The Luna's Dark Protector

The Midnight Garden

Sleep was a battlefield Elara could not win. Behind her eyelids played a relentless reel: the metallic taunt of the centerpiece, Kaelen’s green-lit eyes, the wrenching truth of Kael’s confession in the frozen corridor. The final marker isn’t a place. It’s a person. It’s you.

She threw off the heavy furs. The silence of her chambers was a scream. The memory of Kael’s stillness, a stillness she now understood as a constant, agonizing vigilance over the corruption he carried within himself, was more suffocating than any guard at the door.

She needed air that wasn’t filtered through stone and fear. She needed a place that belonged to her.

Slipping a velvet cloak over her nightdress, she eased open her chamber door. The antechamber was empty. Theron’s guards, after the corridor incident, had been posted further down the hall. And Kael… she didn’t know where he was. On the roof, perhaps, or haunting some other shadowed vantage point. The thought that he was out there, wrestling with his own personal hell because of her, because of his oath, twisted something sharp in her chest.

She moved through the sleeping keep like a ghost, her bare feet silent on the cold stone. Her destination was the Midnight Garden. A walled, forgotten courtyard at the keep’s eastern edge, overgrown with night-blooming jasmine and pale moonflowers. It was the one place her mother had claimed as her own sanctuary. Elara had claimed it too, as a girl. It smelled of damp earth and fragile petals, not politics and paranoia.

The iron gate creaked softly. The garden was a pocket of silvered darkness, the twin moons, Selene and Astra, spilling their light over wild roses and crumbling benches. For the first time in days, Elara breathed deeply. The scent of jasmine was a balm.

She walked to the central dry fountain, its stone basin filled with rainwater and floating petals. She was not alone.

She didn't hear him, didn't see him. She felt him. A shift in the tapestry of shadows beneath the ancient, weeping willow. Kael. He wasn't following her. He was already there. A sentinel in her sanctuary. The realization should have angered her, this invasion of her last private space. Instead, a treacherous wave of relief washed through her. He was here. The cracked shield was still standing watch.

“Do you ever sleep where I cannot see you?” she asked the night, not turning.

“Sleep is a luxury for the safe,” his voice came from the willow’s darkness, no louder than the rustle of its leaves. “You are not safe. Therefore, I do not sleep.”

“You watched me come here.”

“I anticipated you would come here. This place… it whispers of you. Of your mother. It is a tether to your light. The enemy uses tethers. So I guard it.”

Of course. Even her solace was a strategic point to be defended. She traced the cool edge of the fountain. “The thing in the corridor… the Memory-Eater. It showed me what really happened. At Blackwood.”

From the shadows, a stillness so profound it felt like the garden itself was holding its breath.

“It did not show you everything,” he said finally, his voice stripped raw. “It did not show you the weeks after. The way the corruption slithered in my veins, whispering. The things it wanted me to do. To become. It took everything I had to force it dormant, to bury it so deep I almost forgot the taste.” A pause, filled with the chirp of a single cricket. “Until I came here. Until I felt your light. It… stirs the hunger. Not in me. In the thing I carry. Protecting you is a fight on two fronts, Elara. One against the world. One against the relic of my failure living inside my skin.”

The confession was a physical blow. He wasn't just guarding her. He was at war with himself, every moment. The core struggle in the garden was no longer about solitude. It was about Burden: Shared or Borne Alone? He saw his corruption as his to manage, his silent cross to bear. She saw a man crumbling under a weight she had, however unintentionally, made heavier.

“You should have told me,” she whispered.

“To what end? To have you look at me as you look at Kaelen? With fear and revulsion?”

“I don’t look at you with revulsion,” she said, the truth of it startling her as much as him. She turned toward the willow. “I look at you and see a man who has shouldered a monster to save others, and then shouldered the blame when it didn’t work. That doesn’t make you a monster. It makes you the strongest person I’ve ever known.”

Silence. Then, a soft sound. A shift of leather. He stepped out from under the willow, into a patch of moonlight. He looked ravaged. The stark light carved hollows under his eyes, highlighting the tension in his jaw. He looked at her as if her words were a language he’d forgotten.

