Silence.
Not peace. Not calm.
A crushing, endless silence that pressed in from every direction like being buried alive in cotton, in void, in the space between thoughts where nothing exists and everything waits.
Luna floated in it, weightless, bodiless, aware only of the steady burn in her chest where the Moonbound mark still glowed like a dying ember. She tried to scream and had no mouth. Tried to move and had no limbs.
She was aware without form.
Terror without the ability to express it.
Then the pain returned.
Sharp. Immediate. Brutally real.
She gasped and slammed down onto solid ground, the impact driving every molecule of air from her lungs in a violent rush. Stone bit into her palms as she coughed and rolled onto her side, retching, her body remembering how to be a body again after forgetting for what might have been seconds or centuries.
She lay there, shaking, relearning the concept of up and down.
Then she realized: she was alone.
The world around her was not dark, but colorless—like looking at reality through a filter that stripped away every wavelength except the one that meant existence. A vast, hollow space stretched endlessly in what might have been every direction at once, made of light and shadow folded into each other in impossible geometries. No sky. No ground. Just layers upon layers of shifting energy, stacked like transparent pages in a book written in a language that predated words.
This was the space between.
The place where banished things went.
"The seal," Luna whispered hoarsely, her voice swallowed almost immediately by the emptiness.
She pushed herself up, her legs trembling so badly she nearly collapsed twice before managing to stand. Her body felt wrong here—too solid, too defined, like she was a crayon scribble on a watercolor painting.
"So this is where you chose to run."
The voice came from everywhere at once, from the walls that weren't walls, from the air that wasn't air, from inside her own chest cavity.
Luna spun, her heart hammering against her ribs.
The Devourer emerged from the haze like something coalescing from smoke and memory. Its form was less overtly monstrous here, stripped of the theatrical horror it wore in the real world, but somehow more terrifying for it. Here, it looked almost human. Almost. Its many eyes glowed dimly in a face that kept trying to be faced by her father's, the First Moonbound's, her own before sliding back into something alien. Its body constantly shifted like it could not decide what shape to wear, like it had forgotten what it was supposed to be and was desperately cycling through options.
"I didn't run," Luna said, forcing her voice steady even as her legs shook. "I came to end this."
The Devourer laughed softly, the sound like wind through empty houses.
"You came to understand," it corrected, its voice gentler than it had ever been. "Whether you know it or not."
It circled her slowly, predator-like, studying her with too many eyes.
"This place," it continued, gesturing to the void around them with an appendage that was sometimes an arm, sometimes something else, "is made of you. Your blood. Your ancestors' choices. Every fear they buried instead of facing. Every truth they locked away because it was easier than changing."
Luna swallowed hard, her throat dry. "You're not balanced. You're the consequence."
The Devourer paused mid-step.
For the first time since she'd encountered it, it looked something other than hungry or amused.
It looked offended.
"I am hungry," it said, its voice taking on an edge. "The hunger created when power is denied its voice. When people are told what they are wrong. When magic is locked in cages and called protection."
Images flooded the colorless space around them like a film projector gone mad.
Witches dragged from their homes, mouths sewn shut with silver thread. Wolves slaughtered in their dens, pups and all, for the crime of existing. Humans burned alive for knowing too much, for asking the wrong questions, for writing down the truth. Councils rewriting history in comfortable rooms, striking out names, erasing entire bloodlines from the record.
The Devourer grew larger with every image, feeding on them, becoming them.
"You fed me," it said, its voice multiplying, becoming a chorus. "Over and over again. Every act of suppression. Every silenced voice. Every person told them they were too dangerous to be free. I am what you made."
Luna clutched her chest, pain radiating outward like cracks in glass. The mark burned so hot she thought it might brand through to her spine. "Then I'll starve you."
The Devourer's eyes flared bright, all of them at once, a constellation of rage and hunger.
"How?" it demanded, leaning closer, its breath—if it had breath—cold against her face.
Luna closed her eyes.
She thought of Kael, the way he'd looked at her before the seal closed. Like she was the only thing in the world worth saving. She thought of Rhea, fierce and loyal and refusing to let Luna face this alone. She thought of her father, who'd loved her enough to lie, to protect her even when it cost him everything. She thought of the people who suffered under a false balance, crushed beneath rules designed to protect those in power, not those without it.
She thought of what true balance might actually look like.
Not control.
Trust.
She opened her eyes again, and they blazed silver.
"By telling the truth," she said simply. "All of it. Everything they tried to bury."
The seal shuddered violently, the entire space convulsing like a living thing in pain.
Cracks spread through the colorless void like lightning frozen in place, spiderwebbing outward from where Luna stood.
"No," the Devourer snarled, its form destabilizing, fragments of it peeling away. "Truth breaks the seal. Truth destroys the seal. Truth will kill us both."
