Page 61 of Moonlit Desires

The words hang in the air, not a declaration seeking approval but a truth finally recognized and embraced. The mark on her back—inheritance and curse, gift and weapon—pulses once, powerfully, as if in confirmation of a decision long in the making but only now consciously chosen.

Chapter eighteen

CrisisofIdentity

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The ancient texts spread across Lyra's chamber floor like fallen leaves, their yellowed pages catching moonlight that streams through tall windows. Her fingers trace words written centuries ago, descriptions of a mother she never knew and a father whose existence was erased from her understanding. The mark between her shoulder blades throbs with each revelation, a steady pulse of heat that seems to mock her newfound knowledge.

"Queen Selene's disappearance marked the beginning of the Court's decline," reads one scroll, its edges crumbling beneath Lyra's trembling touch. "Her betrayal of sacred tradition for the sake of human affection left our realm vulnerable to the encroaching shadow."

Another volume, bound in silver-threaded leather that catches the light in painful flashes: "The royal bloodline, unbroken for seven thousand years, polluted by human weakness. The child—a half-breed abomination—spirited away to prevent further contamination of Court magic."

Lyra's throat tightens, the words blurring before her eyes as she reaches for another text. This one older than the rest, its script flowing in a hand less formal, more urgent: "Selene radiated joy in her final days, even as the Council plotted against her. The human scholar with his curious questions and gentle hands had awakened something long dormant in our queen—not weakness, as they claimed, but courage to challenge traditions that had become chains rather than foundations."

She rises from her cross-legged position on the floor, muscles stiff from hours of hunched reading. The chamber—assigned to her upon arrival at the Court—suddenly feels like a luxurious prison, its silver-veined walls and moonstone fixtures mocking her with their beauty and alienness. Her steps become restless, bare feet slapping against cool stone as she paces the perimeter, one hand pressed against the mark that pulses beneath her thin shirt.

"Thomas Gray," she whispers, testing the name on her tongue. "My father." A scholar who loved myth enough to find truth hidden within it. A human who loved a fae queen enough to risk everything. A father who must have raised her alone after her mother's murder, who must have hidden the truth to protect her, who eventually disappeared from her life like everyone else who might have anchored her to something real.

The pacing quickens, her path cutting across the chamber rather than around it, stepping on scrolls that crinkle and tear beneath her feet. Her breathing grows ragged, each inhale catching on the edges of emotions too jagged to process. The first book flies from her hand before she consciously decides to throw it, pages fluttering like broken wings as it crashes against a shelf of delicate silver ornaments.

The destruction feels good. Necessary.

She grabs another volume, the Court's official history with its sanitized account of her mother's "abdication," and hurls it with greater force. The spine cracks against the wall, leaving a smear of ink like a wound on the pale surface. A third book follows, then a fourth, her movements growing wilder with each release. A crystal decanter shatters, spilling something that smells of flowers and moonlight across the floor. A silver bowl rings like a bell when it hits the stone hearth, its perfect circle dented beyond repair.

"Twenty-five years," she says to the empty room, her voice cracking on the numbers. "Twenty-five years of pain I couldn't understand. Of dreams that made no sense. Of feeling wrong in my own skin." Her fingers find a stack of correspondence between Council members discussing "the half-breed problem" and scatter them into the air, watching dispassionately as they float to the floor like oversized snowflakes. "Twenty-five years while they plotted and schemed and waited for me to become useful."

The mark between her shoulder blades flares to painful life, no longer merely pulsing but burning with an intensity that forces a gasp from her throat. Silver light bleeds through her shirt, casting her shadow in sharp relief against the wall. The pain is familiar—her oldest companion, present in her earliest memories—but the context is new, transforming discomfort she'd accepted as natural into evidence of deliberate manipulation.

"They marked me," she hisses through clenched teeth, nails digging crescents into her palms. "Branded me like cattle. Their own perfect puppet with strings made of pain and ignorance."

Her gaze falls on a small hand mirror resting on the dressing table, its reflective surface catching the silver light emanating from her skin. Lyra approaches slowly, dread and curiosity warring in her chest. The face that looks back is both familiarand strange—the same features she's known all her life, but illuminated from within by light that shouldn't exist. Her eyes, normally green, now shine with silver highlights that make them appear inhuman. Her skin, pale by nature, now seems translucent, veins beneath the surface carrying currents of magic rather than mere blood.

