When the Moon Hatched (The Moonfall #1)

Chapter 31

T he Creators are so quiet now, their voices vacant echoes barely loud enough to grasp.

I’m not sure why.

Perhaps the Aether Stone is taking so much of me there’s little left to listen with.

That’s how it feels. Like my soul’s being suckled through the diadem’s web of tendrils now magnetized to my skull.

I hate it.

How Mah survived this for over a hundred phases, I’ll never know, but perhaps I do understand why it took her so long to bring Haedeon into this world.

Then me.

Perhaps I understand why she was crying in the snow so many phases ago, when my world was small and my heart felt full and whole.

I barely have the energy to breathe, let alone eat. Last cycle, I certainly didn’t have the energy to help with the preparations for the committal. To stand on my own two feet while Náthae and Akkeri blew plumes of aqua flame on Mah’s and Pah’s pyres—committing their bodies back to the elements. Instead, I sat in Haedeon’s chair and watched them burn, my heart so raw from cycles of clutching them close that I almost wheeled myself into the fire, too.

Then came Haedeon’s turn.

Rather than blow flames onto his body, Allume scooped him up, tilled her wings, then tipped her head to the sky and lifted off the ground with my brother clutched against her. She soared unsteadily toward the deep dark where her ancestors rest, then curled into a ball, tucked Haedeon beneath her gammy wing, and solidified before my eyes—giving herself to death rather than live an eternal life without the one we both loved so much.

Or perhaps she just knew how much he hated being alone.

Everyone else went inside to feast in honor of my lost ones while I lay in the snow and sang to Haedeon’s moon, tracing the outline of that small, misshapen wing. Until Slátra came, settled beside me, and curled her tail into a fluffy nest I fell asleep within.

I haven’t woken from this terror yet.

I’m losing hope that I ever will.

Mah and Pah’s aides say I have very few options. That the folk of Arithia won’t accept a queen so weakened by the Aether Stone unless I’m bound with someone who can wield more than two elemental songs. And even so, I’m not yet old enough to rule.

There’s to be a meeting in Bothaim where my fate will be decided by the Tri-Council. Of course, I can’t attend and speak for myself because princesses are to remain mute and veiled in public until their binding ceremony—something Mah and Pah never enforced … But they’re not here anymore.

It’s just me, and I’m certain the sky is falling.