When the Moon Hatched (The Moonfall #1)

Chapter 55

D eep within the heart of the Imperial Stronghold, Kaan unlocks a chain threaded between two mammoth black wooden doors carved to look like a pair of warring Sabersythes going head-to-head, the handles twin tusks curling from their pronged faces. I cut a glance down the empty, dim-lit tunnel behind me as I wait for him to unwind the chain, tugging the left door open.

With a sweep of his hand, he gestures for me to step inside. The dark room. Ahead of him.

I don’t think so.

“You first.”

He sighs, charging into the gloom with a barrage of heavy footsteps.

I follow, sketching out the shape of the space, slivers of sun coming through from what I suppose are curtains over on the far side. Kaan moves toward them.

“ Veil de nalui ,” I whisper, whipping Clode into a giggling churn. She twirls across the room, tangles with the curtains, and rips them wide, dousing the room full of light.

Kaan stops before the glass doors, hand outstretched. He clears his throat. “Thanks.”

“Pleasure,” I say, taking in what I suppose is his personal suite based on the dominance of his warm scent. I’m certain he dabs something on his skin each aurora rise that makes him smell so inconveniently moreish.

This sitting room is packed with curved bookshelves, plush leather chaises, and a black rug stretched across the floor. Beside a deep, upholstered chair that’s worn to the padding in places sits a large string instrument resting on a stand, the frayed strings in desperate need of replacing. On the other side of the same chair is a small round table with a bottle of spirits, an empty glass, and a corked jar that holds something misty.

Swirling.

He snatches it, tucking it inside a drawer within the table.

I arch a brow. “Don’t want me to see your jar of mist?”

“Not particularly,” he murmurs, hanging his málmr on the instrument.

I look away, seeing various weapons haphazardly dumped on shelves and a pair of boots kicked off by the door. My stare glides to a map of the world that stretches across a large curve of wall, the yellowed parchment littered with tiny black crosses—most of which are south of Gore.

Thousands of them.

“Keep your secrets,” I say, gaze bouncing from cross to cross. To the map’s left, a blade’s been stabbed into the stone, and from the constellation of indents surrounding it, I garner it’s not the first time it’s wound up there.

“Believe me,” Kaan mutters, gathering some bits of clothing he’d left lumped on the seater. “I’m under no false assumption that you’re even the slightest bit interested in my secrets.”

“Realistic expectations are healthy.”

He grunts, carrying the clothes through a wide doorway to the right, disappearing into the darkness within while I do another visual sweep of the space, noticing a fine sheen of dust on his shelves. Actually, pretty much upon everything except his instrument, the seaters, that bottle of spirits, and the dagger stabbed in the wall.

Huh.

“Guessing you don’t … entertain much?”

Or even let somebody in to clean.

“The bolted door puts most folk off,” he says from somewhere within the adjacent room. “Suits me just fine.”

Right.

Likes his privacy.

Got it.

I look to the lofty domed ceiling adorned with overlapping dragonscales I suspect are Rygun’s based on their burnt-blood tone. A huge chandelier hangs from the peak, pieced together with more Sabersythe tusks than I’ve ever seen in one place, all of varying shapes and sizes.

“Wouldn’t want to be standing here if the mountain shook,” I murmur, gaze shifting to my right as Kaan emerges from the shadowed doorway with two towels—tossing one at me.

“Thanks,” I say, using it to sponge some of the water clinging to every inch of me like the remnants of a slumber-terror, drying off my garments while he does the same. I drape my towel across the back of a seater, along with my satchel.

“This way,” he rumbles, tossing his towel next to mine, then moves toward the twin doors ahead. They look out onto what appears to be an overgrown private garden doused in so much shade I’m surprised anything grows out there at all.

He unlocks the doors and steps through, and I follow into the humid midst, down an unkept path that often requires me to duck—insects creaking, water beading off the faces of round velvety leaves the color of clay.

A ruffle of wind offers me a glimpse through the dense foliage to the sandy view beyond, and I realize this garden looks south toward The Fade.

Away from the sun.

“It’s just down here,” Kaan says, moving toward a fall of coppery vines that clothe segments of the steep, uneven wall surrounding this garden. He parts the natural drape, cleaving an opening through to a hidden tunnel beyond, then ducks and shoves in ahead of me.

I frown. “I’m not following you down there.”

He pauses, looking at me over his shoulder. “Why not?”

“Because that’s how folk die , Kaan. I know because that’s how I—”

His brow bumps up.

I pause, reconsider divulging my trade secrets with a king I only decided to semi-trust two seconds ago, then figure it’s best he knows I’m a bloodstain on his pretty paradise.

“ Assassinate . This right here”—I gesture to the tunnel he’s leading me down—“is a prime location for you to slit my throat, then carve some letters on my chest.”

