All Chapters of Wrath Of A Scorned Luna : Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

I’m staring at the Void-baby and I can feel everyone waiting for me to make a decision that will either save or damn us all.Kill an infant who might be innocent or let it live and potentially unleash seven entities worse than the one we just barely survived.No pressure.“Mabel,” Alistair says carefully, and I can hear the conflict in his voice because he’s struggling with this too. “What do you want to do?”What I want is to go back to three months ago when my biggest problem was being married to a man I was supposed to hate and planning revenge on people who betrayed me. That feels like a lifetime ago now, back when the world made sense and children were just children instead of living keys to apocalypse seals.“I don’t know,” I admit, and the words feel like failure.Donald moves closer to the baby, his hands glowing with diagnostic magic.“Let me examine it,” he says. “Maybe I can determine if Anna was telling the truth, if there’s actually some kind of programming or compulsion

The first family arrives two weeks later and they look exactly how I’d expect people bringing their superpowered child to a fortress full of other superpowered children would look.Terrified.The mother clutches her daughter so tightly the girl winces, and the father keeps one hand on his weapon like he expects us to attack at any moment.Their daughter, Luna, is maybe four years old with eyes that shift through every color imaginable and frost spreading from her fingertips wherever she touches.“Please,” the mother says the moment they’re through the gates. “Please tell us you can fix her. That you can make her normal again.”I want to tell her yes, want to promise that we’ll solve everything and her daughter will grow up safe and ordinary.Instead I tell her the truth.“I don’t know if we can fix this,” I say. “But we’re going to try. And in the meantime, your daughter won’t be alone. There are other children like her here.”We show them to quarters and I watch as Luna immediately s

The Seal of Stillness sits in the middle of a dead forest where nothing moves and nothing grows. Not dead like burned or diseased, but dead like someone pressed pause on reality and forgot to unpause it. Trees frozen mid-sway, leaves suspended in air, a bird caught mid-flight and hanging there like a taxidermy piece. It’s the most wrong thing I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen a lot of wrong things. “Are you sure about this?” Alistair asks for the hundredth time since we left the fortress. “No,” I say honestly. “But I’m doing it anyway.” The seal itself looks like a door that’s not quite there, shimmering at the edges like heat distortion, covered in symbols that hurt to look at directly. The echoes have been coaching me for two days straight on what to expect, how to protect my mind, how to survive long enough to communicate. “The entity inside is called the Stillness,” the Donald-echo explained. “It doesn’t consume or destroy like the Void Born did. It freezes. Stops. Makes everyth

Tempest ages three days in three hours.I watch it happen, unable to do anything but hold her while she cycles through infant to toddler to something approaching five years old, her body catching up to the consciousness that’s been aware since before birth.“This isn’t natural,” the healer keeps saying, like any of this has been natural.“She’s stabilizing,” the Donald-echo observes, watching with that clinical detachment echoes have. “The acceleration is slowing. She’ll probably stop aging around seven or eight years equivalent.”“Probably,” I repeat numbly.Tempest looks up at me with eyes that hold centuries even though she’s been alive for less than a day.“I’m sorry, Mama,” she says, and she sounds genuinely regretful. “I didn’t mean to scare you. The Stillness, it gave me its gift but also its curse. Time is just a suggestion to me now. I can’t always control which direction it flows.”She’s speaking in complete sentences, her vocabulary that of a scholar not a newborn.“What ar

We don’t get to celebrate our second victory before everything goes wrong.We’re barely back at the fortress when Tempest collapses mid-step, her body convulsing as time fractures around her.“What’s happening?” Alistair shouts, catching her before she hits the ground.“The feeding,” she gasps, her age flickering wildly from infant to teenager and back. “I tried to show the Hunger a possibility but it was too much, too many timelines at once, I can’t…”The Donald-echo rushes over, his hands glowing with diagnostic magic.“She’s burning out,” he says urgently. “The strain of holding time, negotiating with the Hunger, and now feeding it daily, it’s too much for a body that’s only existed for two days.”“Fix her!” I scream.“I can’t. This is beyond magic. She needs to stabilize herself or—”Tempest’s eyes roll back and she goes limp.For three terrible seconds, she doesn’t breathe.Then she gasps awake, looking suddenly older, maybe ten years old now.“I’m okay,” she says weakly. “I just