When the Moon Hatched

Raeve¹ wakes to find Essi⁴ — her young companion, a brilliant Runi inventor she rescued from the Undercity — coiled on the couch with hands pressed over a stab wound leaking blood through her fingers. Essi⁴ didn't seek a healer.

She came home so Raeve¹ wouldn't think she'd been abandoned, the way Essi's⁴ parents once vanished into the mines. Raeve¹ tells her she loves her — words she has never spoken aloud — and holds her as the warmth drains away. Before silence settles, Essi⁴ asks to be given to fire, not cold.

Raeve¹ finds a blade inscribed with Rekk Zharos's⁶ name: a lure. Rekk⁶ killed Essi⁴ to draw Raeve¹ into the open. Hands shaking, Raeve¹ sets their home ablaze, sends her parchment lark Nee back to its unknown sender, and descends into the Undercity.

Grief detonates something frozen beneath Raeve's¹ ribs. Her consciousness sinks, replaced by The Other⁹ — a savage entity with black, glitter-kissed eyes who prowls the Undercity on a blood hunt.

The Other⁹ rips off Raeve's iron ring, sings Clode's suffocating tune to collapse soldiers' lungs, splits the ground with a single word of Bulder's language, and flings blades through the dark with lethal precision. Twenty-five soldiers fall. When Rekk Zharos⁶ finally traps her in a fire-ringed cage, she bites off his finger and spits the tip at him.

An iron pin to the shoulder nullifies her songs. Rekk⁶ wraps her in his whip. Raeve¹ wakes shackled in a cell — back flayed to ribbons by his iron-tipped lash — sentenced for trial before the Guild of Nobles.

Kaan Vaegor² — King of The Burn, disguised as a Runi and secretly in Gore — enters Raeve's¹ cell after snapping her lock with his bare fist. He's the cloaked male from the Hungry Hollow, drawn back by a voice and scent that haunted him for days. He opens a weald of Sabersythe dragonflame, and the firelight illuminates old, mended rune-scars on Raeve's¹ forehead invisible to ordinary light.

His hands tremble. She looks exactly like Elluin — a woman whose death shattered him over a century ago. A Truthtune in the opposite cell confirms Raeve¹ genuinely doesn't recognize him. She threatens him with an iron dagger. He barely breathes. Guards arrive to escort her to trial, and the ground trembles beneath his barely contained fury.

At trial, Raeve¹ corrects her kill count upward, insults the Chancellor's anatomy, and pleads guilty to everything. The vote between execution methods ties — until Kaan,² hidden among commoners, casts the deciding ballot for dragons, positioning his Sabersythe for rescue.

Bound to a stake in the open coliseum, Raeve¹ watches Moltenmaws circle. The Fade's Queen unexpectedly summons wind to scatter them — a public act of defiance. Then the sky blackens. Rygun drops from the clouds, so massive he eclipses the arena.

Something erupts from beneath Raeve's¹ frozen interior: an involuntary song in a language she doesn't recognize. The Sabersythe pauses, tips his horned face — then bites her off the stake, wood and all. She loses consciousness inside his mouth.

Raeve¹ wakes in sand, retching Sabersythe saliva, to find Kaan² standing over her — the cloaked stranger from Gore, now revealed as the Burn King. He flies her on Rygun to his dead mother's mountain retreat: a crooked stone dwelling with lopsided windows and vegetable beds gone to seed.

He cooks root vegetable soup, but with her wrists bound, she can't grip the spoon. Refusing to ask for help, she shoves her face straight into the bowl. The absurdity breaks them both into real, chest-shaking laughter that surprises her more than anything since her capture.

Later, she glimpses Kaan's² bare back: an entire constellation of moons tattooed across the dark expanse, including the small, wonky one she's loved since she first looked south from Gore's wall.

Raeve¹ escapes through the bedroom window during a thunderstorm, scales a cliff, and is swept away by a flash flood. Warriors fish her from the river — then the Fate Herder materializes.

A massive silver feline of legend, it physically blocks every attempt she makes to reach the water, shouldering her toward the Johkull Clan's settlement built inside a fallen dragon's ribcage. Their blind seer declares Raeve¹ the Kholu — the foretold one whose offspring will tether moons to the sky.

Two warriors fight to the death for the right to bind with her. The larger victor, Hock, kneels to offer his pendant. Raeve¹ headbutts him, shatters his nose, and demands to fight for herself. She battles through poisoned venom and mace blows until Hock cracks her skull unconscious.

Rygun drops from the sky and the ground begins to shake. Kaan² leaps into the crater, stalks toward the ring, and demands the trial be voided. When Hock challenges him, Kaan² falls to his knees before Raeve,¹ bows until his tattooed back is bared, and offers his málmr — a carved pendant of a Sabersythe and Moonplume embracing.

The gesture declares her his greater: if Kaan² falls, no one can challenge her choices. A bloodied Raeve¹ presses her palm against the wonky moon inked between his shoulder blades. He rises, selects a toothed blade, and saws through Hock's throat in grinding increments, dropping the severed head at her feet. She loops his málmr over her neck and passes out. Kaan² lifts her and carries her toward Rygun.

Raeve¹ wakes in the Imperial Stronghold of Dhomm — a city of bouldered buildings and inky blooms overlooking a turquoise bay. Kaan's² fierce sister Veya³ confronts her with hostility, warning she'll break Raeve¹ if Raeve¹ hurts Kaan² again. The word again haunts. Pyrok,⁷ a red-haired member of Kaan's² court, escorts her through streets where nulls attend school, younglings play freely, and nobody feeds folk to dragons.