Wonder what he’d give me. Probably:

R E T U R N SP R E C I O U SG I F T S

He turns to fully face me, eyes beseeching as he says, “Listen, Raeve.”

“I am. Obviously.”

“No,” he growls, placing his hand on the smooth, rounded wall. “ Listen. ”

I open my mouth, close it when his meaning sinks in. “But he’s so—”

“What?”

Stable.

Sturdy.

The absolute opposite of me.

Crossing my arms, I shake my head and sigh, loosening my internal sound snare almost wide enough to let him in …

Bulder.

I hold Kaan’s stifling gaze a moment, then loosen the snare that little bit more, slapping a wide-holed sieve atop the opening and bracing myself for Bulder’s grinding vibrato that … doesn’t come.

Because he’s not singing—not at all.

He’s humming .

A deep, droning roll … almost like a baritone coo .

My brow buckles, my own hand coming out to flatten on the burnished stone. “It’s—”

“This is a place of nurture, Raeve. Of love and worship. If I wanted to harm you, I certainly wouldn’t do it within this cavern,” he says, holding my stare with chest-crushing intensity.

“Can’t you just tell me what’s down there?”

His eyes soften. “I can’t. This is something you need to see for yourself.”

Creators.

“Fine,” I snip. “But just so you know, I coaxed your guard into swapping an empty crockery dish for his dagger that’s currently strapped to my upper thigh, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

He blinks, shaking his head as I step into the tunnel, letting the fall of foliage sweep shut behind me—engulfing us in shadow.

T he tight stairwell is littered with small glowing bugs that remind me of Moonplume moons, offering a meager amount of light for our journey down the endless coil of stairs I wish I’d counted from the beginning. I’m certain we’re over a thousand steps down by now, my skin no longer warm but delightfully cold—my exhales like puffs of smoke.

Kaan fills the stairwell so entirely the top of his head nearly brushes the light-smattered ceiling, his shoulders almost too big for him to be moving down faced forward. Every now and again, I try to peep past him and see if there’s an end in sight, but it’s useless.

He’s a giant stairwell plug.

I collect the damp length of my hair to squeeze the gathered moisture from the ends, frowning when I realize the water has begun to stiffen.

To frost .

“Much farther?” I ask, brushing the fractals off my hands, wondering if he’s walking me all the way through to the other side of the world. If we’re going to emerge near Netheryn—the Moonplume nesting grounds.

“Not far.” Kaan looks at me over his shoulder, his eyes glinting in the dark as he assesses me. “Are you okay with the cold? You can have my tunic if you—”

“I’m fine.”

Something flashes in his eyes, like perhaps he assumes the thought of wearing his tunic makes me uncomfortable.

It doesn’t. At least not in the way he probably thinks.

I don’t tell him the deeper we’ve drilled, the less tentative I’ve been about this decision to follow him down a twirling tunnel into a dark abyss. I certainly don’t tell him the growing cold feels a lot like …

Home.

The reason I keep trying to peep past him isn’t because I’m worried he might be taking me down here to murder me. Not anymore.

No …

Some innate part of me is drawn to whatever’s at the bottom of this never-ending stairwell.

The frosty nether nips at my skin, turning the tip of my nose so blissfully numb, the chilled air beginning to lap at me like an undulation of icy waves that tug in their withdrawal—urging me deeper.

Deeper.

Each step folds me further into that tiding tug until the darkness gives way to a silver light that kisses the walls and steps. That turns Kaan into a gloomy silhouette against the radiant luminosity trying to squeeze past him from whatever’s on the other side.

“We’re here,” he murmurs, his voice a shockwave through the hungry silence that lifts the hairs on the back of my neck.

He steps to the side, dousing me in light .

So much light.

My heart stops, an icy cleft of awe fracturing my chest as I take in the circular cavern, the swooping walls embossed in magnificent, detailed carvings of Moonplumes .

The same magnificent creature in hundreds of different stances—long neck; big, wistful eyes; spindly tendrils that trail from its jowls and whisk with its crafted movement. Elegant tri-membrane wings fit for speed and unmatched agility, wispy tail with silken threads that sweep and coil and flick with a gush of personality.

The carvings meld together much the same way as the dragons on Kaan’s málmr, though the extravagant mural pales in comparison to the massive silver moon the cavern cradles like an egg—the ground dipped in the middle like cupped palms, no doubt keeping it from rolling around.

A choked sound slips up my throat, and for a moment I don’t move.

Don’t breathe.

Don’t blink.

Something within me settles, nuzzling into a comforting curl that makes the backs of my eyes sting for the second time this dae—so overwhelmed by the moon’s rounded beauty that I feel like the world is tipping.

My shuddered exhale is so thick and milky it’s hard to see through, a loud smudge upon the gobbling silence.

