Page 46 of Moonlit Desires

He gestures for her to sit. She lowers herself cross-legged to the cold stone, expecting discomfort but finding instead a pleasant numbness that spreads upward from her ankles. Ashen takes his place directly opposite, knees nearly touching, his gaze not quite meeting hers. He draws from his robe a slender vial of silver ink and an ancient brush with a handle of polished bone. The tremor in his hands makes the brush rattle softly as he uncaps the vial, the sound echoing in the hollowed air.

He hesitates, then reaches into a hidden pocket and draws out a narrow slate and a stick of white chalk. He writes with the same urgency as he moves—fast, tremulous, yet impossibly precise. He tilts the slate toward her: “Words are anchors. Sometimes, they drown me.”

She understands at once. “That’s why you almost never speak,” she says, softer now. “The visions—too many at once?”

He nods, lips drawn tight, and then, with visible effort, says aloud: “When I speak, I sometimes see every possible version of the words, all at once. Hard to stay here. Harder, when the future isn’t settled.”

He puts the slate down, takes up the brush, and gestures for her hands. She offers them, palms up. His own are cold and dry, his grip surprisingly strong despite the trembling. He dips the brush into the ink and draws on her skin, careful and deliberate, the touch sending a shiver up her arm that is not entirely physical.

As Ashen paints, Lyra looks past him to the closest pool of silver. At first, the liquid seems inert, but then she sees flashes in its surface—flickers of images, people moving throughtime at impossible speed, entire generations flickering by in moments. She leans forward, mesmerized, and sees herself, then her mother, then strangers with her same eyes, always here, always marked. The pool goes still as quickly as it began, as if embarrassed to have shown her so much.

Ashen notices her focus and speaks, his voice now little more than the breath behind the syllables: “Each pool is a memory. Sometimes mine, sometimes the Court’s. All connected.” His eyes flick up, catching hers. “Not all of them end well.”

She wants to ask more, but the sensation of the brush distracts her. Ashen draws a tight spiral on her right palm, then crosses it with three quick lines, forming a sigil that’s both familiar and foreign. As he works on her left hand, she feels the heat of the mark on her back intensify, as if whatever he’s doing is waking it from sleep. The touch is nothing like the heat of Thorne’s hands, nor the cold burn of Riven’s shadows. This is clear, sharp, crystalline—a tingle that travels along nerves and lights them from within.

Ashen sets the brush down and takes her hands in both of his, pressing the inked palms together. “I can offer what the others cannot,” he says, and this time his voice doesn’t waver. “Balance and clarity. The others push you toward your edges; I draw you back to center.”

He closes his eyes and breathes in, holding it until his chest stills. The silver pools around them begin to ripple, each one joining the rhythm of his breath, as if the entire chamber is listening. She feels her own lungs matching his pattern, her pulse syncing to the slow, deliberate inhale-exhale.

The ink on her skin begins to itch, then to burn—but not in a painful way. More like the sensation of pins and needles when blood returns to a limb. It grows until she can’t keep her eyes open, until the moonstone walls blur into a soft white haze and she has no sense of her own boundaries.

“Don’t fight it,” Ashen whispers, and the words come from both in front of her and somewhere inside her skull. “Let go. Let me share the weight.”

She does.

The last thing Lyra sees before her vision folds inward is the reflection of herself and Ashen in the moonstone wall—a pair of figures reduced to silhouettes, arms outstretched, hands joined. As the chamber recedes, she hears the faint, persistent tremor in his voice as it threads through the darkness: “I’ll show you how to dream without breaking.”

Then the silver pools rise up to meet her, and she is nowhere, and everywhere, all at once.

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At first, it is only darkness, the way the back of your eyelids is never really black, but a seething river of colors that exist nowhere on any spectrum. Lyra floats in this void, weightless, the only anchor the twin points of pressure where Ashen’s hands clasp hers. She can feel him—a presence more than a person, immense and tender and precarious as a bridge spun from spiderweb. Then the sigils begin to move.

They crawl from her skin in lines of cold fire, rising in slow, deliberate arcs to hover above her palms. She watches, transfixed, as the marks swirl in midair, then multiply, forming spirals and helixes and impossible geometric shapes that orbit her in a complex, living architecture. The light from the sigils gathers intensity until it is almost painful, and for a moment she thinks she must be burning, but there is no pain—only an endless clarity, as if her mind is being ground and polished by the touch of a thousand tiny jeweler’s wheels.

Her body is still cross-legged on the floor of the moonstone chamber, but she perceives herself somewhere else: an endless expanse of white, the boundaries of space marked only by the slow drift of memories—her own, and others not her own.

Ashen is here, too, but altered. The tremor is gone from his hands; his movements are fluid and assured. His hair drifts about his face in a corona of faint silver, and his eyes, always strange, have become the twin moons of this world, reflecting everything with no shadow or distortion. He is himself, but more so—every flaw and strength distilled to its purest essence.

He reaches for her, and Lyra feels the contact not as skin on skin, but as the resonance of two tuning forks set vibrating in perfect harmony. He does not speak, but understanding passes between them, effortless, without language.

::This is my domain,:: his presence says. ::But tonight, it is yours, too.::

Images spool out from him: the corridors of the palace, glimpsed not as they are, but as they were—full of life, colors unmuted, music and laughter ricocheting through the stones. He shows her the birth of the Moon Court, the first seers laying down these meditation chambers, each one a node in a living network of memory and possibility. She watches as centuries pass in moments, love and war and renewal and decay in an endless cycle.

Then Ashen shares himself. Lyra feels the first eruption of his power as a child, the fear that he will lose himself in visions and never claw his way back. She feels his shame, the months of muteness when words triggered floods of unwanted futures, the slow learning of silence as both weapon and shield. She sees the moment he decided to become guardian—a decision made not in triumph, but in resignation, the only path left that would let him protect without being destroyed.

The sensation is overwhelming, but not frightening; here, in this space, she cannot drown, cannot be swept away. Instead, she is buoyed by the flood, carried along until the rush of memory and feeling settles, and she is left facing Ashen across a distance that is both inches and eons.

He takes her hand, and this time the touch is electric—literally, as arcs of silver dance between their fingers, drawing fractal patterns in the emptiness. The sigils that left her skin now orbit them both, a protective halo of moving light. Ashen gazes at her, eyes brimming with both sorrow and fierce determination.

::You are more than your mark,:: his presence insists. ::But you must learn to hold it, not let it hold you.::

Lyra laughs in the shared silence. ::You sound like every self-help book I’ve ever ignored.::

A smile flickers across his psychic face, wider and more genuine than any he’s shown in waking life. The humor is gone as quickly as it appears, replaced by an intensity that makes her shiver.

::The bond we form now is different. Not fire, not shadow. Something older—starlight, maybe. The power of seeing and being seen.::

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