Both POVs
Lenora
Ten years after the blood-moon ceremony, I stood at the bridge.
This was not an anniversary. I didn't mark the blood-moon ceremonially — it was not a date I needed to preserve in ritual. But it happened to be autumn, and the mist was on the river, and I found myself at the bridge rail with the particular awareness of time that visits when you've lived long enough for the early chapters to feel like another person.
They didn't feel like another person.
They felt like me — an earlier version, younger, stripped down to essentials, carrying the compressed wisdom of survival. I could access that woman when I needed to. She was not gone. She was the foundation.
But I was different from her.
I thought about the things that had changed.
The oversight body had processed fou