“That is a dangerous thing to believe, Luna,” he said, her title a wall he hastily rebuilt between them.

The jasmine vine coiled around the garden’s trellis began to move.

Not a rustle in the wind. A deliberate, sinuous uncoiling, like a waking serpent. Its delicate white flowers pulsed once with that same vile green light, then turned black and withered.

Elara gasped, stepping back.

Kael was instantly in front of her, but he didn’t face the vine. He turned his back to it, facing her, his hands coming up to grip her shoulders.

“Don’t look at it,” he commanded, his voice low and urgent. “Look at me.”

“Kael, the vine”

“Look at me!” His grip tightened, his stormy eyes capturing hers with fierce intensity. “It’s not an attack. It’s a mirror. A Snare-Heart. It shows you what you fear most to lose. If you look, it will show you… and then it will take it.”

Over his shoulder, she saw the blackened vine creep across the flagstones, not toward them, but toward the base of the willow. Where it touched, the willow’s bark began to peel, revealing not wood, but a shifting, reflected image.

In the bark, she saw a reflection of Kael. But not as he was. He was on his knees in this garden, green fire erupting from his eyes, his mouth, his hands. And standing before him, caught in that corrosive glow, was her reflection not terrified, but reaching for him, compassion on her face. The image showed her touch connecting with his corrupted form. And the moment she touched him, her reflected self dissolved into light, which was then sucked into him. The corrupted Kael in the reflection grew larger, stronger, his sorrowful eyes turning triumphant.

It will show you what you fear most to lose.

Her greatest fear wasn’t her own death. It was Kael, losing his fight. It was her own compassion, her need to heal, to connect that was the very thing that unlocked the monster within him and doomed everyone. It was the Blackwood tragedy, with her playing the doomed Luna, and him, unwittingly, playing the destroyer.

She couldn’t look away from the horrific prophecy in the bark.

“Elara!” Kael’s voice was desperate. He gave her a slight shake. “It’s a lie! It feeds on your fear to make it real! Look. At. Me.”

Tearing her gaze from the willow was like pulling her own soul out by the roots. She focused on his face, on the real him, the anguish, the resolve, the humanity holding the line.

“It’s showing you my corruption, isn’t it?” he ground out, reading the horror in her eyes. “And it’s showing you trying to save me. And it’s showing you are failing.”

She could only nod, a tremor running through her.

A strange, grim calm settled over his features. “Then it doesn’t know me at all.” He released one of her shoulders, keeping his other hand firmly on her, anchoring her. With his free hand, he didn't gesture at the vine or the willow. He pressed his palm flat against his own chest, over his heart.

“You want to see the corruption?” he whispered, not to her, but to the garden, to the enemy. “Then see it. See all of it. See the memory it lives in.”

He closed his eyes.

From the point where his hand pressed, a darkness deeper than night bloomed on his leather tunic. But it wasn't his shadow magic. It was a stain. And from that stain, images pulled from him, not as a vision for Elara, but as a physical extrusion into the world.

The green fire of Blackwood. Luna's screaming face. The agony of the poison taking root in his soul. The decades of silence and self-loathing. The unbearable, fragile hope that had sparked when he saw Elara not just as a duty, but as a light that made the monster inside him cringe and want. Not to consume, but to… protect. To be worthy of.

He was vomiting his own darkest memories, his shame, his secret hope, into the Snare-Heart’s psychic trap.

The garden reacted. The black vine convulsed. The willow’s bark-mirror shattered, the terrifying prophecy exploding into meaningless shards of light and shadow. The Snare-Heart was a parasite that fed on specific, hidden fears. Kael had just force-fed it a toxic overdose of his raw, unfiltered truth, a truth so complex, so full of pain and contradictory hope, that the simple magical creature couldn't process it.

With a sound like a sigh, the vine crumbled to dust. The garden was just a garden again.

Kael opened his eyes, swaying on his feet, the hand on her shoulder the only thing keeping him upright. The act had cost him dearly.