Chapter 131: Elaris Is Dying

Astrid Vale

"Why was I brought here?" I demanded, my back against the dead-end wall, Ivy sagging beside me. "What do you want from me?"

Soldiers had filled the corridor behind him, blocking every direction we might have run, but Maximus didn’t order them forward. He simply stood there, watching me with an expression that had finally shed every last trace of hospitality.

"Elaris is dying," he said.

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the beginning of one." He took a step closer, unhurried, as though he had all the time in the world now that we had nowhere left to go. "The curse that binds our bloodline is worsening. You’ve seen it yourself. The transformations, the ferals, the people we lose more of with every cycle. Our doctors can suppress the symptoms, slow the progression, but suppression isn’t a cure. We’ve spent generations searching for one."

"What does that have to do with me?"

"Our records describe a way to break the curse," he said. "An old prophecy, though I’ve come to think of it as something closer to biology than fate. It requires the blood of a wolf capable of surviving the surface air that kills the rest of us. A wolf whose body doesn’t reject the Moon Goddess’s curse the way ours does."

Something cold settled into my stomach even before he finished.

"You survived," he said quietly. "Our records say blood like yours may be enough."

I stared at him. "I’ve never been up there. Not the way you mean."

"You were found on the surface, unconscious, breathing that same cursed air, and it didn’t kill you," he said. "It should have. For anyone carrying our bloodline, it would have. That alone told us what we needed to know."

"How did you even find me?" I asked, my voice shaking despite everything I tried to do to steady it.

"Patrols," he said. "We’ve sent people to the surface for years, protected by masks, searching for exactly this. Fragments of old records mentioned a bloodline capable of what you can do. It took considerable time, but eventually those fragments led us to you." His gaze flicked briefly toward Ivy. "We took her first. We needed something that would bring you to us without a fight."

The east wing. Ivy’s messages. All of it suddenly clicked into place with a horrible, clean precision.

"Did you know my mother?" I asked, the question tearing out of me before I’d fully decided to ask it.

Something shifted behind his eyes. "Your mother knew a great deal," he said. "Enough to understand exactly what you were, and enough to spend the rest of her life hiding it."

"Did the King kill her because of me?"

He didn’t answer immediately, and the silence stretched long enough that I felt Ivy’s hand tighten weakly around my arm.

"Perhaps he wanted what she was hiding," Maximus said finally. "Perhaps he feared what you would become. Or perhaps your mother understood exactly what he would do the moment he learned what ran through your blood, and she spent seventeen years making sure he never found out." He tilted his head slightly. "I don’t know which. I only know she succeeded long enough for you to grow up believing you were ordinary."

I felt something crack open in my chest, old grief tangling with something sharper, angrier.

"I’m not your cure," I said. "Whatever you think my blood can do, I’m not going to let you drain me to save yourselves."

"Thousands of my people are suffering," he said. "Dying, some of them, slowly and painfully, through no fault of their own."

"I never chose your curse," I said. "It’s not mine to fix."

"She’s right," Ivy said, her voice hoarse but steady, pushing herself more upright against the wall despite everything her body had already been through. "You can’t just decide someone else owes you their life because you’re desperate."

Maximus studied us both for a long moment, something almost sad passing over his expression before it hardened again. Then his voice dropped, quieter, more deliberate than anything he’d said so far.

"You have spent your entire life believing that night was the beginning of your suffering," he said.

I went still. "What?"

"You remember your mother dying," he said. "But you don’t remember everything that happened that night."

"What are you talking about?"

He started walking toward me, slow and measured, and something about the way he moved made my vision blur at the edges without warning. The corridor stretched strangely, the soldiers behind him growing indistinct, their outlines smearing like watercolor left out in the rain.

"Stop," I tried to say, but my own voice sounded distant, muffled, like it belonged to someone standing several rooms away.

Ivy’s grip on my arm loosened, her voice calling my name from somewhere I couldn’t quite locate anymore.

Everything washed white.

Then warmth against my forehead. A cool cloth, soft fingers pressing gently at my temple, and a woman’s voice, achingly familiar, murmuring close to my ear.

"Easy, sweetheart. You’re burning up."

My eyes opened.

I was in a bed. Not the white sterile room of Elaris, not restrained, not surrounded by soldiers or sealed doors. A small, familiar room, candlelight flickering against wooden walls I recognized instantly, the faint smell of cheap perfume and old wax settling over everything.

No soldiers. No underground city. No Ivy leaning weakly against a dead-end wall.

I turned my head, and my mother sat beside the bed, her expression pinched with worry, a damp cloth still pressed against my forehead.

I stared at her. My throat closed up completely.

She smiled, soft and concerned, the exact way she used to smile at me when I was young and sick with fever, back before either of us had ever heard of Moonshade or the east wing or anything that had happened since.

"You had another nightmare," she said gently.

I looked around the room, taking in every impossible detail. The cracked windowpane I remembered from childhood. The chipped edge of the dresser she’d never bothered fixing. Everything felt solid, real, achingly present in a way that made my chest ache with longing before my mind could even catch up to what I was seeing.

Then, slowly, other memories crept back in around the edges. Elaris. The kidnapping. Liora, her wolf tearing into soldiers to buy us time. Maximus’s voice, calm and certain, telling me things about my mother I’d never known.

I looked back at her, my mother, sitting right in front of me, alive, her hand still resting against my forehead.

"It was a dream?" I whispered.