Red Moon

The wind blew hot and low across the Marches of Kraal, tugging at cloaks no longer worn by the dead.

Bodies sprawled in every direction--armored, torn, twisted. The stink of iron and open gut rose in waves from the blood-soaked earth. Crows circled. The sun, swollen and dirty-orange, sagged between the jagged stone spires that crowned the valley like broken teeth. Shadows fell long. The day was nearly done.

In the center of it all, Elsha stood.

She bled from the thigh, a long gash that stung with every shift of weight. Her cheek was split, lip cut, chin crusted with drying blood not all her own. Her axe--Gods, that axe--was streaked in black and red, the grooved head still wet. Steam curled off the blade like breath. Her arm trembled from the swing that had brought down the last Kraal warrior. Her knees wanted to fold. She wouldn't let them.

The silence that followed was too complete. A battlefield's hush, but charged--like the pause between lightning and thunder. Her vision tunneled, narrowed, focused only on the one who still moved.

Yethan of Zaarn.

He rose from the wreckage, stumbling over the corpse of a friend. His helm was gone, hair matted to his forehead, one eye swollen shut. His people--her allies--were gone, slaughtered by the war-singers of Kraal. He staggered toward her, a curved blade in his hand and murder in the set of his jaw.

"You brought them here," he spat, his voice ragged. "You knew. You read that cursed scroll and you knew."

Elsha didn't speak.

"You said we'd be safe. That the eclipse would buy us time. That she--she--would protect us. And for what? Your shadow-fucking ghost whore?"

Still she didn't speak. She let the words pass like heat. She could barely hear over the blood in her ears.

Yethan screamed and charged.

He was quick for a dying man. Desperate. His blade swung wide, savage, meant for her throat.

She moved faster.

The axe came up, not high, not grand, just a brutal half-arc that caught him through the collarbone. His scream cut off halfway through. The impact rang through her arms like hammer on bell.

He dropped.

Elsha stood over him, panting. Her blood ran down her leg into the dirt. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and blinked into the dying light.

Somewhere beyond the spires, the sun dipped lower. Soon the sky would bruise. And if the scroll was right, the shadow of the Red Moon would fall across the battlefield in less than an hour.

And she would come.

Namaris. Flesh again. Breath again. For eight minutes this time.

Elsha looked down at the dead.

She could already taste her.

Later.

The beast thundered beneath her--six feet tall at the shoulder, all sinew and feathers the color of old rust. A beak like a scythe. Eyes black as oil and just as cold. It screamed once as it tore across the scrubland, legs pounding the cracked earth in strides longer than a man's reach.

Elsha rode it bareback, fingers tangled in the thick plumage at its neck, the leather reins long since discarded. Her leg burned with every jolt. The makeshift bandage was soaked through. Her cheek was scabbed, lip split anew from the wind.

Behind her: Kraal pursuit. A wall of them. Screaming, howling, riding beasts smaller but faster--scaled hounds, venom-spitting lizards, even one war-chariot rigged with bone and blood. But they were behind. For now.

The spires were gone, swallowed by horizon. To the east: flat plains, cracked and gold-flecked, stretching toward the bones of forgotten cities and the shadow of the next eclipse.

She didn't look back.

She didn't need to.

Later still--The Bar

It's a few days on. The wound's stitched. Her cloak's fresh, though still stiff with old salt and blood. She's sitting at a bar in Orrik's Rest, a dusthole town with one well and too many gods. The barkeep is a woman with a dead eye and no patience.

Elsha drinks from a tarnished tin cup.

A man next to her says, "You're the one from Kraal."

She doesn't answer.

He says, "They say you ride a beast that eats horses. That you fucked a ghost under the Red Moon and brought ruin to a warhost."

She says, "The beast's name is Kaava. And I never kiss and tell."

He laughs, nervous.

Then she looks at him. Really looks at him.

And he stops laughing.

The door banged open like a shot, and half the bar twitched. Dust blew in, caught the lantern light, and stuck to sweat-slick brows. He was a big fucker--chainmail stiff with dried salt, the red-clay crest of the Cur still smeared across one pauldron. His eyes scanned the room and locked on her like a butcher sizing up meat.

She didn't look back.

