Page 45 of Moonlit Desires

“The bonds you’re forming are dangerous.” He takes a step into her chamber, bare feet silent on the polished stone. The silver in his hair refracts the weak moonlight, so that for an instant she thinks he is a ghost, half-faded from his own existence.

Lyra blinks, trying to chase the last haze of sleep from her mind. “That’s cryptic, even for you,” she manages. “Which bonds? There’s plenty to choose from.” She expects a flicker of a smile—Ashen has a dry sense of humor, when he chooses to deploy it—but his face remains unlined, gaze unblinking.

He approaches with measured steps, moving as if the air itself were thicker around him, each footfall a negotiation with gravity. “You move through your guardians like a spark through kindling,” he says, voice still reverberating in the hollows of her chest and skull. “First the beast, then the shadow. Each union feeds the mark. Each act tears a little more of the Court into you.”

Ashen stands at the end of her bed, hands clasped before him to minimize their shaking, but it only makes the tremor more obvious—a vibration not entirely of the body. She opens her mouth to retort, but the words evaporate as the silver light in his eyes intensifies.

“Your mother did the same,” he says, and for a moment his voice loses its spectral modulation, becomes almost human with memory. “But she took years to make the rounds. You have done it in a matter of weeks.”

Lyra feels heat rise to her cheeks, equal parts embarrassment and anger. “Are you here to judge me, Ashen? Or is this some kind of seer’s intervention?”

Ashen’s lips twitch, not in amusement but in a wince, as if her words physically pain him. “Not judgment. Warning.” His gaze drops to her chest, then traces the invisible path up her spine to where the mark lies hidden beneath cotton and skin. “Do you feel it now, the instability? The way your power thrums against the warding spells in these walls? How it gnaws at you when you try to rest?”

She does. The last few nights her dreams have been fever-bright, sometimes prophetic, sometimes merely obscene. The mark’s pulses wake her at odd hours, always in time with the shifting tides of the moon.

Ashen continues, “The rapid succession of… connections, magical and otherwise, has created an energy in the Court that even the elders can’t dampen. The other night, after you andRiven—” His words fracture, and the air in the room vibrates as if with the silent shriek of a tuning fork. He recovers, voice more controlled: “After the Midnight Court, even the oldest barriers began to fail. The fountains, the trees—they’re waking, but wild. Untamed. It isn’t restoration; it’s consumption.”

Lyra sits on the edge of the bed, feet braced on the cool stone, hands curled to fists. “And what’s the alternative? The Court was dying before I got here. The only thing anyone agrees on is that I’m supposed to fix it. No one told me there was a right or wrong way.”

Ashen’s head dips, chin nearly touching his collarbone, hair falling in a shimmering curtain to hide his features. “There isn’t. Only the way that hurts least.”

For a moment, the two of them hang suspended in a silence so dense it becomes palpable. Then Lyra sees it—a silver glow leaking through the thin cotton of her nightshirt, marking the shape of her ribs, pooling at the hollow of her throat where the pendant lies. It pulses brighter as Ashen draws near, as if the magic within her is a caged animal, straining toward his aura. She tries to smother it, to will the light back beneath her skin, but it only throbs more fiercely, as if in protest.

Ashen’s voice softens, shedding some of its vibrato. “You must balance what you take with what you give. The Court is a closed system, Lyra. When one side grows too strong, the other collapses. If you continue at this pace—” He shakes his head, hair swirling in an impossible wind. “We will not survive your cure.”

Lyra laughs, the sound sharp and joyless. “So now I’m both poison and medicine. That’s a new one.”

This time, Ashen does smile, but the expression is as brittle as an old bone. “You always were, even before you were born.”

He moves then, so abruptly her eyes struggle to follow it—a flicker of pale skin and silver shadow as he kneels before her,hands reaching for her own. For the first time, Lyra realizes how young he looks, stripped of the Court’s formal trappings and masks. His hands shake as he takes hers, thumb tracing the faint glow that emanates from her veins.

“I know you can’t stop,” he whispers, the words barely more than air. “I know what the mark demands. But if you let it, the wild magic will devour us all—first the Court, then you, then the world beyond.”

She stares at their joined hands, at the way the silver in her blood merges with the blue-white of his skin, creating a network of light that flickers across both their bodies. “So what do I do?”

He leans close, so close she can see the fine lines of runes etched across his temples, nearly invisible unless the light catches them just so. “You must let yourself be tempered. Accept limits. Take as much as you give. Or find a way to split the burden.”

Ashen rises with a dancer’s grace, leaving her hands empty and trembling in the aftermath. “I’ll show you,” he says. “If you trust me.”

Lyra’s breath catches. “I do,” she says, and for the first time, means it. In the corridor, moonlight flickers on a thin trail of silver droplets—blood, or something like it—spilled from where Ashen’s nails dug into his own palms. He doesn’t seem to notice.

He turns, offering her his hand once more. “Come. There’s a place where the wildness can be harnessed, if only for a little while.”

The mark on her back pulses in response, eager and fearful all at once. She pulls on her robe, slips her feet into soft slippers, and follows him through the blue-dark corridor, their shadows braided together in the living light.

____________

Ashen walks the labyrinthine corridors of the palace as if gravity bends differently for him, each step parting the airin subtle, non-Euclidean spirals. Lyra trails in his wake, the memory of his trembling hands still ghosting across her skin. They pass through a silent wing where the floors are covered in fine dust and the curtains never move; then through an archway laced with frozen spiderwebs of silver wire, and finally into a descending spiral staircase carved from stone so black it drinks in the moonlight, leaving no echo of it behind.

She loses all sense of time and place, focusing only on the fragile gleam of Ashen’s hair, the way it floats and eddies behind him like a signal flare for lost souls. The deeper they go, the less the palace feels constructed; here, the halls twist in organic curves, like the burrowed bones of something ancient and still half-alive.

At last they reach a round portal—no door, just a thin, quivering film of silvery fluid stretched across the entry like a second skin. Ashen presses his palm to it. The film shivers, then absorbs his touch, leaving a handprint that pulses with soft, irregular light. The barrier dissolves with a sound like a sigh, and the two step through.

The meditation chamber beyond is perfectly circular, its walls and ceiling fashioned from monolithic slabs of moonstone polished to a mirror sheen. The stone has a depth that confounds the eye, so that their reflections appear both infinitely distant and disturbingly close, as if specters crowd just beyond the visible. The floor is smooth, but small round depressions dot its surface, each filled with a pool of silver liquid, some quiescent and flat as glass, others roiling with slow, hypnotic motion.

Lyra moves to the center, unnerved by the way her own reflection watches from every angle, her image multiplied and warped by the curved stone. “It’s like standing in the middle of a pearl,” she whispers, voice instantly swallowed by the chamber’s strange acoustics.

Ashen’s mouth twitches in a flicker of agreement. “It’s a memory vault. Every Court seer has added to it—memories, visions, histories. Some are real. Some… not yet.” His voice strains as he speaks, as if each word must be wrestled from the well of silence within him.

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