Chapter 6: The Moon Goddess's Sanctuary
The Lycan Kingdom was not what she'd expected.
She'd expected dark stone and torchlight, something medieval and grim. What she found was architecture built for something that moved between human and other without announcement—high ceilings, wide corridors, spaces that felt simultaneously like rooms and like clearings in a forest at night. Beautiful in the way a predator is beautiful: efficiently, without apology.
She was not a prisoner, technically. She had an escort of twelve.
Lex walked beside her, close enough that she could feel the careful containment of him—the effort it took to keep himself between her and everything else without making it look like that was what he was doing.
The sanctuary was at the heart of the complex. A circular chamber open to the sky through a carved oculus, where moonlight fell in a column onto a black stone obelisk that stood at the center. Around it: a hundred Lycans, still and watchful.
An Elder—old as bedrock and twice as unmovable—gestured her forward.
"Touch the stone," he said.
"Why?"
"It will tell us what we need to know."
She looked at Lex. His face was unreadable. She looked back at the obelisk. Then she walked forward and pressed her palm flat against the stone.
The light was instantaneous.
It didn't radiate outward the way light usually did—it erupted. Up, out, through every crack in the stone, through the floor, through the air, like something that had been held in too long and could not be contained a moment more. It was warm. It was musical. It sounded, distantly, like her mother's song.
Around her, one by one, the Lycans went to their knees.
The Elder's voice, hushed and reverent: "The Moonheart has come."
Ava didn't hear the rest of it clearly. There was too much light. Too much sound. The warmth in the stone was flowing up her arm like it recognized her, and she stood in the center of all that prophecy and power and felt—
She looked for Lex.
He was the only one still standing. Not defiantly. Not theatrically. He was standing because he wasn't looking at the sacred obelisk or the light or the miracle. He was looking at her. Only at her.
Not like she was divine.
Like she was Ava.
In the middle of everything that was happening to her—everything that was being decided about her, announced about her, claimed about her—she felt something in her chest split open.
He sees me, she thought. Just me.
And that terrified her more than any prophecy.
