Page 124 of Magical Moonbeam
And they were watching me.
They didn’t have faces. Not ones you could name. They wore the outlines of people like cloaks, with long coats that whispered with ash and hoods that clung too tightly to where a face should be.
But beneath the illusion, wrongness caressed my soul like the echo of a scream held just behind glass.
They moved in time with the curse.
Every footfall, if you could call it that, sank into the cobblestone with a sound like breath pulled too slowly. I counted them as they passed in the periphery of my vision. One, two, five, seven. There was no pattern to their route, but every time I blinked, one seemed closer. I didn’t think they walked toward me. I think the world bent to bring them near.
Was bent, not broken…
According to Gideon, they were drawn to disruption.
And I was a spark in the middle of a drought.
“The curse has guardians. You think it's just a tangle of old words and binding knots? No, Maeve. It has guardians. Dancers. Keepers.” His brows lifted in anticipation.
They didn’t speak, the dancers, not with words. Their language was older. Body and sway. They moved like rituals being repeated. Spells encoded into motion. Every twist of their arms, every flicker of their drifting shapes left marks in the fog. Runes I couldn’t translate. Patterns I couldn’t unsee.
One of them stilled when I met its gaze, or where a gaze should’ve been.
And I swear I felt it lean into my thoughts. Not fully. Not like the sprites in the forge. But enough. Enough to make the back of my throat tighten and my birthmark burn.
These weren’t shadows left behind by people.
These were the shadows of the curse itself.
As long as Shadowick lived in limbo, between broken and reborn, they would dance. They wouldkeep. They would guard the curse like it was a crown, and I was the thief with her hands too close.
I took a step back.
The fog shifted. They vanished.
But not really.
I could feel them now. Not just in this village, but in the corners of memory. In the hesitation behind every spell. They were stitched into the curse, waltzing endlessly through the seams of what Gideon broke.
The shadow dancers had no master.
Only duty.
And tonight, they would know my name.
Chapter Thirty-One
Gideon didn’t breathe like a man.
He moved like he had been carved from the shadows themselves, less a body and more a convergence of dark magic and will. The fog deepened around us, swallowing the edges of the buildings and curling along the cobblestone like it had a mind of its own. I could no longer see the storefronts or the winding roads of Shadowick. Even the mansion across the square, the place that had haunted my dreams, blurred behind a curtain of gray.
“I can tell you more if you join me,” he murmured, his voice sliding into my ears like ice water.
I didn’t answer. Not right away. My mouth was dry, my pulse a hammer trying to break free from its cage.
He moved closer, boots silent, his silhouette shifting slightly with each step, as though even the moonlight was uncertain how to touch him.
“You always had such a strong will, Maeve. It’s what made you interesting.”
I swallowed the instinct to recoil. “You don’t know me.”
