I thought I knew what beauty looked like by now.
I had been so... so wrong.
The moment I stepped into the open heart of Polaris when I exited Kael's mother's house, I stopped dead in my tracks at the front door, breath leaving me in a quiet, reverent gasp. Whatever expectations I had carried with me—whatever comparisons I had made to festivals I had seen before—like the festival of Phoebes inside the Herion pack... they all crumbled instantly.
This was nothing like Herion.
There were no lanterns. No crafted light meant to imitate the stars.
Polaris didn’t imitate them.
They claimed them.
Above the Polaris grounds, thousands of tiny orbs of blueish-white light hovered freely in the air—soft, living points of silver, blue, and pale gold. They weren’t tethered to strings or poles like
