Chapter 25: Adenium

Lumina had already finished committing every step of the recipe, every spice, to memory, and now her attention drifted back to Lucian, who’d gone quiet, his face turned entirely toward the girl in the white robe.

The old fruit vendor treated Miyu with a kind of reverence bordering on worship.

She’d only meant to buy a handful of fruit, but he kept pressing more and more into her arms, and no matter how many times she tried to refuse, he simply wouldn’t let her.

He wasn’t the only one, either. Word that Miyu had arrived seemed to spread through the market instantly, and within moments, vendors were abandoning their stalls to crowd around her.

They practically fought each other for the chance to give her something: food, bolts of cloth, sandals, rolled scrolls of parchment.

From the look on her face, it was obvious she needed none of it, but the people around her wouldn’t hear of letting her leave empty-handed.

Unable to refuse any longer, Miyu accepted it all, one gift after another, that same warm, radiant smile never once slipping from her face.

That smile really is something else, Lucian thought, even as he watched her struggling under the growing pile in her arms.

Then a second woman came sprinting through the crowd, dressed in a white robe nearly identical to Miyu’s, save for one difference, hers carried no star embroidered into the fabric.

She was tall enough that dust kicked up faintly with every stride, closing the distance fast toward Miyu, who looked seconds away from dropping everything she was holding.

"Hey! Stop crowding the Moonmaiden like this!"

The woman’s hair was a mix of black shot through with brown, and she looked a few years older than Miyu, somewhere around twenty-three.

Something about her voice struck Lucian as strangely familiar, though the edge of irritation in it now made it hard to place exactly why.

Everything about the way she moved, the ease with which she started pulling packages out of Miyu’s overloaded arms, spoke of someone who knew Miyu intimately, someone who’d done this a hundred times before.

One of the vendors, dressed in green, let out an embarrassed laugh and offered a quick apology for the commotion.

"Ahaha, forgive our rudeness, Archpriest Alayna. We got a little carried away with Moonmaiden Miyu here."

"A little? Have you even looked at her face right now?"

Miyu did look worn thin, her cheeks flushed red from the sun beating down on all of them, though she carried it the same way she carried everything else, without a word of complaint.

If anything, she’d turned her attention to scolding Alayna instead, upset that her friend was snapping at people who only meant well.

Alayna’s expression softened into guilt almost instantly. She bowed her head, clasping both hands together in a gesture that made her regret plain to everyone watching.

The vendor in green raised a hand, insisting the fault was equally theirs, and helped smooth things over.

Miyu, cheeks still puffed out in that particular pout she wore whenever she was annoyed, finally let out a breath and settled back into her usual easy warmth.

That was when a young boy pushed his way through the crowd toward her. His face was smudged with dirt, his clothes threadbare and worn thin, his hair a tangled, uncared-for mess.

A shallow cut ran across his left hand, blood still welling from it, and a deeper wound marked one of his legs.

None of it stopped him from making his way toward Miyu, a single white Adenium flower clutched carefully in his good hand.

He pushed through the crowd gathered near her, and the moment the people behind him registered who’d just shoved past, their expressions shifted, curiosity curdling instantly into open disgust.

"Hey, cursed brat, what are you doing here?"

A man near the back of the crowd spat the words out, loud enough that Miyu’s head turned sharply toward the sound, immediately sensing that something was wrong behind her.

He wasn’t alone in his disgust, either. Fear rippled through the crowd around the boy, and within seconds, someone had already picked up a stone and hurled it at him.

The boy dropped instantly, curling into himself, arms thrown over his head, small fingers trembling as he braced for the impact.

But a pale, gentle hand shot out before the stone ever landed, a shadow falling over him, shielding him completely.

"How dare you."

Miyu’s eyes had gone wide with fury as she planted herself between the boy and the crowd. "How could any of you be this cruel to a child?"

Every hand that had been raised to strike him dropped at once. No one dared move against him with Miyu standing there. Alayna rushed to her side a moment later.

Then, cutting through the crowd, came a man in a white robe, his face concealed behind a white cloth marked with a crescent moon, the sign of someone holding real authority within the Order of Selena, this region’s counterpart to the Order of Lumielle.

"Maiden Miyu. Perhaps you’re unaware of the rumors surrounding this child’s family. They say a curse was born with him, that any household near his brings sickness and death, that the neighbors have seen monstrous things moving inside their home at night."

