Chapter Thirteen: Elowen's Warning

Lyra’s POV

Elowen didn't speak again until we were well away from the healer's house, moving through quiet corridors and out a narrow side door I hadn't even noticed before, into a small walled garden tucked behind the palace's oldest wing.

Moonflowers climbed nearly every surface here, pale and closed against the daylight, waiting for a darkness that wouldn't arrive for hours yet. The air smelled faintly of crushed herbs and old stone, quieter than anywhere else I'd found within these walls.

"This place is warded," she said, closing the gate behind us with a soft, deliberate click. "No one listens here. No one watches. It's the only place in this entire palace I trust enough for this conversation."

"That's not reassuring," I said.

"It isn't meant to be reassuring. It's meant to be honest." She led me toward a stone bench beneath an old, gnarled tree, silver moonflowers climbing its trunk despite the early hour. "Sit, child. This will take some time, and you'll want to be sitting for at least part of it."

I sat, my earlier panic from the healer's house still simmering just beneath the surface, now tangled with a fresh, colder unease at Elowen's careful, measured tone.

"You said it's time we talked about who I really am," I said. "So talk. Please. I'm tired of everyone around me knowing more about my own life than I do."

"Fair enough." Elowen lowered herself onto the bench beside me, moving slowly, joints clearly protesting the effort. "Tell me, Lyra — what do you know of the Lunar Dominion?"

The name meant nothing to me. "Nothing. Should it?"

"Once, it was the greatest kingdom in the werewolf world," she said. "Ruled not by an Alpha bloodline, but by something older, something tied directly to the moon itself. Its rulers carried a gift called the Moon Heart — power beyond anything modern packs remember or understand anymore."

"I don't see what this has to do with me."

"Patience, child." Something in her voice, gentle but immovable, reminded me suddenly of the way she'd spoken at the healer's house days ago. Not yet. It's not time yet. Apparently, time had finally arrived. "Twenty-two years ago, the Lunar Dominion fell. Overnight, as far as the rest of the world understood it. An entire kingdom, gone, its royal line believed extinguished entirely."

"Believed?"

"There were rumors, in certain circles, that the youngest heir survived the fall. Smuggled away, hidden, protected by loyal guardians willing to give their own lives to ensure the bloodline didn't end that night." Elowen's eyes, sharp despite her age, held mine steadily. "I've spent twenty-two years searching for that child, Lyra. Hoping, praying, that somewhere in this fractured world, she still lived."

"Twenty-two years is a long time to search for someone with nothing but a rumor to go on."

"It is," she agreed. "I've chased false hope more times than I care to admit. Wolves with the wrong birthmark, the wrong age, the wrong eyes entirely. Each time, I told myself it was foolish to keep looking, and each time, I looked anyway, because the alternative was accepting that everything we lost that night was lost for nothing."

"And you think I'm different from all those other false hopes."

"I think," Elowen said carefully, "that you are the first person I've found who makes my old heart afraid to hope at all, precisely because the possibility feels too large to survive being wrong about."

Understanding crept toward me slowly, and I refused it the moment it arrived.

"No," I said, standing abruptly. "No, whatever you're about to say, I already know it isn't true. I'm Beta Elias's daughter. I grew up in Mooncrest my entire life. I have memories, Elowen. Childhood, my mother's face, learning to walk in our own cottage. That's not something you fabricate."

"I'm not suggesting your memories are false," Elowen said calmly, unbothered by my outburst. "I'm suggesting the story behind them is incomplete."

"This is insane." I paced away from the bench, arms wrapped tightly around myself. "You're talking about some lost royal bloodline, some ancient prophecy, and somehow you've decided that's me? Based on what? A birthmark? Glowing hands? Malachar asking uncomfortable questions about my birth?"

"Based on all of that, yes," Elowen said. "And based on something else, something I've carried with me for over two decades, waiting for the day I might finally need it."

She reached into the folds of her robe and withdrew a small, tarnished locket, offering it toward me with hands that trembled slightly despite her outward calm.

I took it reluctantly, turning the delicate metal over in my palm before working the tiny clasp open.

Inside, painted in fine, faded detail, was a woman's portrait — silver-black hair, pale golden eyes, a face achingly, impossibly familiar despite the fact that I had never once seen it before in my life.

My own face, or close enough to steal the breath directly from my lungs.

"That is Queen Alara," Elowen said softly, "ruler of the Lunar Dominion, beloved by her people, and — if I am not mistaken, and I pray every day that I am not — your mother."

"No." The word came out cracked, barely more than breath. "No, this isn't— this can't be real."

"I understand this is difficult to hear."

"Difficult?" A broken, disbelieving laugh escaped me. "You're telling me my entire life was a lie. That Selene, Elias, Mooncrest, all of it, was just some elaborate hiding place for a secret I never even knew I was keeping."

"Not a lie," Elowen said gently. "A sanctuary. A choice made out of love, by people desperate to keep you alive when the alternative was almost certain death."

I stared down at the painted face in my palm, searching for any argument sturdy enough to hold against it, and finding none. The eyes alone were damning enough — my own eyes, exactly, down to the pale gold that flared bright when emotion ran too high to contain.

"Even if this is real," I said, my voice unsteady, "even if somehow, impossibly, this woman really is my mother — that doesn't explain why nobody told me. Twenty-two years, Elowen. Twenty-two years of people apparently knowing exactly who I was, and letting me grow up believing I was ordinary, unremarkable, easily rejected and easily discarded."

"Because the alternative was far more dangerous than a difficult childhood," Elowen said. "Because the people who protected you understood that a target too young to defend herself was a target likely to die before she ever had the chance to grow into whatever she was meant to become."

"Death from what?" My voice rose, panic and grief tangling together into something too large to properly contain. "You still haven't told me what actually happened. If this kingdom really existed, if I really am who you think I am, then what happened to my real parents? Why did they just — disappear, and leave me hidden away my whole life without a single word of explanation?"

Elowen's expression shifted, old grief surfacing plainly beneath her careful composure, and for the first time since she'd found me at the healer's house, her steady voice wavered.

"They didn't disappear, Lyra." She reached for my hand, holding it firmly despite my instinct to pull away. "And they certainly didn't leave you by choice."

"Then what happened to them?"

Elowen held my gaze, unflinching, and let the truth fall as gently as such a truth could ever fall.

"Your parents did not die of sickness, child," she said softly. "They were murdered."