The lie begins with silence.
Not the peace-kind.
The dangerous kind—the kind predators trust.
Blood Moon goes quiet on purpose.
Borders relax just enough to look real. Patrols shift patterns slightly. A single, carefully chosen ward is lowered for three heartbeats every third hour. Just long enough to be noticed by the wrong eyes.
Just long enough to bait a god.
I sit in the inner sanctum, hands resting over my stomach as Jason watches the shifting currents of magic around me like a man charting unstable stars.
“The child is learning how to fold their presence,” he murmurs. “Like dimming a flame without extinguishing it.”
I swallow. “Does it hurt them?”
“Not pain,” he says. “More like… concentration.”
The heir stirs faintly in response, a soft ripple beneath my palm. I’ve come to