She sat sideways at the bar, one leg crooked on the rung, the other stretched out, boot muddy, her thigh wrapped in stained linen. Her curls were a riot--copper, sun-wrecked, matted in places. The kind of hair that suggested a woman too mean to brush it and too wild to care. Skin gold and scarred. Muscles taut. Shoulders like a goddamn statue but posture like a drunk. She drank with her whole mouth, like she didn't owe anyone grace.

He stepped closer.

"You're her," he said, low, like he couldn't quite believe his luck. "The axe bitch."

She swallowed, wiped her mouth with her forearm, and finally looked at him.

Her eyes were exhausted. Flat. She didn't blink.

"You came a long way to say something that stupid?" she asked.

He grinned. Yellow teeth. No shame.

"Orders say you come back alive. But me?" He licked his lips. "I think we've got time to get acquainted first."

He reached for her.

The next moment happened too fast.

His fingers grazed her bare arm. Just that. The brush of touch.

Her elbow moved. The cup spun away. And her other hand was already holding the knife--a short, vicious thing honed on bone. She slammed it into the bar next to his crotch, leaned close, and hissed, "Touch me again and I'll bleed you like a pig."

He laughed, tried bravado. "You don't scare me. I've fucked--"

She stood.

Not tall. Not bulky.

But built like the fucking Red Moon carved her out of raw sex and steel. Every muscle said she'd fuck or fight you, and you'd lose either way.

He reached for her jaw, maybe to slap her, maybe to pull her in for the kiss.

Bad idea.

She headbutted him. His lip burst. He howled, hand flying to his mouth. "You bitch--"

He went for his blade.

She went for his wrist.

Steel flashed.

And his hand was gone.

It thumped wetly against the floor, fingers twitching like spiders. He screamed. She stepped over it and kicked him in the gut so hard he hit the wall behind him with a noise like dropped meat.

She bent down, picked up her tin cup from the floor, checked for dirt, drank what was left.

The bartender, polishing something with eyes like flint, finally spoke. "You paying for that?"

Elsha shrugged. "Wasn't my hand."

Then she walked out into the night, where the Red Moon hung low and fat, and her rage hadn't yet cooled.

The Road to Taal

The trail east was dry, brittle, and curved along cliffs like a serpent skin peeling from the world. Every step kicked up grit. Elsha's bandage itched, her mouth tasted of last night's copper and bad beer, and her mood was exactly as foul as the sky was hot.

She was alone for all of five miles.

Then came the voice.

"Is that the Red Moon scroll?"

It came from the rocks.

Elsha didn't slow. "No."

A red-haired blur dropped down beside her, light as a lizard and dressed like a storybook lie--leather vest, bare arms, patched trousers, dust-caked boots with one lace entirely missing. She couldn't have been five feet tall. Her tits were barely rumor. She had eyes like polished thieves' tools and the teeth of someone who smiled too easily for how much she talked.

"I'm Mouse," she said, already walking beside Elsha like they were old travel buddies. "Thief. Information broker. Sometimes dancer. Depends on the town. You're her, huh? Axe-bitch? Ghost-lover? Dream-licker?"

Elsha said nothing.

Mouse grinned wider. "Right. The silent brooding type. So hot. Want to see a card trick?"

"No."

"Want to fuck?"

Elsha stopped walking. Turned.

Mouse put up both hands, palms out, perfectly relaxed. "Just checking. No harm in asking. You're not my only option out here. I once fucked a centaur."

"You ever shut up?"

Mouse squinted at her, then snapped her fingers. "Nope."

The Road Gets Longer

Mouse followed her for hours. Days. She stole nothing but conversation and firewood. She sang once. Badly. She tried to bathe in a creek Elsha had been using to clean her wound, and the resulting chase almost ended in murder. Then Mouse tripped on purpose and landed very close to Elsha's thigh.

"I'm good with tongues," she said.

"Keep yours if you want to keep breathing."

"But you haven't smiled in three days. You're like a statue with blood pressure."

Elsha finally snapped, "You think this is a game? You know who's after me? You know what that scroll is?"

Mouse sobered a little. "I know it's written in moon-blood and it screams when it gets wet. I know it bends time and sucks warmth, and that the next eclipse cuts through Taal like a gut wound." She tilted her head. "But I'm still here."

