Lunara thought she nodded, but couldn’t be sure. She did as she was told, leaning heavily against the panel as she finally cranked the handle and fell into a midnight sky with a scream—belatedly making sense of Endellion’s last words.
Endellion sighedas Lunara slipped into her innermost mind. The darkest parts of herself.
Getting her here had been the most difficult task. The most unsure move in the game she was playing, the pieces she was arranging. She watched through the Sight as possibility after possibility died, narrowing down to two, side-by-side.
To one of the most pivotal moments she’d foreseen.
The Moonweaver had been perilously close to succumbing to the fracturing of her bond with the Demon. Of crumbling beneath the weight of his utter desolation.
A problem for later, but nottoomuch later.
First, Lunara had to face the split in herself. The moth-shaped divide.
“Tell me, Sorcerit,” she whispered to herself, “will your answer be right? Or will you consign us to doom-colored Night?”
Two were there, without a doubt. Two went in, but only one would come out.
The question was, which would it be?
If she was smart… If she was fast… If she trusted herself…
They’d make it just in time.
Lunara plummeted for an eternity.Stars and nebulas raced by on the edges of her vision, infinite galaxies bleeding into one another, until a blackened ground appeared below and rushed up beneath her.
Dust and debris flew as she crash-landed, knocking the air from her lungs. Staring up into the endless void, she took stock, fighting to steady herself. The impact hadn’t hurt, and the pain from before had been erased the second she’d fallen through the door.
Endellion had assured her this was all in her mind, so Lunara wasn’t fooled into a useless panic at finding herself back in the chasm—especially since this one was lacking all of the things that made the real one terrifying.
Little more than a dense, weighted emptiness, every breath thick and heavy.
She far preferred the blinding white from before to this stifling black and grey—aside from the faded orbs of dim light hovering drunkenly in a poor imitation of the spell she herself had cast in the actual chasm.
This bleak place wasinside of her? Probably best if she didn’t think about it too long.
Standing, she brushed the dust away from her hands and body, finding exactly nothing when she looked both ways down the rift.
“Youare nothing.”
She jolted, her insides clenching as the hair on the back of her neck rose. Maybe she’d imagined that rasping voice, scraping like cracked nails against the deepest parts of her.
“You are weak.”
O-kay… Not imagined, after all.
“Who’s there?” she called into the darkness.
“Such a disappointment. How can you even bear to look at yourself, Moonweaver?”
A hot, prickling wave of shame washed over Lunara from out of nowhere. She pressed shaking hands to her burning cheeks, confused as her chest tightened.
“Pathetic.”
She hunched unbidden, her body making itself as small as possible, limbs tingling with fear.
Still, some small part of her rebelled against it, and anger spiked. Enough to clear the dark thoughts away. To remember this washermind, and there was no more room for anyone else inside of it.
The only shame would be to listen to yet another fucking disembodied voice spewing unwanted vitriol.
