Confusion roils inside of me.
Moros takes a step forward, and I’m taken back to a time when Reichardt told me I wasn’t enough.
I was young—no older than ten—and I tried for an entire summer to be able to hold up a real sword, not just one of the wooden practice ones. The sword was nearly as long as me at the time, and almost as heavy.
I couldalmosthold it up with two arms, but never got close with just one.
What I didn’t know was that Reichardt was watching me. I thought I was hiding behind our cabin—a place no soldier lurked near because of who Reichardt was—but I was wrong.
The whole time, Reichardt watched. He watched me fail day in and day out to swing the sword one-handed. At the end of the summer, just as the cool breeze of fall began to set in, he walked into my room.
He dropped a dull blade at the base of my bed, jolting me out of a deep sleep.
With a frown, he had said, “A son would’ve been able to swing that by the second or third week of training at your age.”
Then he left.
It wasn’t the first time I had felt less-than—wasn’t the last, either. And as this dagger rests like a blade of ice in my palm, the same feeling washes over me.
Moros smirks, just a step or two away from me now.
Adrian jumps toward him, but the shadows lash out and shove him back against the wall. Opal screams behind me, begging Moros to let us go.
“Such a disappointment,” Moros calls out tauntingly.
Memories swirl around me: the number of times Reichardt called me a disappointment to him. All of those days in Penyth I failed to call on my magic. When Eurydice didn’t bless me the first time.
Then again when I lost Graylen, when it wasIwho let him slip through my fingers and be trapped in the Vale with the Goddess of Vengeance.
Blood rushes in my ears, silencing the protests from Adrian, the cries from Opal, and the sneering comments from Moros.
Graylen isn’t here to jump in and fight with me, and Soren is wherever he is. Leda is doing goddess knows what, while Zephyr is just as stuck in Penyth.
No one is coming to save me, not this time.
A flicker sparks in my palm, the slightest tingle of warmth permeating from the hilt of Nightfall.
I still haveme.
I am not a disappointment.
I amnota failure.
I am Lunaria goddess-damned Manor, just as I’m Amira Ramsey. I’ve always been one or the other, but I realize now that they’re both two parts of a whole. Halves of me that I can’t abandon. I need each of them to make me who I amnow. In this moment.
More warmth begins to spread throughout the hilt of Nightfall, heat wrapping around it and causing my palm to sweat.
It sings for me, teasing against the walls of my Essence and looking for a way in. It’s not that it isn’t working for me—it’s that I have to let it in. Let ittake.
I don’t want to lose my magic—don’t want to be just Amira again.
But if I want to kill Moros, I have to let it go. Have to give the blade the hunger it searches for. It isn’t going to save me; it’s going to take from me.
And I have to let it.
Using the shard, allowing it to almost drain my magic, was just a taste of what it craves. This dagger—using it in its entirety—is going to require more than just draining my magic to the last dregs.
It wants it all.
