Chapter Thirty-Eight
Emerald's Point Of View
I was seven years old the first time the moon goddess broke me.
Not gently. Not with warning. Not with the soft maternal grace the old stories assigned her, the silver light and the whispered blessing and the tender hand guiding the chosen toward their purpose.
She split me open like a fault line.
I had been sitting on the kitchen floor of our small house at the edge of the Ashveil territory, my bare feet cold against the stone, eating an apple with both hands the way children eat when no one is watching. My little sister Lyra was asleep in the next room, three years old and still small enough to curl into a ball that fit inside my arms. The house smelled of dried herbs and candle smoke, our mother's doing, always burning something, always
