The moons of Nocthera were bleeding.
Not in the literal sense, but in the quiet, unsettling way that made the night sky look wrong—like someone had smeared ink through a celestial painting and left it to rot. One of the twin moons, Virell, now hung cracked and veined with crimson light. The other, Tessa, trembled behind shifting clouds as if afraid to watch.
Cassian stood at the helm of the skyskiff, his knuckles white against the wood.
They hadn't returned here since the fall. Since the rebellion.
Since she died.
Elara said nothing. She stood behind him, silent, letting the wind bite her cheeks and the horizon draw closer. There was something fragile about Cassian's silence tonight—not wounded, exactly, but sealed.
She knew better than to break it.
Not yet.
Nocthera had once been a place of obsidian beauty—its towers grown from volcanic glass, its people clad in dark silks and sharper secrets. Now, it was hollow. The streets whispered, not with life, but with ghosts. Buildings half-fallen leaned like beggars. The sky pulsed above them, too bright, too fast.
"They say time slips here now," Lyra muttered, brushing past a fractured sundial that pointed in four directions at once. "Like memory. Like guilt."
Cassian's voice cut through the air, sharp and hoarse. "It started the night the moons changed."
Elara turned to him. "What did?"
"The unraveling. The forgetting."
He didn't look at her.
Instead, he looked at the crypt.
It was built into the bones of the cliffside, the entrance marked by black ivy and runes scrawled in grieving gold. Elara could feel the glyph beneath her skin tingle as they approached.
This place remembered.
Even if Cassian didn't want to.
She watched him kneel at the stone door.
He didn't speak.
But the door opened anyway.
Inside, it was too cold for a place without wind. The walls were etched with starlight that moved. Paintings bled across the stone — images of a woman with silver hair and burning eyes, holding a child. Holding him.
Cassian stood before her tomb and whispered, "Hello, Mother."
The silence that followed nearly broke Elara.
They didn't speak until they left the crypt.
Even then, it wasn't Cassian who broke it.
It was the vision.
One moment, the road ahead was empty.
The next, she was there.
A woman, cloaked in stormclouds and moonfire, standing barefoot in the dust, her arms outstretched.
"Cassian," she said, her voice like a lullaby cracked by grief.
Elara's glyph flared.
Cassian froze. His entire body shook.
"Mother?" he rasped.
But Elara saw it before he did. The untruth. The ripple.
"That's not her," she said sharply.
But it was too late.
The ghost lunged — and the sky tore with her scream.
The next few seconds were chaos.
Lyra drew knives.
Kaelen shifted his blade into fire.
Cassian dropped to his knees, hands clutched over his ears as the illusion invaded his mind.
Only Elara stood steady.
She stepped forward, her hand glowing.
"Enough."
The glyph on her chest pulsed, and the illusion shattered.
What remained wasn't a woman, but a shadow-walker — one of the In-Between creatures hunting her across the veils. This one had taken Cassian's deepest memory and warped it.
"You should not remember," the creature hissed.
Elara held her ground. "And yet I do."
She raised her palm—and unleashed a memory.
Not hers.
Cassian's.
The sky filled with the sound of a lullaby. A real one. His mother's.
The shadow screamed, unraveling in the air.
And Cassian finally breathed.
Later, when the stars quieted and the others gave them space, he found her on the cliff's edge.
"You knew," he said quietly. "You saw it wasn't her."
"I felt the wrongness," she said. "It's what the glyph does."
Cassian's eyes were haunted. "But I wanted it to be her. Just for a second. Just to pretend."
Elara reached for his hand.
"She lives in you. Not just your blood. Your choices. Your fire. You don't need to see her ghost to remember who she was."
His throat worked.
"I'm afraid," he said.
"So am I," she replied. "But we still go forward."
They stood there until the cracked moon wept above them, and the night finally settled.
In the shadows of the ruined spire, another figure watched them.
Draped in veils made of forgotten names, eyes like melted stars.
She smiled.
"Soon, little weaver," she whispered.
"The final glyph will awaken."