"Why?"

Mouse shrugged. "You're hot. And doomed. I'm a sucker for bad decisions."

Elsha's Dream

The night before Taal.

The stars were wrong.

Too many. Too close. Hung like lanterns swaying in black water. No wind. No insects. Just the soft crackle of distant fire and the taste of salt at the back of her tongue. Elsha sat cross-legged on stone that wasn't stone, under a sky that pulsed with the blood-red bulge of the moon, so close it seemed she could reach out and peel it.

She didn't move.

Because she was there.

Namaris.

Barefoot, as always. Cloak trailing smoke. Skin dark as wine in moonlight. Her hair was longer in dreams, a rippling black tide, always moving like it had somewhere better to be. Her lips curved. That same knowing smirk--the one she used to wear just before she'd drag Elsha into temple shadows and put her hand between her thighs like she owned her.

"You always sleep outside," Namaris said, voice like silk and ashes. "Even in storms."

"I don't like walls," Elsha muttered, but her tone was soft. Different.

"You like me," Namaris said, stepping forward. "And I'm a dream with no roof."

Elsha looked up at her, then away. "I thought you'd be gone tonight."

The priestess shrugged. "The moon's fat. She makes room for me." She knelt, her knees brushing Elsha's. "You look like hell."

"I've had worse," Elsha said, but it came out quieter than she meant.

Namaris reached out, slow, and touched her face. Fingertips over the cut lip. The bruised cheekbone. "You always let them get close."

"Not on purpose."

"You're still bleeding," Namaris whispered. "You never stop."

Elsha didn't answer. Her jaw clenched, but her eyes fluttered shut under the touch.

A long moment passed.

"I miss you," Elsha said, and it cracked her in half to say it. Not screamed on a battlefield, not muttered to the fire, but here, now, said soft, like it mattered.

Namaris leaned forward, resting her forehead against Elsha's. "I'm always close. Even when you can't touch me."

"That's the problem," Elsha breathed. "I want to."

"You will. At Taal. If you get there in time."

Elsha opened her eyes. "There's a thief with me."

"I know. She has quick hands."

"She wants to fuck me."

Namaris smirked. "I definitely know."

"You're not angry?"

"Should I be?" Namaris asked, pulling back. "She's not me. You don't look at her like you look at me."

"How do I look at you?"

Namaris stood.

"Like you'd die for fifteen more minutes."

And then she was gone, dissolved into red smoke, the taste of her kiss still burning in Elsha's mouth.

Elsha woke up with tears drying on her cheeks, fists clenched in the dirt, and the first flicker of eclipse-shadow licking the rim of the moon.

She didn't speak.

Just got up, cleaned her blade, and started walking toward Taal.

Taal in Eclipse Season

The city smells like sweat and crushed petals, a mingling of perfume and beast-shit, sizzling fat and the hard tang of steel.

Taal is alive. Not in the polite, civilized sense--but in the way a fire is alive, or a cockfight, or a fuck that leaves teeth marks. She squats low in the valley where the Genthis Road crashes into the Quarl Track, and everything worth stealing in the world rolls through her gates twice a year.

Right now, in the heat of eclipse season, she's throbbing.

The Red Moon is nearing eclipse, and the city knows it. Flags hang from balconies, dyed rust-red or gold or both, stitched with bird crests and lewd puns. "The Beak is Near." "Fifteen Minutes of Heaven." "Cluck Me Gently."

Every third man has dyed feathers braided into his beard. Women paint their lips with crushed carmine root, echoing the eclipse. Vendors hawk eclipse charms, snake-laced aphrodisiacs, and bottles of "moon-sweat" collected from the backs of bird-racing champions. It's piss. Everyone knows. Still sells.

The streets near the Plumtrack--Taal's famous racing circuit--are chaos:

Terror birds are quartered in makeshift stables beneath awnings of silk and rope, their claws capped, their handlers caked in dust and desperate luck.

Betting houses are clogged with shirtless gamblers screaming at glass cages where birds peck each other bloody to prove form.

Street performers imitate the racers--lean women strapped into fake saddles, chasing men dressed as birds through alleys to riotous applause.

Brothels lean into the season: girls in feathered masks, boys in racing silks, old hands offering "rider's relief" for a coin and a prayer.

