Page 2 of Moonlit Desires

From the far end, a regular shouts for another round. Lyra leaves the mercenaries to their quiet violence and pivots down the line, serving shots, collecting coins, bantering just enough to keep the crowd lubricated. Behind the scenes, her ears strain for signs of escalation—voices a shade too loud, the scrape of wood on tile, that subtle hitch in breath before someone gets stupid. The place is a pressure cooker, and Lyra has developed a sense for exactly how close it can get before the lid blows.

Halfway through her shift, the flow of customers spikes. A group of junior city clerks crowds in, still in uniform, voices climbing as their drinks disappear. Lyra splits her attention between the bar and the mercenaries, whose “negotiation” is now openly hostile. The tattooed one slams his palm on the table, sending their bottle spinning.

“I did my part,” he snarls. “You got paid, same as me. Don’t try to short me now.”

“Check your memory, old man. I took the first shift on watch. You owe me two nights, and you know it.” The second mercenary is goading, voice oily with pleasure.

A hush ripples through the nearby tables. Lyra steps in, feigning a casual air, but her hands are poised—one on a bottle, the other braced behind her back where she keeps the heavy mallet for stubborn keg taps.

“Trouble?” she asks, letting the word hang. Her gaze dares them to test her patience.

The tattooed man turns, and for a moment Lyra sees something raw and ancient in his eyes—an old scar, or maybejust an echo of the woods from her dreams. It makes her shiver, and she hates herself for it.

“No trouble,” he mutters, but the lie hisses through his teeth.

She glances at the bottle between them. “Might want to pace yourselves. House policy says if you bleed on my floor, you mop it up yourselves.”

The moment stretches. The mercenary with the black eye laughs, shrill and brittle. He swipes the bottle, drains the last finger, and sets it down with a bang.

“Fine,” he says. “We’ll take it outside.”

Lyra nods once, not breaking eye contact. “I appreciate your restraint.”

They stand. The tattooed man is a head taller, built like a cathedral. The other slouches, hands hidden, smile gone. As they shoulder past, Lyra keeps her eyes fixed on their hands. The slighter man’s fingers twitch at his belt. A flash of steel—a knife, quick as a snake’s tongue.

The air snaps with movement. Lyra is over the bar before she thinks, one boot on the stool, the other on the sticky floor. “Not in here,” she says, voice low, threaded with iron.

But the slighter mercenary is already lunging, the knife aimed not at his partner but at Lyra. Instinct tightens her muscles, but she’s half a second behind. She pivots, grabbing for his wrist, but he’s faster, fueled by a cocktail of spite and desperation. The blade slashes through the air, catching her shirt at the seam of the shoulder. She feels fabric give, then a slice of heat as the edge kisses her skin.

Adrenaline tunnels her vision. She grabs the man’s arm, twisting hard. The wrist snaps, the knife clatters to the floor. The tattooed mercenary curses, shoving the smaller man hard enough to send him crashing into the bar’s foot rail.

Lyra tastes blood—hers, she realizes, trickling from the shallow cut at her shoulder. She clamps a bar towel to it, eyestracking the mercenaries as they stagger toward the door. The crowd erupts in a riot of shouts and jeers, emboldened by violence and proximity. She ignores them, focusing on the pain, which is hot but manageable.

Then the second pain hits.

It is nothing like the first. Not a knife, not even fire. More like a lance of molten silver driven straight through her spine. It starts at the spot between her shoulder blades and spreads outward, searing nerves, crawling up her neck and down her arms in a rush of blinding agony. She gasps; the sound strangled and drops the towel.

For a moment, the world blurs. The shouts and breaking glass recede, replaced by a high, crystalline ringing. Lyra’s vision fragments at the edges—slivers of white, of forest, of moonlight, overlaying the bar in fractured double exposure.

She clutches the counter, knuckles white, determined not to fall. The pain pulses, fading and returning in waves. Each time, it leaves her a little weaker, a little less sure of the boundaries of her own body. She can feel eyes on her—not the mercenaries, not the clientele, but eyes from somewhere deeper, older, hungrier.

The fight is over before she regains full control. Someone, maybe the seamstresses, has called for help; the bouncer appears, herding the bleeding mercenaries out the door. The crowd surges with gossip and excitement, already mythologizing the scuffle into legend.

Lyra fakes composure, wiping her shoulder with a fresh towel, but her hands tremble. The pain between her shoulder blades is a star, burning and growing, impossible to ignore. She tries to breathe it away, but the agony only sharpens her awareness: the stink of the bar, the taste of iron in her mouth, the memory of a thousand eyes watching from a dream.

She fumbles for the bottle of cheap vodka kept under the counter for emergencies, pours two fingers, and slams it back. Itdoes nothing for the pain, but the ritual steadies her. She runs a hand across her face, flinching as her fingers brush the sweat at her temple.

In the mirror behind the bar, she catches a glimpse of herself—pale, bloodless lips, eyes rimmed in a green so bright it could be a trick of the light. For an instant, she swears she sees something glimmering at her back, a shimmer that vanishes as soon as she blinks.

Lyra pulls her shirt higher, ignoring the way the fabric sticks to her skin. She busies herself with the mundane: stacking glasses, mopping the spill, resetting the order of the world one motion at a time. But the pain won’t let her forget, not even for a second.

The bar resumes its rhythm, laughter and stories rising to fill the void. Lyra floats through it, anchored only by the counter beneath her hands and the certainty that nothing will ever be simple again.

____________

She waits for the next rush of pain, but it doesn’t come. Instead, the agony contracts to a sharp, hot knot beneath her shoulder blades, as if someone has embedded a coal there. Every time she flexes, it pulses. Every time she breathes, it glows.

Lyra holds her post through another round of drinks, answering to shouts of “Hey, red!” and “Another over here!” with deadpan efficiency. Her composure is a lie, but she wears it well—only her hands betray her, trembling faintly as she stacks glasses or wipes the counter clean. Each movement grinds the knot deeper, igniting sparks that flash behind her eyes.

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