Poppy pressed a hand to her abdomen slowly, trying to process what was happening. “I think…” Her breath wavered. “I think the baby felt something.”
Xu Yunlian and Mingxi both froze. The sanctuary floor glowed faintly. A hairline crack of dim foxfire light ran through one of the ward-circles. Just one. Barely visible. But there.
Poppy looked up at Mingxi, heart pounding. “It’s starting,” she whispered.
He wrapped her in his arms, holding her as though the world was already shaking apart. Beneath the valley, far below the moonwell’s trembling heart, something vast shifted once. The tremor faded, but its echo lingered like a bruise in the air.
Poppy clutched Mingxi’s sleeve as the sanctuary settled again, though nothing felt settled at all. Her pulse thrummed with the faint aftershock of the moonwell’s cry. Mingxi pressed a hand to the floor, trying to sense the leyline beneath them.
“It’s weaker,” he whispered.
Poppy sank to her knees, breathing shakily.
Mingzhao stepped forward, grave and still as carved stone. “This confirms it,” he said. “The moonwell is not simply disturbed. It is wounded.”
Xu Yunlian knelt beside Poppy, rubbing her back in small circles. “You saw the moonwell in your dream,” she murmured. “Did it show you when it needs us?”
Poppy shook her head. “No, but it showed me why. There’s something inside it. Something that shouldn’t be there.”
Mingxi’s jaw tightened. “The shard.”
Caelan rubbed his temple. “When the battle happened at the last full moon, we assumed the splinters scattered far.”
Poppy’s voice trembled. “It didn’t. A piece sank into the moonwell’s core. It didn’t show us because it was trying to heal around it.”
Yunlian drew a breath that sounded like it hurt. “Oh… child…”
Elder Suyin whispered, “A shard lodged in the moonwell’s heart would poison everything it touches. Slowly. Quietly. Until the next moonrise exposes the wound fully.”
Poppy looked up sharply, remembering. “The moonwell told me it would open again. Once. Only once.”
Mingxi’s ears flicked. “When?”
Mingzhao answered, voice low, “The next full moon.”
Poppy felt a chill roll down her spine. “Is that when the moonwell… blooms?”
All the elders nodded.
Elder Qiao clasped his hands tightly. “At the fullness of the moon, exactly one lunar cycle after the first battle, the moonwell softens its core. It becomes fluid enough to be purified, healed… or killed.”
Caelan’s voice dropped. “And that is the only time the shard can be removed without destroying the valley.”
“And if we wait longer?” Poppy asked.
Yunlian didn’t sugarcoat it. “Then the wound will consume the wellspring. And Huoyáo Jìng will fall with it.”
Mingxi pulled Poppy into his arms before she could react.
“We won’t wait,” he murmured fiercely. “We will stand at the moonwell when the moon reaches fullness again. We will rip that shard out before it kills anything else.”
Poppy rested her forehead against his. “I’m not afraid,” she whispered.
But she was.
Not of the moonwell. Not of the shard. Of the shadow she had seen beneath the surface of her dream—the thing even the moonwell feared.
She drew a breath. “What about the presence I saw? The darkness, the eclipse?”