I stagger forward, hand outstretched, the tips of my fingers aching with the need to touch. To trace the divots and mounds of the fallen Moonplume forever tucked in a sleeping curl, head half nudged beneath the fan of a frayed membrane. The dragon’s silky tail is woven up beneath its winged embrace, spilling out in tufts about its neck and head like a once soft pillow.

Drawing close to the fallen beast, I feel smaller than I ever have. A hatchling in comparison to its vast size.

Bulder continues to hum, the heavy baritone an audible cradle of droning comfort so complex it’s impossible to grasp. Like looking up at the stars and trying to work out what’s in the dark gaps between those distant prickles of light.

He’s a nest, I realize. Can almost picture him crouched, hands cupped before his chest, curled under this beautiful moon while he looks down upon it.

Treasures it.

Nurtures it.

My throat thickens so much it’s painful to swallow …

I reach forward, brushing my hand across the Moonplume’s once-leathery hide now fossilized. So hard and cold it’s like caressing a frosted mound of ice.

“Your moon,” I rasp, a small smile picking up the corner of my mouth as a tear slips down my cheek that I’m swift to bat away.

“Her name was Slátra,” Kaan says, a rawness to his voice that I’ve never heard before. “I’m yet to find her final shards. You can’t see on this side, but there’s a small crevice around the back of her I still need to fill.”

A chill climbs my spine, and I trace a hairline fissure with the tip of my finger, looking up to see so many more webbed across the metallic beast—proving she smashed into thousands of shards upon impact. Shards that have been painstakingly pieced together in this rounded tomb.

“You did this?” I ask, my voice wobbly.

“I did, yes.”

I shake my head, realization gushing down my throat like a drowning shove of water.

My rage—my rabid thirst for revenge—was blinding . I thought Kaan was a tyrant. A heartless monster. But he has such a big, warm heart I’m surprised it fits in his chest.

“Why?”

“Because it hurts knowing she’s not whole,” he rasps, casting another sweep of sting across the backs of my eyes.

I step around the dragon, pausing at the spot where Slátra’s head is nuzzled deep into the tuft of her tail.

My heart stills, breath catches. A bludgeoning bang inside my chest almost makes me lose my balance.

Ignoring the sounds of splitting ice ratcheting through me, I ease up onto my tiptoes, peering over the cleft of her wing to the small hollow it’s shielding. Not sharp and jagged like bits are still missing, but a smoothed ingress close to the tip of the beast’s wide nose, as though Slátra gave her final breath cradling … something bundled within the silken tendrils of her once soft tail. Shielded by her cupped claw.

My brow furrows, stare pouring into that snug hollow, almost feeling its clefts and bulges nudged against my body.

Cradling me .

Almost feeling the cold expanse between her slit nostrils pressed against my brow, the solidified tuft of her tail cushioning my … chest—

I stumble back a step … another … sucking breath into lungs that seem to have forgotten how to work.

No—

“You’re familiar with it,” Kaan says, his baritone wrestling the silence like a rockslide.

Battering me.

“I—”

My thoughts tunnel to a memory I discarded long ago, its corpse laid out on the shore of my internal lake, stripped of all the frilly emotion I plucked from it, leaving only the bony skeleton of something that might’ve hurt one time.

Felt heavy in some way.

I allow myself to assess the remains from an angle of relative disconnect:

A strange trundling sound had roused me from my eternal sleep. I’d blinked my eyes open for the first time, taking in the world I’d been born into through the iron bars of what I now know is called a cage.

My brutal waking was fraught with confusion while I tried to work out how I fit inside my body. How it worked and moved. Why everything was blurry.

Warm.

Yet I trembled—violently. I thought it was the heat, but now I know that’s not the case.

My soul was shuddering from the inside out.

I’d reached forward, finding something heavy and cold clamped around my wrist, an item I now know to be a shackle. I’d clung to the bars in the effort to steady myself in this strange existence where I had hands that moved, lungs that breathed, and eyes that could see—my stare narrowing on the source of the sound that had drawn me into existence.

A cart being wheeled down the length of a dusky burrow, past my place of waking.

In its deep hollow sat jagged shards of silver brightness that gave off a lapping chill I wanted to splash upon my face.

The shards were so beautiful against the dim of my surroundings that I was immediately certain my place of waking was not good, but bad. Because no matter how hard I grunted and screamed, trying to beg the creature that was pushing the cart to please bring it closer so I could have a proper look at the pretty, pretty shards I desperately wanted to touch, he did not so much as look at me.

The shards disappeared, and I realized mere moments into my existence what it meant to be trapped.

“Answer me, Raeve.”

Again, I feel trapped. Forced to look at something I’m certain has the potential to shred me from the inside out if I look any deeper.

Any harder.

