VANESSA'S POV
The moonstone dagger. The words became a mantra, a singular focus that eclipsed all else. We had our anchor. Now, we needed its resting place.
The ancient journals and manifests provided a grim poetry but no clear coordinates. "The Luna's tears, crystallized in stone" could mean anything. "Cast into the deepest pool" pointed to water, but the territory had dozens of streams and ponds. "Buried at the foot of the oldest oak" was equally useless in a forest of ancients.
The answer, it turned out, wasn't in the words. It was in the pain.
It came to me in a dream, the night after we deciphered the dagger's likely identity. Not a vision of the past, not a torrent of power. Just a feeling. A deep, resonant ache, a pull so profound it was less a direction and more a gravity.
I w