Luna met its gaze, all of its gazes, calmly.
"That's the point," she replied.
The ground beneath them began to dissolve like sugar in water, like sand in a tide, like everything that had ever pretended to be solid revealing itself as temporary.
Luna felt her body pulling apart at the seams, like she was being stretched between worlds, between states of being, between is and was and might be.
She screamed as memories poured out of her like blood from a wound.
Not just hers.
The First Moonbound's pain, the betrayal when the council turned on her, the loneliness of being the first to carry a curse no one else understood. Her defiance—standing alone against an entire system designed to break her. Her choice to sacrifice everything rather than submit.
Luna felt it all.
Lived it all.
"I won't be erased," Luna shouted into the dissolving void, her voice cracking but defiant. "Not like her. Not for their comfort. Not anymore."
The Devourer roared, a sound that made the collapsing space shudder, and lunged at her with all its mass, all its hunger, all its desperate need to exist.
Luna stood her ground.
Her feet planted on nothing.
Her spine straight.
She reached out and grabbed it.
The moment her hand closed around its shifting form, solid and liquid and smoke all at once agony tore through her like lightning through a wire never meant to carry that much current. Every nerve ending ignited. Every bone felt like it was being rewritten from the inside.
But so did understanding.
The Devourer froze, its many eyes widening in shock.
You… accept me?
Its voice was different now. Smaller. Almost… vulnerable.
"I acknowledge you," Luna said through clenched teeth, her hand burning where it touched the creature. "You're real. You're the consequence of real harm. But you don't get to rule me. You don't get to become what they were just another tyrant demanding submission."
Light exploded outward from their joined hands, white and silver and black all at once, colors that shouldn't exist together but did, blindingly.
The seal fractured completely.
Not breaking.
Opening.
Far above or below, or beside, directions meant nothing here, voices screamed. The real world rushing back in like air into a vacuum.
Luna felt herself falling again, faster this time, pulled violently back toward the surface world by gravity and magic and the simple fact that living things belonged among the living.
The Devourer wrapped around her, not attacking this time.
Clinging.
Like a child afraid of being left alone in the dark.
If I fall… you fall, it whispered, desperate. We are bound now. Truly bound. Not by chains. By choice.
Luna's heart pounded so hard she thought her ribs might crack.
Understanding flooded her.
This was the price.
This was always going to be the price.
She screamed Kael's name as the light tore open like a wound
and she slammed back into her body with enough force to crack the stone beneath her.
The plaza roared back into existence, sound and color and realness hitting her like a physical blow.
She gasped, choking on air that tasted like copper and ash and life.
Kael was on his knees beside her instantly, his hands shaking violently as he grabbed her shoulders, his face streaked with tears and blood. His eyes amber threaded with silver now, permanently changed, were wild with relief and terror.
"She's alive!" he shouted to someone, everyone, his voice cracking. "She's alive!"
Luna coughed, her whole body convulsing as it remembered how to breathe, how to be. Her body felt like it had been taken apart and reassembled slightly wrong.
The Devourer's shadow loomed behind her, visible to everyone now, no longer hidden.
Not gone.
Changed.
Bound to her like a second skin, like a conjoined twin, like a parasite that had become symbiotic.
Maeven stared in absolute horror, her face the color of old parchment. "What did you do?" she whispered, the words barely audible.
Luna pushed herself up slowly, every muscle screaming in protest. When she opened her eyes, they glowed faintly, silver shot through with veins of black that pulsed like a heartbeat.
"I didn't destroy it," she said hoarsely, her voice layered now, doubled, hers and something else's speaking in harmony. "I merged with it."
The Devourer's voice echoed through the plaza, no longer just in Luna's head but in everyone's, a whisper that made people's skin crawl.
We are unfinished, it said, and it sounded almost… satisfied.
Luna looked down at her hands.
Dark veins pulsed beneath her skin like rivers of ink, spreading from her palms up her wrists, her forearms, disappearing under her sleeves but clearly continuing. They moved. Breathed. She could see thoughts flowing through them like blood.
And she realized with dawning terror that made her stomach drop
She could feel it thinking.
Could feel its hunger, not as an outside force but as something inside her, part of her, indistinguishable from her own thoughts except for the slight difference in texture, in flavor, in the way it tasted ancient and new at the same time.
She and the Devourer were no longer separate entities trapped in the same space.
They were one.
Kael's hand tightened on her shoulder, his voice breaking. "Luna?"
She looked at him, and he flinched just slightly, just for a second from what he saw in her eyes.
"I'm still me," she whispered, desperately hoping it was true.
The Devourer laughed softly inside her chest.
For now.
And the cracks in the sky began to spread.