"I'm not even human," she whispers to her reflection, the truth of it settling into her bones with awful finality. The person she thought she was—a bartender with an unusual birth mark and chronic pain, a woman with no family but a talent for fitting in anywhere—never existed. That person was a construct, a protective fiction as false as the history books scattered across her floor.

Her fist connects with the mirror before conscious thought forms, glass shattering with a sound like breaking ice. Shards embed themselves in her knuckles, blood welling immediately from half a dozen small wounds. But the blood isn't right—not entirely red, but threaded with silver filaments that catch the moonlight and reflect it back in nauseating patterns. She stares at her hand in horror and fascination, watching as red and silver swirl together, neither fully mixing nor separating.

The fight leaves her body all at once, legs folding beneath her as she sinks to the floor among broken glass and scattered texts. Her back presses against the edge of the bed, the mark still burning between her shoulder blades, though the pain feels distant now, secondary to the hollow ache spreading through her chest. Silver tears—actually silver, metallic and strange—slide down her cheeks, dropping onto her bloodied hand where they mingle with the evidence of her divided nature.

"Everything was a lie," Lyra says to the empty chamber, her voice small and lost in the vastness of revelation. "I'm not even human. I'm just another pawn in this game." The words hang in the air, unanswered, as moonlight continues to stream throughthe windows, indifferent to the identity fracturing beneath its silver touch.

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Thorne arrives like a shadow detaching from deeper darkness, his massive form filling the doorway for a breath before he steps inside. The scent had pulled him from his night patrol three corridors away—blood mixed with silver magic and the sharp tang of despair. His body hovers in that liminal space between forms, too beast-like to pass for human but too controlled to be fully animal. Golden eyes assess the destruction with a predator's precision, cataloging broken glass and scattered texts before locking onto Lyra's huddled form among the wreckage.

He makes no announcement of his presence, no polite throat-clearing or verbal greeting. Instead, he enters her space the way water fills an empty vessel—gradually, inevitably, his movements deliberate but unhurried. Coarse golden fur covers his forearms and neck, catching moonlight in ripples as he crosses the chamber. His face remains recognizably Thorne's, but elongated, features sharpened toward something wild and ancient. Claws extend from fingers that still maintain human dexterity, and when he breathes, the sound carries a subtle rumble beneath it.

Lyra doesn't look up, even when his shadow falls across her curled form. Silver tears still track down her cheeks, gathering at her jaw before dropping to join the small constellation of droplets on her bloodied hand. The mark between her shoulder blades pulses visibly through her thin shirt, its rhythm erratic like a distressed heartbeat.

Thorne lowers himself to the floor beside her, glass shards crunching beneath his weight. He settles cross-legged, his knee just brushing against hers, and simply exists in her space without demand or expectation. For long minutes, they breathe together in silence, his inhales gradually lengthening,hers unconsciously matching his rhythm until the ragged edge softens from her breathing.

Without asking permission, he reaches for her injured hand, movements measured and telegraphed as if approaching a wounded animal. His clawed fingers—each capable of rending flesh from bone—cradle her smaller hand with impossible gentleness. The contrast is startling: her pale skin mapped with silver-threaded blood against his tanned palm dusted with golden fur; her fingers trembling slightly while his remains rock-steady.

He examines the wounds with narrowed eyes, then begins the delicate work of removing glass fragments embedded in her flesh. Each shard comes away with surgical precision, plucked by claws that serve as tweezers more effective than human fingers could manage. When a particularly deep fragment causes her to wince, a soft rumble emanates from his chest—not quite a growl, but something equally primal, a sound meant to soothe rather than threaten.

"You don't have to do this," Lyra says, her voice rough from crying, from screaming words the room's walls had absorbed without answer.

Thorne makes no verbal response. Instead, he continues his careful work, occasionally pausing to brush his thumb across her wrist in small circles, the gesture oddly tender from hands so clearly designed for violence. When the last shard is removed, he brings her wounded hand to his face, inhaling deeply at her wrist as if cataloging her scent, her pain, her essence.

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