Chapter 16: Marked and Mirrored

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• Echoes of Moonfire   Chapter 85: Before the Divide

  ~SerikThe sky here was wrong.It wasn’t blue. Not entirely. It shifted from gold to amethyst in slow, swirling gradients—as if the world couldn’t decide whether it was day or night. Three moons hovered in the sky, layered like bruises over the horizon. One full and pale, one crescent and crimson, and the third fractured—glowing with cracks like it had been struck by something it couldn’t survive.This wasn’t my world.It was older. Wilder. Real in a way that made everything else feel like a shadow. Everything here felt like it fell out of my history book. All the things that I’d read about the world before the creation was here and I still couldn’t recognize most of them.I walked through the strange woods slowly, taking it all in. Trees towered high, their leaves glimmering like starlight caught in glass. Flowers hummed when I passed. Not sang. Hummed—low and harmonic, like they were warning the earth I didn’t belong here.And they were right.As I crested a hill, the land spread ou

• Echoes of Moonfire   Chapter 84: The Vanishing Trail

  ~SeleneThey say when the moon is high and the winds go quiet, the veil between realms thins. That’s when the world feels wrong—like something ancient is breathing just beyond sight, watching, waiting. Most people dismiss that feeling.But not mages.We know better.Alpha Aeron stood in the center of the war room, hands clasped behind his back, cloak rippling faintly from the open balcony. He looked like a statue carved from stormclouds—solemn, unreadable. I’d known him since I was a girl apprenticing under Master Theon, and even then, Aeron had a presence that filled the room before he ever spoke.“I won’t lie to you,” he said, voice clipped. “The risk is real. But the danger of not helping Lunar is greater. If we don’t act, if we don’t try—then the alliance breaks. They turn on us and given our current situation, we don’t stand a chance against them. I’m not asking you to go because I trust him. I’m asking you to go because I don’t want Obsidian to die.”We understood what he was tr

• Echoes of Moonfire   Chapter 83: The Godkiller

  ~SerikThe last thing I remember was being beaten within an inch of my life by a Lunar Sentient. She’d snarled something to Tamar—told him to bring her a pendant if he wanted to see me alive again.The thing was, Tamar didn’t have the pendant.I did.But she didn’t know that.She dragged me into a pocket dimension—one of those cursed in-between realms suspended outside space and time, a place where light bends wrong and the air hums like it’s trying to speak. She paced like a caged beast while I sat chained and gagged, blood drying down the side of my face. She kept waiting for Tamar to send a signal. Some message. Some token of surrender so she’ll go out and collect the pendant from him.I knew he never would. Not because he didn’t want to save me—he just couldn’t. The pendant was right here. Not in a box. Not buried beneath some shrine. Right here.With me.I didn’t know why I had it. Or how. I just knew it had always been with me. Since childhood. Like a second skin. And I knew eno

• Echoes of Moonfire   Chapter 82: Lunar’s disappearance

  ~AeronI followed my butler in silence.The hallway to the throne room was long, flanked by silver sconces and walls still streaked with faint burn marks. The stone floors had been recently scrubbed, but some things couldn’t be erased. War leaves residue. In the corners. In the air. In the bones.My boots echoed faintly as I walked. Each step sounded louder than it should have—a drumbeat against silence.I didn’t know who I was going to meet.Important, the butler had said. Not urgent. Not dangerous. Just… important. But I’d learned by now that importance could mean anything from a royal emissary to a harbinger of doom.My mind drifted as I walked, thoughts circling like vultures.The corridor opened up into the main chamber, sunlight pooling in through the high arching windows. Gold and obsidian banners hung from the pillars. The throne room had been rebuilt with fewer jewels and more steel. Fewer ornaments. More purpose.My eyes found him instantly.Reed.He stood casually near the

• Echoes of Moonfire   Chapter 81: After the Light

  ~AeronThe light swallowed the sky.It wasn’t lightning. It wasn’t fire. It was something older—something primal. Like the world itself had exhaled for the first time in centuries. It stretched across the heavens in a perfect sphere, not blinding, but all-consuming. White. Pure. Absolute.And then… it was gone.Silence followed.The kind of silence that lives in ruins and aftermaths. The kind that has teeth.I staggered back, blinking. My ears rang. Smoke drifted past in soft ribbons, and the heat from what remained of the palace cracked the air.I looked up.There was… *nothing*.Eira was gone.And so was the man that was trying so hard to get to her.The place in the sky where they’d hovered moments ago now pulsed with fading strands of magic—silver, blue, and violet, unraveling like threads in water. I stared until my eyes watered, hoping to see movement. A silhouette. A flicker.But there was only sky.I didn’t realize how many people had stopped fighting until I heard how quiet t

• Echoes of Moonfire   Chapter 80: The Ones Who Still Believe

  ~EiraObsidian burned.From where I hovered—high above it all, suspended in the center of a sky split by storms—I could see everything. The towers were crumbling. Smoke billowed in furious plumes. The sacred streets I once walked barefoot now split open like old wounds, bleeding fire and stone.Below, the Lunar Sentients and the Horax were locked in a battle that had no rhythm, no end, no mercy.Their magic painted the air in streaks of silver and black—light clashing with dark, swords swinging between spellfire, and blood soaking into cracked stone. I watched a Sentient, young and trembling, hurl a disc of glowing moonlight at a Horax warrior—only to be impaled by a jagged obsidian spear before her spell even landed. She fell beside the man she killed. Both turned to ash when the next blast hit.Screams were like wind now—constant, shifting, endless.And then there was Aeron.He moved like a man fighting time itself. His shirt was torn, his hands bleeding as he pulled one survivor af