Miyu’s expression flickered with surprise at that, though it settled quickly into something harder. She recognized immediately what this man was: an Archbishop.

"If they were truly cursed from birth, Goddess Selenea would never have allowed them to exist in this world at all."

"And do you hold the authority to declare a family cursed or not, Archbishop Zoria, based on nothing but rumor and hearsay?"

"Of course not!. I’m no Saintess, capable of receiving the Goddess’s own revelation. I only meant to relay what the people have been saying. Isn’t it our duty, as servants of the Goddess, to listen to our people?"

The white cloth hid the Archbishop’s face completely, but the edge in his voice made his irritation with Miyu unmistakable.

"If all you’re here to do is make this worse, perhaps you should simply leave, Archbishop Zoria," Alayna cut in, her tone sharp and final.

"Very well. I’ll take my leave. I do hope the Moonmaiden won’t be too much longer, though. The Awakening ceremony will begin shortly, and we wouldn’t want to keep the other officials waiting."

But before he could leave, he shot a sharp glance at the boy holding the adenium flower, as if something lingered there.

Archbishop Zoria turned and walked off, leaving the crowd behind him.

Miyu knelt to help the boy back onto his feet. His hands still shook, but he closed his fingers around hers and held on tight, refusing to let go.

Stammering, he held the Adenium flower out to her with his good hand.

"Moonmaiden Miyu, please, help my mother get better. If you heal her, I’ll find more Adenium flowers, I’ll pay whatever it costs, I promise."

Tears ran down his face without stopping. He’d torn himself up all over his body just to find a single flower, the first payment he could offer toward his mother’s cure.

Miyu, understanding exactly what that sacrifice had cost him, wiped the tears from his cheeks and pulled him into a gentle embrace.

"Don’t cry anymore. Don’t you want to go heal your mother right now?"

The boy’s tears stopped almost instantly at the mention of it. Miyu released him from the embrace, took his hand, and started walking toward his home without another word needed.

Alayna’s expression shifted, not from any reluctance to help the boy, but from the growing certainty that the Awakening ceremony was drawing close.

"Miyu, if we do this now, you’re going to be late."

Miyu only smiled at her friend.

"Don’t worry about it."

Reluctant as she was, Alayna fell into step behind them, and the three of them walked off together, leaving the crowd behind.

In the middle of watching this fragment of memory play out, Lumina suddenly pulled at Lucian’s hand, something about Miyu clearly holding her attention.

"Lucian. Let’s follow her."

Lucian startled slightly at how eager Lumina sounded, though the truth was he’d already been planning to follow Miyu on his own, with or without her prompting.

After a long walk, they finally arrived at a slum pressed up against the outer wall of the city.

A crumbling, decrepit building stood before them, wrapped in a black aura visible even from a distance.

Though this was only a memory, the weight of darkness radiating from that broken-down house pressed against Lucian just as heavily as if it were real.

Miyu and Alayna, walking ahead of them, seemed entirely unbothered by it, stepping inside as though nothing about the place troubled them at all.

Lucian and Lumina followed close behind. The door groaned as it swung open, and the small room beyond came into view: a single bed, and on it, a woman so thin she looked barely more than bones, dark veins visible beneath her skin.

"Mother, I’ve brought the Moonmaiden."

A weak cough answered them from the bed, the only sign that the woman lying there was still alive at all.

But Lumina’s attention wasn’t on Miyu’s healing at all. She was staring instead at a cluster of Adenium plants, eight pots lined up along the darkest corner of the room.

"Lucian, weren’t you curious where that Murk came from?"

Lucian hadn’t been paying attention to her at all, until the word "Murk" cut through, and his focus snapped back toward those pots. There was something off about them, something that felt unmistakably like dark mana pooling beneath them.

"Why are you staring at the base of that pot, Lucian?"

"What do you mean?"

Lumina reached up and tilted his chin upward, and the instant she did, the thing that had left him shaking earlier reappeared in full.

Murks crawled along the ceiling above them, invisible to the family living below. Worse still, there wasn’t just one. Lucian counted eight of them, clustered together, turning this house into less of a home and more of a nest.

Shit. There’s more than one.

He’d barely managed to hold his own against a single Murk. Facing eight at once left him completely, hopelessly outmatched, and all of them seemed to sense him the instant he registered their presence.

Lucian tried to pull back, to get out of their reach, but Lumina still had his chin locked in place, holding him frozen where he stood.

"Lumina!"