I woke up as Luna.
That sounds simple. It was not simple. There was a specific difference between the morning and every morning before it that I noticed before I was fully awake: the bond, warm and certain in a way the first fragile pull of nine months ago had never been, settled in my chest like something that had always lived there and had simply been waiting for the correct conditions to make itself known.
I lay in the morning light and felt it and felt myself feeling it and decided, quietly, that this was going to be the new baseline. This warmth. This certainty.
Good. I could work with that.
The palace greeted me differently. I noticed it within the first five minutes of leaving the room in the way the staff acknowledged me, not the polite deference of someone managing an uncerta