At The Curly Quill, a blind Mindweft shopkeeper named Vruhn reads Raeve's¹ thoughts unbidden and weeps, telling her she's missing something profound within the icy depths of her mind. Raeve¹ refuses to let him dig further and leaves shaken — the first cracks forming in her certainty that all Vaegor kings are tyrants.

Kaan² leads Raeve¹ down an endless frozen staircase beneath his private suite to a cavern where Bulder hums a cradling song into the stone. Within glowing walls carved with Moonplumes sits a massive silver moon — Slátra, pieced back together from thousands of scattered shards over more than a century.

He tells Raeve¹ this dragon cradled a woman's body as it soared skyward and solidified. That the woman was Elluin — identical to Raeve.¹ That she hatched from this tombstone like a dragon from its egg.

Raeve¹ approaches the fossilized beast and feels the hollow where Slátra's claw once cupped something small — a space that fits her body exactly. Terror floods her chest. She denies everything, storms up the stairs, and resolves to leave Dhomm immediately.

Drawn by inexplicable compulsion to Dhomm's western point, Raeve¹ pushes through vines into a hidden cliff dwelling. Inside she finds stone carvings, twin mugs, a pallet — then is struck by a vision so vivid it buckles her knees: herself naked and laughing with Kaan,² their bodies intertwined on this very bed.

She collapses among scattered feathers, gasping, forced to accept that this forgotten place belonged to them in a life she cannot remember. Rather than flee, she stays.

Over weeks, she repairs chairs, sews curtains, forages berries and melons, and begins journaling for the first time — each quiet domestic act an excavation of the woman she used to be. She keeps trying to leave to hunt Rekk Zharos.⁶ She keeps returning with towels instead.

At The Great Flurrt festival — the aurora multiplied into thousands of dancing ribbons, dragons spiraling through the sky — Raeve¹ wins a fortune at Skripi off arrogant nobles, then faces Kaan² across the game table. If he wins: three truthful answers.

If she wins: one night pretending they're the couple from the dwelling, plus a wish she plans to spend on erasing him from her memory. She plays the smox — a shapeshifting wildcard — as a tick, turning his unbeatable Sabersythe into a rabid, doomed beast.

His shard darkens. They dance afterward, and a sudden rainstorm overwhelms her: she hears Rayne's weeping song for the first time, sobbing uncontrollably. Kaan² wraps around her from behind and hums her calming melody — one she's carried since before memory began.

After their night together in the dwelling — tender, devastating, raw — Raeve¹ tries to return Kaan's málmr and leave. He refuses it. She plans to visit the Mindweft to have Kaan² erased from her mind, but he has already moved Vruhn to a safe house. He tells her bluntly: Elluin bound with another male. That someone out there needs Raeve¹ more than either of them do.

That she must face her past or spend eternity running from it. He gives her a satchel of bloodstone, kisses her temple in a swift, searing press, and lets her go — not because he wants to, but because caging her would destroy what little trust she's built. His parting words: chase death, but come back to him.

Shade emissaries arrive in Dhomm, among them Rekk Zharos⁶ riding a sun-blistered Moonplume named Líri — wings shredded, skin bubbled, eyes masked. Raeve¹ sees the tortured dragon and is slammed by a vision: herself aboard a Moltenmaw, watching a blistered Moonplume bobbing through burning daylight, its luminous eyes fading to gray. The memory cleaves her chest.

Kaan² prevents her from attacking Rekk⁶ on Burn soil. Instead, she descends to Líri's hutch, presses her palm against the dragon's icy snout, and speaks soothing words in the southern tongue — a language she didn't know she knew. Something settles inside Raeve¹ like a key sliding home. She vows no one will hurt Líri again and tells Kaan² that Rekk⁶ took someone she loved.

At the Velvet Snog inn in Bothaim — neutral territory — Raeve¹ sets her trap. The Other⁹ takes the wheel when Rekk⁶ reaches for what he thinks is a hired companion. Instead: iron pins through his thigh, daggers in the fire, razors in the door handle. The Other⁹ uses Clode to seal his lungs, then whispers Ignos's flame to a stoking iron and draws burning lines across his chest — precisely mimicking every welt he seared into Líri's hide.

She tells him she heard every one of the Moonplume's screams and understood them. She uses his own metal spurs to gouge matching holes into his body, then finishes with the whip he once used to flay Raeve's¹ back to ribbons. Vengeance for Essi.⁴ For Líri. For herself.

Kaan's² sister Veya³ infiltrates Arithia's palace disguised as a servant, using an appearance-altering bangle. She narrowly survives an encounter with Tyroth¹⁵ — the cruel King of The Shade — and reaches the royal sleepsuite where Elluin died giving birth. Beneath the obsidian pallet, angled toward Haedeon's wonky moon visible through the balcony, Veya³ finds a leather diary.

Its final entries reveal everything: Kaan's² father Ostern blackmailed Elluin into leaving Kaan² by threatening to kill him and Veya.³ Elluin carried Kaan's² child — not Tyroth's¹⁵ — to Arithia and pretended to conceive on her wedding night. Princess Kyzari,⁸ raised as Tyroth's¹⁵ heir, is Kaan's² daughter. The diary is a lit fuse beneath three kingdoms, and Veya³ holds the match.