Nursery Fire and the Moonfire King
1245 Words
Lucian reached the nursery first. The heavy oak double doors were shut tight on the second floor of the school.
Talia and Alina ran blindly, following the pack. Talia's lungs were burning. She didn't know the streets of the Obsidian Ridge village, but she knew the smell of smoke.
"It’s sealed!" Casius roared, slamming his shoulder into the wood. It didn't budge. "From the inside?" He questioned, shocked at the possibility.
"Stand back," Lucian commanded.
He didn't use a key. He didn't use a spell. He used brute, alpha force backed by the crushing weight of his aura. He kicked the doors, sending a shock wave through the ground. The wood splintered and exploded inward, like glass.
Heat punched out; smoke rolled low and mean.
"Clear the building!" Lucian ordered, storming into the fire.
Talia followed him into the suffocating gray haze. It was chaos.
Guards were scooping up coughing toddlers, passing them down the stairs, and out the front door to safety. Soon, the exit through the front became engulfed, and the smoke was so thick that they could no longer see.
Casius was already at the back, smashing a window to create a second exit.
"Alina!" Casius shouted through the broken glass. "Catch!"
Alina, standing in the garden below, held out her cloak, catching the first child passed down, then handing them off to a warden.
Talia scanned the room. The count seemed right. The guards were retreating. But a sound pricked her ears—thin, panicked, and muffled.
There, Kaela urged. One left.
Talia moved toward the sound. It came from an overturned crib in the darkest corner, half-hidden by smoke. A slick, black shine crept along the baseboards like oil with a purpose. Reminiscent of the consistency of the marsh with the witch.
Talia braced her boot on the rail, hauled the crib up, and found a baby wedged in the slats, red-faced and fighting.
But the oily goo had seen the same target. It wasn’t just spreading anymore; it was reaching—thin ropes climbing the crib legs, sneaking toward tiny kicking feet.
"No time," Kaela pressed. "Move, Talia!"
Talia slid her dagger under the slats, popped the catch, and freed the baby’s ankle. The black sheen hissed and recoiled, then snapped forward again, faster, hunting her boots now. It touched leather and went icy-cold, biting. A band cinched around her left foot, tightening hard enough to numb her toes.
This is not fire, Talia realized. It is a net. A trap.
Talia lifted the baby against her chest and turned—only to find the path to the door blocked by a wall of flames. The black shine
rippled across the floor, cutting off her retreat.
"Lucian!" she screamed, but the roar of the fire swallowed her voice.
She coughed, stars bursting behind her eyes. Her heel wouldn’t lift—the black band had her. It tightened, inch by inch, like a snake.
"Window!" Casius shouted from the other side of the room, spotting her. "Talia, get to the window!"
She couldn't. The floor between them was a lake of that black, necrotic rot.
The baby kicked and wailed. The goo crept up Talia’s boot to her calf, stinging and turning to an intense burn. She slashed at the invisible line holding her.
The band shivered, loosened… then split in two and tried to climb both legs at once.
Enough.
Talia set the baby back into the crib for half a heartbeat—safer there than in her arms if she had to fight.
Window. Now, Kaela pressed.
"We shouldn’t shift," Talia thought. The healer’s warning was loud in her head. No shifting for two days, or you’ll bleed inside.
Better than burning, Kaela snapped. Decide.
Talia decided.
The shift slammed down her spine like a breaker. Bones ran hot, then cold. The world snapped wide. Her wolf—ginger, massive, muscles coiling—filled the corner of the room.
She clamped her jaws onto the back of the baby’s thick onesie, careful to catch only fabric. Kaela planted massive paws on the crib, turned, and gauged the window Casius had broken. It was twenty feet away across a floor of burning rot.
The black band whipped through her foreleg. She yanked free, tearing fur, and launched herself.
She hit the floor running, paws skimming the black ooze, and leaped for the sill.
"Down!" someone yelled outside.
She launched into the jump, and after one terrible heartbeat, Talia had the wrong angle; she was going to clip the stone.
A ribbon of soft white light slid across the sill like a hand smoothing a tablecloth.
Lucian, standing a few feet behind her, threw his power out to her like an embrace to give her a lift. Gravity lost its bite.
They cleared the stone.
Kaela twisted midair to take the landing on her shoulder. She hit the ground hard—pain lanced her ribs—but kept her jaws gentle.
Alina was there instantly. She took the baby, murmuring, "Got you, little star," and ran for the medics.
Kaela rolled and came up in a crouch, hackles high, lip curled at the oily smear now clinging to her foreleg. The stuff wasn’t brave out here; it wriggled like a worm exposed to sunlight and tried to sink into the dirt.
"Hold," Casius said softly, stepping up to her wolf. "You're safe."
Talia’s wolf huffed. I know.
Lucian stormed out of the smoking building, coughing but unharmed. He saw Talia, then looked at the oily residue on the grass.
He lifted his hand; the same pale flame that had caught her fall licked across the ground. It hit the black shine. The goo shrieked—quiet, like a mosquito—and went gray and dead, flaking away like ash.
Talia’s chest felt too big for her ribs. Then pain punched through the adrenaline—hot, sharp. The shift had torn at the places the healer warned about. She could taste the copper tang of her own blood.
"Easy," a healer said, appearing with a drape. "Stay wolf a minute; let it knit."
Talia shook her foreleg, dislodging the dead ash. She forced the change back, slowly, so it didn’t tear further. The healer caught her elbow when her knees buckled.
Talia nodded once—thanks—and straightened, wiping a line of blood from her lip.
"Someone inside did this," she said, her voice rough as gravel. "That black rot... it was hunting the child."
The silver-eyed Elder Neris arrived, hem smudged with soot. She took in the scene—the saved children, the Northern banner snapping across the yard, the King’s fury.
"Sanctuary stands," she announced, her voice trembling with rage. "If any of you want our law, you pass under it and answer questions. Trials at moon rise."
What does that even mean? Talia inquired.
"It means everyone will answer this," Lucian said, stepping up beside Talia, "and that someone just declared war."
"I owe you," Talia murmured, looking at the scorched earth where he’d burned the rot.
"You owe me nothing." Lucian’s eyes were hard. "Get to the infirmary. Eat. Then we talk."
" He turned to Casius. "Find the traitor. Find who planted the rot."
Talia nodded. The baby she had saved wailed again in the distance—angry, alive. Good sound.
"Find the leak," Kaela said, baring mental teeth.
Talia agreed, and despite the blood in her mouth, she smiled.
We saved a child today.
- Writer