The city pulses to a single thought: eclipse is coming.

And that means anything--anything--can happen.

Elsha arrives midmorning, dirt-streaked, bleeding from two days of travel, with Mouse trailing behind like a red-headed devil and Kaava (her murder-bird) stabled under threat of death in the back alley of a tavern called The Moon's Open Mouth.

She hates the city.

She hates the noise.

She hates that everyone's fucking or fighting or doing both.

But the scroll says this is the place.

And somewhere--through the steam of spice pots, over the thunder of racing birds, past the wine-drunk gamblers and the silk-veiled courtesans--Namaris is coming.

Fifteen minutes only.

And Elsha has to live long enough to feel them.

The crowd is thick near the Velvet Rope, one of Taal's upper-tier betting dens, where rich men wager in gold, and poor men in blood. Elsha is already pissed. She's bled on five different rugs and stepped in bird shit twice. Mouse keeps stealing figs and handing them to her like bribes.

Elsha growls, "Stop giving me fruit."

Mouse just grins. "It's diplomacy. Besides, you're less stabby with something in your mouth."

And then--*

Elsha stiffens.

A breeze across her back that shouldn't be there. A whisper in a language she doesn't know but understands anyway.

She turns--

Mantis.

Not a name. A title. One of the Cur's assassins. Dressed in sheer shadow-thread, tattoos like spider legs trailing from her neck to her jaw. Her blade is thin, almost invisible, and it's already moving.

For the scroll. Strapped beneath Elsha's ribs, tucked into leather and sweat.

She's too close.

Elsha reaches, but the blade's faster--

And then Mouse is there.

She dives, not at Mantis, but at Elsha--shoving her sideways into a food cart of skewered meat. The assassin's blade catches only air.

Mantis snarls. "Fucking red-haired--"

Mouse kicks her in the cunt and runs.

Elsha is up before the meat stops sizzling. One hand on her axe, the other on the scroll. Blood runs down her ribs from the glancing strike. Her eyes are wide and black.

Mantis is moving fast, low, impossible angles. She cuts a path through the crowd. Mouse disappears into the alleys.

Elsha follows.

They find each other in a spice alley. Red dust everywhere, and hanging racks of chili strings swinging in the breeze. The sun's gone behind a cloud and the air is tight. Smells like copper and heat.

Mantis is waiting.

"You can't kill what you can't catch," she hisses. "The scroll belongs to the Cur."

Elsha doesn't answer.

Mantis comes at her again, fast and low--aiming for the thighs. Disable. Take the scroll. Take it back to him.

But Elsha's not in a good mood.

She sidesteps, grabs Mantis by the wrist, and slams her against the alley wall hard enough to crack brick. The assassin writhes, hissing, flipping the blade to her other hand--

Too slow.

Elsha drives her axe into her gut, pulls up through the ribs. Not clean. Not pretty.

Just final.

Mantis gasps. Tries to speak. Chokes.

Elsha leans in, forehead against hers. "No one touches her scroll."

Then yanks the axe free.

Aftermath

Mouse finds her in the alley a few minutes later, carrying a mostly-intact fig.

"You're bleeding," Mouse says, frowning.

Elsha says nothing. Just sits on a crate, staring at her own hands.

"You gonna say thanks?"

Elsha exhales. "You did good."

Mouse smiles. "You're welcome. Also, that was fucking hot."

Elsha doesn't smile.

But she doesn't look away, either.

The Temple of the Moon isn't high. It's low, sunk into the bones of the earth--old stone, black with ash and worn smooth by feet long dead. Smoke curls through the archways, perfumed and heavy, sweetened with myrrh and something less pleasant--coppery, sharp. Blood.

There's only one priestess.

She stands at the center of the atrium, bare to the waist, body slick with sweat and sacred wine, her massive breasts tattooed--hemispheres of the Red Moon inked in stark detail, pulsing now with eclipse-light. Blood runs down her arms from self-inflicted cuts, bright against her brown skin. She sways, chanting in the Old Tongue, "Tull'aa, Vesh ar Kal... Tull'aa, Vesh ar Kal..." Her voice is breaking--pleading.

Above them, the sky is bruising. The Red Moon sliding across the sun, slow as doom.

