Page 8 of Favored By the Stars

Senara

The scent of Thorn's blood clung to my skin as I pressed my cheek against his chest, every muscle in my body still screaming from the flight through the forest. Exhaustion swallowed me in ragged increments and when the last tendril of consciousness snapped, I plunged into an unnatural darkness.

“Child of moonlight." The delicate voice cleaved through the darkness like a silver blade.

I jolted upright, bare feet sinking into velvety moss that hadn't existed moments before. Luna moths flitted around me in a slow celestial dance, each one bleeding soft light that painted the grove in teal and mercury hues.

"Goddess?" The word tasted of fresh water and blood on my tongue.

Light congealed into feminine curves robed in constellations. The Moon Goddess's presence vibrated against my skin, once warm as a midsummer night, now thin and strained like overstretched silk. Fractures of darkness swam beneath her luminous skin, pooling around her throat where a triple-star pendant that I had never noticed before hung, tarnished.

"Three trials guard the Grove's heart." The deity's voice shimmered between octaves, mother-soft cadences fraying into something raw and desperate. "Where silver roots drink from truth's well, your bonds will drown or bloom."

I stepped toward the glowing figure, the luna moths fluttering away from me as I moved. "What must we sacrifice?"

"Everything." The goddess's hand flickered translucent as she gestured to my chest. "Your mortal shell. His cursed lineage. The lies festering between you."

Ice crystallized in my veins. I reached for the goddess's disintegrating hand. "How do we?—"

The grove shuddered. Liquid shadows erupted between tree roots, devouring light as they surged. The goddess's form exploded into a thousand shards of mirror-bright light, each fragment reflecting a private nightmare.

The Void Dragon Empress coiled around Thorn's motionless body.

My own hands dripping black venom.

A silver-haired infant dissolving into stardust.

Wyn begging for mercy, from me.

The mirror shards reflected my scream as they fell.

I dropped to my knees in a spreading pool of liquid moonlight. Something vast and wrong uncoiled between the shattered oaks, its breath frosting the air into jagged crystals that cut her tongue when she gasped.

"Poor starlight whelp." The voice poured through the clearing like oil over water. "Did she neglect to mention you're the third sacrifice?"

The Void Dragon Empress emerged from something akin to a tear in reality. Deep obsidian scales lined a face that was too beautiful for words and yet was also completely devoid of humanity. Wings jutted from her back and her feet ended in talons that scored deep grooves into the glade's crumbling edges. The dark scales seemed to swallow the moon's radiance, drawing my gaze to her face once more. On her head she wore a crown of twisted talons, scales, and jewels which dripped with captured starlight. But it was her eyes that froze my blood, twin vortices of collapsing galaxies framed by lashes made from darkness itself.

The Moon Goddess's fractured light gathered weakly around her as though she was trying to form a barrier of some kind to protect herself. "Do not listen, child. Her truths are?—"

"Parasites," the Empress purred, snapping her claws. The goddess's remnant light constricted into a gilded cage no larger than my fist. "Your precious deity feeds on stolen power. Why do you think her consorts constellations fade from the northern skies?"

My moon mark burned as conflicting magic warred in her marrow. I pressed a hand to my throbbing moon mark, fingertips coming away smeared with silvery blood. "Liar."

A scaled tail flicked out from behind the empress, sending spider webbing cracks through the dreamscape's foundations. "Ask why half-breeds always die in their cradle, why they are portents of doom." The Empress leaned down until her breath brushed over my face, both as hot as a fire and as cold as the dead of winter at the same time. "You're not the chosen one, little moth. You're the kindling. You are but one in a long line of sacrifices she has used to keep her power."

Memories surged unbidden, Thorn's fevered whispers about our forbidden bond, the way moonlight sometimes slid off his skin like water from a bird's feathers. My knees buckled as the grove's remaining flowers wilted and died around me.

The cage dimmed. "Her darkness dies with my light," the goddess whispered, voice fraying at the edges.

"Silence, relic." The Empress vanished in a swirl of cosmic dust. Her presence swirled around the grove for a moment before reappearing behind me, her claws resting against my neck. "Shall I show you the grove's true trial? How does your mortal heart burst when forced to choose between his life and hers?"

Cold spread from the Empress's touch, branching through my veins like petrified roots. In my mind's eye, Thorn lay gasping beneath a dead oak, obsidian shards protruding from his chest as my own hands dripped with viscous shadow.

"Never." I grabbed the Empress's wrist. Smoke hissed where my skin met her scales. The Empress recoiled with a snarl, her wounded arm leaking void-stuff that dissolved entire sections of the dream. "Foolish child! When your goddess strangles you with her need for power, remember this mercy refused."

The goddess's cage flared once, violently bright. "Strike now! Her essence is thinnest here!"

I lunged, not for the Empress, but for the disintegrating remnants of moonlight. The glowing cage melted through her fingers, reforging into a slender dagger humming with the energy of the goddess and moonlight itself.

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