Page 44 of Moonlit Desires

Recognition flickers in his mercury eyes, awareness returning in stages as he forces himself back to the present moment. His breathing gradually steadies, though the tremors continue to wrack his frame in waves that coincide with the pulsing of his silver scars. When he finally speaks, his voice emerges raw and unfamiliar, stripped of its usual sardonic edge.

"She's in my head," he whispers, fingers pressing against his temples as if trying to excise something lodged within his skull. "Even now, even here. Her voice. Her thorns." A shudder passes through him, violent enough to momentarily blur the edges of his form, as if he might dissolve into shadow from the force of remembered pain. "The ritual... opens pathways. Makes old wounds bleed anew."

Lyra remains perfectly still, instinctively understanding that movement might shatter this fragile moment of honesty. "Who, Riven?" she asks, though part of her already knows the answer.

His laugh is a broken sound, all jagged edges and bleeding wounds. "The Queen of Thorns. Your would-be captor." His eyes close briefly, the lids translucent enough in the silver light to reveal the rapid movement beneath them, as if he's watching scenes play out on their inner surface. "She had me for thirty-seven days. Or perhaps it was years. Time... moves differently in her garden."

One trembling hand traces the most prominent scar on his forearm, a silver line that runs from wrist to elbow in a pattern reminiscent of thorny vines. "She bound me with living thorns—beautiful things, black as night with silver tips that shone like stars as they pierced my skin. Every thorn carried a different poison—some for pain, some for truth, some for..." His voice falters, breaks. "Some for pleasure, so you would beg for more even as they tore you apart."

Lyra's stomach clenches at the implication, at the depth of violation suggested by his fractured confession. The mark between her shoulder blades pulses with sympathetic heat, responding to his pain with gentle waves of silver light that wash across the platform, touching his skin with soft illumination.

"Each day, she extracted a piece of my shadow," Riven continues, his gaze fixed on some middle distance beyond the chamber walls. "Not quickly, not mercifully. She would isolate a single tendril of darkness and draw it out inch by excruciating inch, coaxing it with those silver-tipped thorns until it separated from my essence."

His hand moves to his chest, pressing against a particular scar directly over his heart—a starburst pattern that seems to pulse with its own rhythm, slightly out of sync with his heartbeat. "When the shadows were gone, she started on memories. Began harvesting pieces of my mind like ripe fruit, sorting through them for anything useful before discarding the rest."

The trembling in his limbs intensifies, sweat beading on his forehead despite the chamber's cool air. "She wanted to know the Moon Court's weaknesses. Its secret passages, its forgotten magics, the vulnerabilities of its guardians." Pride briefly straightens his shoulders, a flash of his former self emerging through the cracks. "I didn't tell her... not even when she peeled my shadows from my skin, not even when she planted thorns in my dreams that bloom there still."

His voice drops lower, nearly inaudible. "But she took pieces of me anyway. Pieces I'll never get back."

The confession hangs in the air between them, raw and terrible in its honesty. In this moment, stripped of his armor of sarcasm and perfect posture, Riven is simply a being who has endured tortures designed to break both body and spirit—and somehow survived, however damaged.

Lyra moves toward him with extreme caution, telegraphing each shift of her body to avoid triggering another panic response. "May I touch you?" she asks, the question simple but weighted with understanding of consent's importance to one whose boundaries have been so violently transgressed.

Riven's eyes meet hers, surprise flickering across his features at being offered a choice. He nods once, the movement jerky and uncertain but unmistakable.

With deliberate gentleness, she closes the distance between them, positioning herself beside him without pressing against his body. Her hand lifts slowly, giving him time to withdraw permission, before coming to rest lightly on his shoulder. When he doesn't flinch away, she gradually draws him closer until his head rests against her chest, her fingers threading through his silver hair with careful strokes.

The mark on her back pulses with steady rhythm, casting a soothing silver glow that seems to calm the agitated shadows still clinging to the chamber walls. Under her gentle ministrations, Riven's trembling begins to subside, his breathing synchronizing unconsciously with the rhythm of her touch. His body remains tense, unused to comfort, but he makes no move to pull away.

"She can't reach you here," Lyra murmurs, continuing the steady, gentle strokes through his hair. "Not through me, not through the mark. This place is yours, and now, in some small way, mine as well."

Power crackles between them—not the violent surge of their ritual joining, but something steadier, a current of shared strength flowing in a continuous circuit. The shadows respond to this new energy, gradually venturing back from the walls, approaching their intertwined figures with curious tendrils that no longer seem predatory but protective.

Time passes in unmeasured intervals as they sit together in the silver glow. Riven's head rests against her shoulder, the proud guardian momentarily surrendered to simple human need for connection. His fingers eventually find hers, intertwining with tentative pressure that speaks of trust being rebuilt from its foundations.

Around them, the chamber breathes in slow, contented rhythm. The transformed shadows—now containing silver light within their darkness—dance in lazy spirals that echo the joined hands of shadow-binder and moon-heir. The ancient glyphs pulse in sequence that matches their heartbeats, no longer erratic but harmonized into steady cadence that suggests healing has already begun.

No words pass between them, none needed in this moment of raw understanding. Tomorrow will bring Court politics and emissaries' threats, questions of strategy and survival against a Queen whose thorns have already drawn too much blood. But here, in this hidden chamber where shadow and light have learned to coexist, something fundamental has shifted—a connection forged not just through ritual passion but through vulnerability freely offered and compassionately received.

The silver mark and scarred skin pulse in unison, two sources of power different in nature but aligned in purpose, creating something new in the space between darkness and light.

Chapter thirteen

Ashen’sWarning

____________

Lyra’s sleep shatters in a storm of silver, a dream of running through corridors that dissolve into liquid light, of mouths pressed against her skin, of voices chanting words she knows she shouldn’t understand. Her eyes snap open, heart still hammering with the aftershocks of whatever her subconscious conjured. The familiar darkness of her chamber, layered in blue-gray shadow, presses against the thin walls of wakefulness. She lies still, limbs half-tangled in the linen sheets, every muscle humming with residual magic.

The mark between her shoulder blades throbs with the heat of old injury, then with a second pulse, cold and uncanny—like being brushed by the edge of a grave. Lyra turns her head. The door to her chamber is open, and in the spill of moonlight stands Ashen Evermore, his silhouette barely distinct from the night beyond. Only the glimmer of his hair, spectral as spun glass, andthe reflective, almost colorless sheen of his eyes mark him as real.

He doesn’t move. For a long moment she wonders if she’s still dreaming, if this is another of the Court’s little hauntings—the way memories and regrets sometimes walk these halls, replaying tragedies in an endless loop. Then she sees the tremor in his hands, fingers fluttering like trapped moths, and she knows: this is no memory.

She pushes herself upright, conscious of the sweat cooling on her skin and the half-buttoned state of her nightshirt. Ashen is still framed in the doorway, not entering, not retreating. He’s watching her with the patient neutrality of a scientist observing an unstable experiment.

She tries for humor, but her voice comes out raw: “Can’t sleep either?”

Ashen does not answer at first, only tilts his head, the movement owlish and disconcertingly fluid. Then, for the first time since she arrived at the Court, he speaks directly to her—a real voice, not a message scribbled in trembling ink or relayed through others. It’s a sound that ripples the air, each syllable shivering through the bones of the room. His words are shaped in a register that feels too large for the body it emerges from: ethereal, musical, and infinitely sad.

---