Chapter 78. She Let Go of My Hand and Became a Second Moon

Chapter 78: 78. She Let Go of My Hand and Became a Second Moon

I don’t know where it came from.

It wasn’t a plan, or a line, or a promise I’d thought about.

It was just what came out... I held her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye and said it again, quieter. "I won’t."

Something in her face cracked.

She didn’t say a word. And she didn’t pull away.

She stood there with her hands hanging at her sides and the tears finally coming, silent and hot, running down her cheeks and freezing on her chin.

I didn’t try to wipe them... I just kept my hands on her shoulders, so she would know I was there.

Magnara was watching us.

She’d turned her head a little, still bracing against the claw, and she was looking at the two of us out of the corner of her amber eye.

I’d forgotten that she was standing right there. And she didn’t say anything.

But something shifted in her face, a small, odd softening around the mouth, and she looked at me for a long moment with an expression I couldn’t read.

I didn’t know it then, but she was thinking something that she would never have said aloud.

She’d spent her whole life respecting strength. And here was a shaking man with a broken sword who had stepped in front of the wounded instead of behind the strong.

She grunted. And she went back to holding up a monster.

The next half hour was the longest of my life.

We couldn’t kill her... That was the whole problem.

She was Elsbeth’s mother, and nobody would say it out loud, but nobody would raise a blade against her either.

Velora cut at the beast’s legs and then pulled the blows at the last second.

Sylvara wove chains of violet light around her wrists and ankles, but they melted in seconds.

Magnara bore the brunt of the claws, her arms opening up in long red furrows, and her breath rasping in her chest.

It was a fight where nobody was allowed to win. I’d never seen anything so exhausting.

Meanwhile, Cassian stood off to one side with a rag pressed to his ruined face, murmuring orders through clenched teeth.

His Chosen surged forward. Ylva moved beside him with her two curved swords, calm and graceful and smiling, and a handful of the other golden-armored women fell in around her.

They fought like dancers.

Every strike was beautiful.

And every strike was meant to kill.

I saw a Nightclaw rider go down with a blade through her side. And I saw a Hearth Guard fall.

My eyes caught Eira, her braid streaming behind her, standing over a fallen friend with her bow drawn, and I saw her not loose.

[Lust Energy: 33/100]

My hands had stopped shaking. And to be honest... that scared me worse than anything.

They just hung there, heavy and numb, and I realized that I couldn’t feel my fingers. I tried to count the minutes I had left and gave up.

’I’m not going to last ten more minutes,’ I thought, quite calmly.

And that was when the cocoon broke.

It started with a sound.

Sssshhhhhh...

It came from far below us, from the depths of the Moon Shrine, a deep, clear, ringing note like a struck crystal glass.

It was so pure that for a second the whole battle seemed to hold its breath. Even the Beast Warmother paused with her claw raised.

Then a column of silver light blasted up through the roof of the keep.

BAAAMM!

It tore through the stone and the slate and the timbers like they were paper, and it shot into the evening sky in a straight, brilliant pillar that was visible, I’d guess, from twenty miles away.

The ground shook. And I saw tiles rain down.

I threw an arm over my face and peered through my fingers.

Something was rising on the pillar.

She came up slowly, out of the hole in the roof, drifting upward on the light as if it were a current of water.

At first, I couldn’t see who it was... There was only a shape, a small, slender shape, wreathed in white fire.

Then the light settled, and the fire dimmed, and I saw her clearly.

The sun was just going down.

The whole western sky had turned to molten orange and rose, and against it... in a halo of silver, hung Milunaria Lunhare.

She was still Millie. I knew her at once, by the line of her shoulders and the tilt of her head.

But she was also something else. Her hair had grown, and grown, a long, shimmering river of pale light that flowed down past her feet and out into the air, rippling like water.

Her ears had lengthened too, curving up and back like the crescent of a new moon. Ribbons of cold white fire spun lazily around her body.

She was wearing a gown that was made entirely of light, and on her forehead, glowing softly, was the mark of a silver crescent.

Her face was calm. It was older than I remembered and gentler and a little sad.

Her eyes were also closed.

The whole battle stopped.

I’m not exaggerating...

For the length of a long breath, nobody moved.

The Chosen froze with their blades half raised.

The chain-mages lowered their staffs.

The Beast Warmother stood motionless, her enormous head tilted back, her blue eyes fixed on the sky.

Even Cassian had lowered his rag, and he stared up at the glowing girl with the one eye he had left, and his lips were parted like a man seeing his own death.

The note from the Throne Glass had stopped.

Ding!

[Host: Do not move.]

I looked up at her, and I didn’t think... I just did what I’d been doing all day, with my heart in my throat and my body shaking.

I went down on one knee in the middle of the shattered courtyard, and I held out my hand.

I held it out with the palm up... just to open to the sky.

The ribbons of light that wound around her turned.

They drifted down toward me, slow as falling feathers, and wrapped themselves around my outstretched fingers, one by one.

They were warm... They felt like a human hand.

She opened her eyes.

They were still Millie’s eyes. They were rose-pink, soft, tired, and kind.

She looked down at me across forty feet of air, and a tear slid down her cheek, and where it fell... it turned into a shower of tiny white sparks.

"Leon," she said.

It was one word. It rang across the courtyard like a bell.

I tried to answer, but fuck... my throat wouldn’t work.

I just knelt there with my hand held out, and my eyes stinging, and I thought, ’Please, please don’t go.’

She smiled.

It was the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.

It was full of love, and I understood it.

I understood exactly what she was telling me, without a single word.

Then, one at a time, gently, she let go of the ribbons.

They slid off my fingers like silk.

She closed her eyes again, and she screamed.

It was not a scream of anger... I need you to understand that.

It was the sound of something that had been shut in the dark for a thousand years finally breaking free. It poured out of her like a flood, pure and high and enormous, and it filled the sky from horizon to horizon.

I felt it in my chest and my teeth and the soles of my feet.

Everywhere... the crystals cracked.

I heard them... Thousands of tiny, brittle snaps, like frost splitting on a window.

The blue shards in the monsters’ backs.

The gold stones at the throats of the Chosen.

The seeds buried in the skulls of the sleepers.

All of them split, from one end to the other, in thin white lines.

Millie’s body began to change.

It started at her fingertips. The skin turned pale and glassy, then hard, then luminous.

It crept up her arms and spread along her shoulders, her hair, her ears, and her face. Her gown of light dissolved into her skin.

She rose higher, and as she rose, she grew, her radiance swelling larger and larger until she was no longer a girl at all.

She was a sphere of pale, perfect light.

She hung above the broken keep in the red sunset, and she was the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen, and I realized, with a numb, cold horror, what I was watching.

She was becoming... a moon. Maybe a new moon.

The sky had one already, rising pale in the east. But this one was nearer.

It was larger, and brighter, and warmer, a second moon hanging low over the valley like a lantern, so close that I felt I could reach out and touch it.

I stayed on my knees on the cold stones. I kept my hand held out, trembling, in front of me.

The system flashed in the corner of my eye, over and over.

[Do not move. Do not move. Do not move.]

"Hey," I whispered to the sky. "I’m here."

My voice cracked.

"I’m right here... I’m not going anywhere!" I forced a smile. "Okay...?"

"Millie... I’m right here."

There was no answer.