Elsha doesn't kneel. She never does. She watches the priestess with grim reverence, her fingers brushing the scroll under her vest.

Mouse is nearby, crouched behind a pillar, chewing dried fruit and clearly trying not to stare at the priestess's tits. "You know, I thought the moon maps were exaggeration. But that's... that's cartography."

Elsha snorts once. Then stiffens.

Movement at the periphery. Shadows bending wrong.

Kraal mercenaries. Six of them. Two with hooked blades, one with a chain whip, and one--big fucker--holding a moon-sigil brand glowing faintly red.

They've come for the scroll.

Again.

Elsha draws her axe slow, like it's part of her body, not a weapon. "Mouse."

"Yeah?"

"Stay close."

Mouse flips her dagger and says, "We always have our best dates in temples."

The Kraal rush in.

The priestess does not stop chanting, even as a blade slices her thigh open. She welcomes the pain. She's deep in ritual, mouth open in ecstasy or agony or both.

Elsha blocks two attacks, counters with a pivot and an elbow that cracks a jawbone sideways. Blood splashes the altar. Mouse dives under a spear, comes up behind and slits a throat clean. The chain-whip wraps around Elsha's bicep--she pulls the mercenary toward her and buries her axe in his side.

But it's not enough.

More keep coming. She's tiring. The wound in her thigh tears open again. Her balance falters. A blade grazes her ribs, too close to the scroll. Mouse screams something--maybe her name, maybe a curse--but Elsha can't hear over the priestess's wailing climax of chant.

The eclipse reaches its peak.

And everything turns red.

Outside the Gates

The Cur of Gargaan arrives.

Not marching. Gliding. His war-chariot is pulled by beasts with mouths in their chests. His army is silent behind him. The sun's last light slips away as he raises one burned hand toward Taal's wall and whispers, "Open."

And the gate catches fire.

Back in the Temple

Elsha stumbles. Falls to one knee.

A Kraal sword rises over her head.

The priestess's voice shatters into scream-song, and from her tattoos, light erupts--moonlight, thick and sticky, flooding the room. It hits Elsha like a second wind. She surges to her feet, catches the sword mid-swing with her axe, drives the edge upward through a throat.

She doesn't know how many are left.

Only that Mouse is bleeding.

Only that she can't die. Not yet.

The scroll is warm against her ribs.

And Namaris is coming.

The light collapsed.

Not vanished--reversed.

The moment the Red Moon swallowed the sun, everything turned not to night, but to something older. A velvet dark, thick with gravity. No stars. No breath. The priestess fell silent mid-cry and dropped to her knees. Her hands clutched her own bloodied breasts, trembling, and she whispered, "She comes."

And Elsha knew before she turned.

A presence behind her, not announced--assumed.

A shadow that didn't just move, but chose a shape.

Not light-made, not imagined.

Flesh.

Namaris.

She stepped from the eclipse-line barefoot and entirely nude, as though her body had been drawn there by a god drunk on hunger. Her hair, once the color of sunlight, was now black as sin. Her skin was the color of dark amber kissed by oil, smooth except where her throat bore the fine ritual scars of her priesthood. Her breasts were small and tipped with dusk-colored nipples that responded to the heat and blood in the air. Her narrow hips swayed with the same rhythm as her voice once had--the rhythm that once made Elsha forget her own name.

Her sex was shaved bare, adorned only by a silver ring through the hood, gleaming like a moon-tear.

Her thighs bore the tattooed marks of ancient eclipses--faint, curling sigils trailing inward as though inviting worship. Her stomach bore no mark, no scar. Her body was whole. She was whole.

Her eyes locked with Elsha's.

Elsha was on her knees now, weapon slack at her side, blood drying on her neck, and none of it mattered. She tried to breathe. Her heart beat too fast, out of time, like a war drum in a temple.

"You're early," Elsha said, voice wrecked.

"I'm on time," Namaris said, and her voice didn't echo. It settled--in the spine, in the cunt, in the air like incense smoke.

Elsha shook her head, laughing without joy. "No light this time."

"There's enough to see you." Namaris stepped closer. "And I do see you."

Elsha's lip was split. Her ribs ached. Mouse lay somewhere behind her, maybe bleeding out, maybe dead. The city was on fire. The scroll pulsed under her ribs.