Because those shards I saw when I first opened my eyes to the world … I now understand they were scavenged at the same time as me. That’s why the cart was lugging them past my cell. They’d just been snatched from the snow, dragged inside a mountain of stone and ice that held a belly full of fire.

“Are. You. Familiar with it?”

I leave the stripped memory where it belongs.

Within.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I snip, whirling around, storming toward the exit.

Kaan banks, cutting me off, his leather tunic dusted in a fine layer of frost.

My gaze snaps up to meet his fiery glare that’s so at odds with the icy fractals dusting his hair and beard, making it glimmer in the luminous light. “ Move .”

“See, I think you’re lying.” He pushes forward a step, emitting the immense energy of a mountain-size beast in his prime. An energy impossible to ignore. “I think you know this moon better than anyone else.”

There’s a rumbling within me, from somewhere deep beneath my lake. A hum of acknowledgment I neglect, focusing instead on the anger swelling within my chest like a ball of dragonflame.

My foot slides back, upper lip lifting from my canines.

“I think this beast cradled you for a hundred phases, breathing life back into your broken body until you both fell from the sky. I think you broke from Slátra’s tombstone like a hatching dragon—”

“You’re fucking mad ,” I hiss as my back collides with the moon.

“Am I?” He arches over me like a rocky overhang, leveling me with a look that sucks all the oxygen from my lungs. “Because I knew a female who died. Tragically. Whose lifeless body was sailed into the sky by the adoring beast at your back with my torn-out heart in her fucking fist,” he rasps, lifting his hand into a claw that he shakes in my face. “Her name was Elluin, and she laughed with the wind, cried with the rain. She angered with fire and bellowed with the ground. Her heart thumped in synchrony with—”

“ Enough .”

He growls, and there’s a clicking sound. He says a word I don’t hear over my roaring pulse as a flame dances to life in his hand.

My body stills, paralyzed by the sizzling sight. A deeper, almost sentient silence hollows the cavern surrounding us. A silence that seems to spawn from … within.

Me.

Like I’m sponging the sound. Absorbing it.

Kaan brings that flame so close to my face I’m certain he’s about to smear it across my skin, and I become innately conscious of the fact that something inside me is watching .

Listening.

“You look me in the eye, Moonbeam—right in the soul —and tell me you don’t hear this fire’s hissing shrieks. Look me in the eye, sharpen those words, and don’t fucking blink as you plunge them through my heart.”

I struggle to gather the breath to tell him exactly that. That his flame does not shriek or hiss or spit. It is but a flame, and it does one thing.

It burns.

“Crush your flame, Sire. Or I’ll crush you,” I seethe with cutthroat certainty—violently aware that my Other is on the brink of bursting free. I may be utterly against hurting this male, but I cannot speak for … it . “That’s a promise.”

A line forms between his frosty brows.

He whips his hand away, crushing it into a fist of smoke, flooding my system with a cold deluge of relief. “Who hurt you?”

“I do not hurt , King Burn. I harden. And no—your pet flame did not sing to me. Not even a little bit. Otherwise I would’ve sung it up the hall and ordered it to suicide itself in a puddle.”

His frown deepens, his hand coming up as if to cup my cheek. Like he wants to touch me but is worried I might slice it off. “Don’t lie to me, Moonbeam. Lie to the world, but please don’t lie to me.”

“Stop talking to me like you know me. You don’t. Even if I did fall with your precious moon, I owe you nothing. Elluin is dead .”

“ Stop .”

His word commands. His eyes plead.

Both ricochet off my armor like arrows I snatch, lodging them between his ribs. “Saving my life, dragging me away to your big, bright kingdom where everybody fucking loves you is not going to reincarnate her. I’m not yours, and I never will be.”

He steps back, leaving me arched over Slátra’s solidified wing. Allowing me space to draw my first full breath since our atmospheres clashed.

I ignore the unveiled pain in his eyes as I charge toward the stairs without a single glance over my shoulder, every step skyward pulling me farther from the comfortable nest of chill.

I ignore the tugging sensation that tries to lure me to turn around. To climb over that folded wing, tuck within the hollow, and fall asleep in Slátra’s stony embrace.

Most of all, I ignore the sense that every step skyward is another step further from my truth.

Instead, I strip the moment of all the soft wisps of attachment and curiosity, bind them into a parcel, then tie them to a stone, finding my internal lake already crushed near the shore. A convenient hole cracked through the ice, making it easy for me to discard the package.

I don’t believe in much, but I do believe that the unknown needs to be handled with caution—much like a dragon. Leave them alone, and they rarely decide to attack. You can exist in harmony for eternity, so long as nobody makes any sudden movements.

Try to climb on their backs or steal their eggs? Well.

Chances are you’re dead.

I happen to like living in my blank oblivion. It’s lonely, but lonely folk have nothing to lose.

That suits me perfectly.