We reached the Moon Temple at dusk.
The valley was wrong.
I felt it before I saw it—a prickle along my spine, a hum in my teeth, a distortion in the air like heat rising off summer stone. The grass on the hillsides had turned silver. Not frost. Not dew. Silver the way my mother's hair had been silver, the way the moonstones had pulsed before they burned to ash. Color that didn't belong to this world, bleeding through.
Caleb felt it too. His hand found mine as we dismounted, our fingers interlocking with the ease of long practice.
"Reyna," he said. "Perimeter. No one enters the temple without my direct order."
Reyna nodded and melted into the shadows with her warriors.
The temple stood against the darkening sky, its white columns luminescent in the strange silver light. The circular o