And Namaris--Namaris--stood there with her body bared and her gaze unflinching, as though nothing else in the world dared to touch them while she was real.

"I don't have time," Elsha whispered, eyes wet, mouth dry. "I don't have fifteen minutes."

"Then take them," Namaris said.

And stepped into her arms.

They kissed.

Not sweetly. Not gently. Like time owed. Like death cheated. Like flesh and memory colliding too fast for either to survive intact.

Elsha's fingers gripped the back of Namaris's neck, hard enough to bruise--if Namaris could still bruise. Namaris's mouth opened against hers with a moan half-feral, half-sacred. Their bodies met like blades drawn from scabbards. There was no tenderness in it. No delay. Just hunger, and rage, and the unspeakable relief of heat-on-heat, skin-on-skin.

And the world shuddered.

The city of Taal, in its chaos and stink and glory, froze. Dice mid-roll stopped spinning. Lovers mid-thrust gasped. A silk vendor dropped his wares. Somewhere in the slums, a voice wailed and then went silent.

Above, the crystalline moon that crowned the Temple's spire--silent for a hundred years--sang.

Not music. Not quite.

It was a resonance that hit the bones before the ears.

A frequency only felt by the fucked and faithful, vibrating down to the heel of every whore and warlord, every priest and petty thief.

Even Mouse, half-conscious, bleeding on the floor behind a column, felt it--murmured, "Gods, who is she?"

Namaris's hand slid up Elsha's neck, her thumb brushing the cut lip, and Elsha groaned into her mouth. Their hips touched, aligned. The heat between them was blinding. Her body had changed--years ago now--but Namaris didn't reach between her legs.

She held her like she was still whole.

And then--

BOOM.

The temple doors didn't open. They exploded.

Stone shattered inward in a storm of smoke and light.

The eclipse wasn't over--but the darkness now had a name, and it stepped through flame on four legs and two.

The Cur of Gargaan.

Not armored. Bare-chested, his ruined flesh burned red-black and oozing under ritual brands. His mouth opened in a scream that wasn't words but command. The scroll shook against Elsha's ribs. The priestess fainted, blood pooling under her on the altar.

And Namaris--already fading, her edges beginning to smoke.

Elsha turned, axe in hand, lips still wet from a kiss that had made the fucking moon sing.

And said:

"You're too fucking late."

The moon sang--

And then she was gone.

Namaris vanished not with a flash, but with a slow dissolving.

Smoke from the chest outward.

Fingers the last to fade, still curved as if grasping Elsha's jaw,

Still warm.

Still wanting.

Elsha stood frozen in the center of the Temple, axe loose in her hand, mouth slack, the kiss still pressed behind her teeth like a memory she hadn't finished chewing.

The Cur of Gargaan did not walk.

He charged.

Namaris's ghost was barely done fading when his burned bulk came crashing across the altar tiles. The brands on his skin glowed molten, glyphs of immortality half-written, his right hand a hammer of bone and brass.

Elsha barely got her axe up in time.

CLANG.

Metal screamed. Sparks tore through shadow. She stumbled, twisted, came in low--her leg buckling under the reopened thigh wound. She struck, caught his hip. He roared, not in pain, but in fury that she touched him.

He swung. Missed.

She countered. Caught his forearm. Blood sprayed--black and wrong.

But she was crying now.

Not from pain.

Not even from rage.

From that sick, cold thing blooming in her chest again--

the same thing that bloomed when Namaris died the first time.

The unfixable absence.

The void that makes you wonder if love was ever real or just a hallucination in red light.

The Cur grinned through broken teeth.

"You were so close," he hissed.

"She was almost yours."

Elsha screamed.

Her swing came from the waist, through her whole fucking soul. It knocked the breath from him. Drove him back into a pillar that cracked with the force.

But she was staggering now.

Weak. Crying. Still swinging.

He grabbed her hair. Slammed her head into the stone. Once.

Twice.

Blood in her mouth.

The scroll throbbed under her ribs--wailing.

She slumped.

He raised his hammer.

And then--

Mouse.

Bleeding. Limping. Grinning like a death wish.

She leapt from a column with Elsha's dagger in her hand and buried it in the Cur's eye.

