The Rise Of The Spectacular Luna

Chapter 2: Mirror, Mirror

The soft knock on Ella's bedroom door comes at dawn, when the first pale rays of sunlight are just beginning to chase away the shadows of her sleepless night. She's been sitting on her bathroom floor for hours, staring at the scratches on her arms and trying to convince herself they're fading, that maybe she imagined their severity in the darkness.

She hasn't.

If anything, they look more pronounced in the morning light—seven distinct claw marks that throb with a dull ache every time her heart beats. The memory of silver wolves and crimson moons clings to her consciousness like cobwebs, refusing to be swept away by rational thought.

"Ella? Sweetheart, are you awake?" Margaret's voice carries through the door, thick with the kind of worry that comes from a mother's intuition. There's something different about her tone this morning—an urgency that makes Ella's skin prickle with unease.

"I'm in the bathroom, Mom," Ella calls back, her voice hoarse from holding back tears she refuses to shed. She hears the bedroom door open, followed by Margaret's familiar footsteps crossing the hardwood floor.

"Are you feeling alright? You look—" Margaret appears in the bathroom doorway and stops mid-sentence, her face draining of color as her gaze fixes on Ella's exposed arms. "Oh, honey. What happened to you?"

Ella follows her adoptive mother's stare to the scratches and feels her stomach drop. In Margaret's shocked expression, she sees confirmation that this isn't her imagination, isn't some stress-induced delusion. The marks are real, and they're impossible to explain away.

"I don't know," Ella whispers, the admission scraping her throat raw. "I woke up with them. I had this dream—this incredibly vivid dream about wolves and forests and..." She trails off, seeing the way Margaret's hands begin to tremble. "Mom, what's wrong? You look like you've seen a ghost."

Margaret moves closer, her fingertips hovering just above the scratches without quite touching them. Her breathing is shallow, rapid, and when she speaks, her voice cracks with barely contained emotion.

"Dreams about wolves?" she asks, and there's something in her tone that makes Ella's blood run cold. Not surprise—recognition. Fear. "Tell me about this dream, Ella. Tell me everything."

The way Margaret says it—like she's dreading the answer but needs to hear it anyway—sends ice through Ella's veins. She studies her adoptive mother's face, noting the way her usually warm brown eyes have gone wide and glassy, the way her lips press together as if she's fighting to hold back words that want to spill out.

"You know something," Ella says, rising slowly from where she's been sitting on the bathroom floor. Her legs feel unsteady beneath her, but her voice grows stronger with each word. "You know something about what's happening to me, don't you?"

"Sweetheart, I—"

"Don't." Ella cuts her off, eighteen years of questions and half-answers finally boiling over into something that feels dangerously close to rage. "Don't 'sweetheart' me and don't lie to me. Not anymore. I've spent my entire life knowing something was different about me, knowing you and Dad were keeping secrets, and now I wake up with claw marks on my arms after dreaming about wolves that felt more real than this bathroom."

Margaret takes a step backward, and for the first time in Ella's memory, her adoptive mother looks genuinely frightened. Not worried or concerned—terrified. The sight of it makes Ella's anger burn hotter, because if Margaret is scared, then whatever she's been hiding is worse than Ella imagined.

"I need answers," Ella continues, her voice rising with each word. "I need to know who I really am, where I came from, why I don't have any baby pictures from before I was three years old. I need to know why you and Dad look at me sometimes like you're waiting for something terrible to happen."

"Ella, please—"

"No!" The word explodes from Ella's lips with enough force to make Margaret flinch. "I'm nineteen years old, and I don't even know my real birthday, do I? I don't know my real name, or my real parents, or why I feel like I'm slowly going insane every time I look in the mirror and don't recognize the person staring back at me."

Margaret's face crumples, and for a moment, Ella thinks she's finally going to get the truth. But then her adoptive mother straightens her shoulders and sets her jaw in the stubborn line Ella knows all too well.

"You were abandoned," Margaret says, the words coming out flat and rehearsed. "We found you when you were just a baby, left on the steps of the church. You were sick, malnourished, and we took you in because no one else would. We gave you a name, a home, a family. That's all there is to know."

The lie hits Ella like a physical blow, and she actually staggers backward, her hip bumping against the bathroom counter. Because it is a lie—she can see it in every line of Margaret's body, hear it in the way her voice shakes on the word 'abandoned.'

"That's not true," Ella breathes, and as the words leave her mouth, she feels something shift inside her chest. A warmth that spreads outward from her heart, flowing through her veins like liquid fire. "You're lying to me. After everything we've been through together, you're still lying to me."

"I'm not—"

"Look at me!" Ella shouts, whirling to face the bathroom mirror. "Look at my eyes and tell me I'm just some random abandoned baby!"

She stares at her reflection, and this time, the change isn't subtle or fleeting. Her brown eyes begin to shift, the color deepening and brightening until they're glowing with brilliant lavender light. The transformation is mesmerizing and terrifying, like watching herself become someone—something—else entirely.

Margaret gasps behind her, a sound of pure horror that confirms what Ella already knows: this has happened before. Her adoptive mother has seen those eyes before.

"How long have you known?" Ella asks, her voice eerily calm despite the supernatural fire burning in her gaze. "How long have you been waiting for this to happen?"

"Ella, your eyes—they're—"

"They're what I really am," Ella finishes, and the truth of it settles into her bones like coming home. "This is what you've been afraid of, isn't it? This is what you and Dad whisper about when you think I can't hear you."

She turns away from the mirror to face Margaret directly, and her adoptive mother actually steps backward, one hand pressed to her chest as if she's having trouble breathing.

"I loved you," Margaret whispers, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I love you. You have to believe that. Everything we did, we did to protect you."

"From what?" Ella demands, but even as she asks the question, she knows Margaret won't answer it. Can't answer it, maybe, because the truth is too big and too dangerous for this small bathroom in this ordinary house.

The rage builds inside her again, hotter and brighter than before, and she can feel it gathering behind her eyes like a storm about to break. She turns back to the mirror, needing to see what she's becoming, needing to understand what she is.

But what she sees in the reflection stops her cold.

Standing behind her in the mirror, just over her left shoulder, is the face of a woman she's never seen before. The woman has the same lavender eyes, the same sharp cheekbones, the same midnight hair threaded with silver. She's ethereally beautiful and radiating power that makes the air itself seem to shimmer.

The woman in the mirror mouths a single word: "Soon."

Ella blinks, and the woman vanishes, leaving only her own impossible reflection staring back. But the message has been received, and with it comes a surge of power so intense it makes her vision blur white around the edges.

The bathroom mirror explodes.

Glass shards fly everywhere, glittering like deadly diamonds in the morning light. Ella throws up her hands to protect her face, feeling the sharp bite of glass cutting across her palm. Pain flares bright and immediate, followed by the warm trickle of blood down her wrist.

Margaret screams, lunging forward to grab Ella and pull her away from the destruction, but Ella barely notices. She's staring at her bleeding palm in fascination, watching as the deep cut begins to knit itself back together with impossible speed.

The wound seals completely within seconds, leaving behind only a thin line of dried blood and unmarked skin.

Margaret sees it too, her face going white as parchment as she witnesses healing that defies every law of nature she knows.

"What am I?" Ella whispers, flexing her fingers and finding no trace of injury.

But this time, Margaret doesn't even attempt to lie. She just stares at Ella with a mixture of love and terror, her silence speaking louder than any words ever could.