Aeris’s pov
The moonlight bathed the lake in a shimmering silver glow, casting a ghostly reflection of myself on the water's surface. I stared down at that reflection—the woman looking back at me was both familiar and a stranger. The girl I used to be, the one who trusted blindly, who believed in the goodness of people, felt like a distant memory now. That version of me had died long ago, and what remained was someone hardened by betrayal, by blood.
I feared this version of myself.
A part of me still longed for the simplicity of the past, for the days when things were normal, when trust wasn’t something I had to guard so fiercely. But look at us now. Standing at the edge of a war that would drown us all in blood, there was no going back. The cold war in my veins had become a part of me,