He howled.

Elsha moved.

She caught the axe, rose in one motion, and split him from groin to sternum.

The Cur of Gargaan collapsed.

Twitched.

Died with her name in his throat.

Elsha dropped her weapon. Fell to her knees.

The eclipse had ended.

The temple was dark.

The city had survived.

But Namaris was gone again, and this time there were no gods left to sing.

The silence after the Cur's death was so complete it made her ears ring.

Elsha sat where she had collapsed, blood pooling at her knees, the stone floor warm with it. Mouse was nearby, curled like a cat with a punctured lung, cussing softly through her teeth and trying to light a pipe with shaking fingers.

Neither of them spoke.

The eclipse had passed. The moon's edge no longer crowned the sun. The city outside was already stirring--murmurs, a bird's shriek, a bell tolling far too late.

And then--*

ping

A sound not like metal, not quite like glass.

Elsha turned her head, slowly. Neck stiff, lips dry.

At the center of the broken altar, where Namaris had last stood--where her flesh had dissolved in Elsha's arms--something remained.

A fragment.

No bigger than a fingernail.

Deep red, veined with gold.

Not gemstone. Not glass.

It pulsed faintly, like a wound still weeping light.

She reached for it.

Her fingers trembled. She was afraid--not that it would burn her, but that it would do nothing. That it would be inert. That it would be just scrap--souvenir of a loss no one would ever understand.

But when her skin touched it--

She heard her name.

Not out loud. Not imagined.

Just beneath the skin, behind the heartbeat.

"Elsha."

Soft. Fierce.

Not a goodbye.

A promise.

She curled her fingers around it and held it to her chest.

And for the first time since the kiss, she let herself cry.

Really cry.

Because she had something now.

Not enough. But not nothing.

The silence in the temple holds for one beat longer than it should. Elsha cradles the fragment to her chest. Mouse breathes, shallow and uneven, fingers slick with someone else's blood. The priestess is unconscious. The axe lies quiet. The Red Moon does not sing again.

And then--

"So," a voice says, rough around the edges, a little hoarse, "the fragment pulses. You feel Namaris's voice inside your ribs. What do you do?"

The candlelight flickers.

Not torchlight. Candlelight. Real candles. Vanilla-scented, in little glass jars with peeling labels.

We're in a living room. Hardwood floors, low ceilings. A bag of Takis spilling neon dust across a Player's Handbook. Someone's sweater tossed across the back of the couch. Three sets of dice--Carrie's are sharp-edged blood-red, Squirrel's are mismatched thrift store trash, Zach's are sleek obsidian and lined up with terrifying precision.

Carrie is Elsha.

Her hair's a mess--no armor, just an oversized Temple sweatshirt that hangs off one shoulder. She's leaning forward in her chair, one hand still clenched in a fist like she's holding something that hurts to let go. Her eyes are wet.

Squirrel is Mouse.

She's cross-legged on the floor, laptop open but long forgotten. She's still holding the die that landed a natural 20 on the Cur's eye-stab. She keeps rolling it across her fingers like it means something now.

Zach is behind the screen. Hoodie, half a beard, ring of sweat around his collar. He's trying not to look too proud of himself.

Carrie doesn't answer.

Not right away.

She stares at the table, at the little pewter mini of Elsha lying in a pool of spilled red Gatorade.

Squirrel swallows. Quiet. "I give her my scarf."

Carrie finally looks up.

"You do?"

Squirrel nods, voice softer than usual. "Yeah. I think Mouse would. She doesn't know how to say it, but she... she wants Elsha to have something. Like... not be alone."

Zach is quiet.

He doesn't narrate. Doesn't need to.

Carrie says, "Elsha takes it." Her voice is rough. Real. "She doesn't say thank you. But she doesn't let go."

Squirrel smiles. Just barely. "Good."

The table is still.

For a moment longer, the three of them sit in the echo of a world that almost ended.

Then Zach flips to the next page of his notes.

"Alright," he says, voice steadier now. "The next session picks up in the ruins outside Taal. You've got a wounded thief, a sacred fragment, and a scroll that just started whispering a new name."

Carrie raises an eyebrow. "Whose?"

Zach grins.

"Yours."

And the moon, in that other world, rises again.