Moon-Water and the First Breaking
1748 Words
(December 27 – 3:47 a.m. to 11:59 p.m.)
The fever did not creep in this time.
It struck like an assassin’s blade between the ribs.
Aurora had been outside at dawn, helping Freya and the other children build a snow-wolf taller than Lucien. She was laughing (actually laughing) at Torvald’s dignified attempt to roll a perfect snowball, when the world suddenly inverted. The sky turned the color of old bruises. The snow became needles of glass. Every breath felt like inhaling frostbite.
She dropped straight down into the drift, a strangled cry tearing from her throat. The mate-mark on her collarbone lit up like a brand pressed to flesh. Silver-blue veins spider-webbed across her throat and down into the neckline of her sweater.
Lucien was across the clearing in a heartbeat, shifting mid-stride (bones cracking, fur rippling) until a massive black wolf with silver eyes burst through the snow and skidded to a halt beside her. He shifted back just as fast, naked to the waist, chest heaving, terror stark on his face.
“Aurora!”
She couldn’t answer. Ice was crawling through her lungs, crystallizing every heartbeat.
He scooped her up so violently the world blurred. Snow exploded around them. Children screamed. Someone howled (an actual, grief-stricken howl that made the pines tremble).
“Eira!” Lucien roared, voice cracking down the middle. “Hot spring—NOW!”
He ran.
Through the lodge doors, down corridors Aurora had never seen, past portraits of wolves with human eyes and tapestries that moved when you weren’t looking directly at them. His boots pounded stone. His heart thundered against her ear like war drums.
A hidden door flew open. Steam rolled out in fragrant clouds (mineral, pine, something electric). Lucien took the spiral staircase three steps at a time, descending into the mountain’s heart.
The hot spring chamber stole what little breath she had left.
It was a cathedral carved by gods.
A vaulted ceiling of natural quartz crystal, thirty feet high, fractured moonlight into a million dancing shards. The pool itself was the size of a small lake, glowing pale turquoise, fed by a waterfall that fell in perfect silence. Ancient runes ringed the water, carved so deep they seemed to breathe. Steam rose in slow, sensual spirals, carrying the scent of starlight and snowmelt.
Eira and three elders waited on the marble edge, faces grim. Blankets, vials, and a bowl of glowing white berries were already laid out.
Lucien didn’t slow. He walked straight into the water (boots, jeans, everything) until it closed over his waist. Only then did he ease Aurora down, letting her feet touch the silken sand.
The heat was a shock after the killing cold. She cried out, half sob, half scream.
“Easy, easy,” he crooned, voice ragged. “Moon-water, little star. Let it in.”
He cupped handful after handful over her head, letting it pour through her hair, down her face, her neck, soaking the cloak and sweater until they clung like a second skin. Where the water touched the mate-mark, silver fire erupted, racing across her collarbone and down between her breasts. The runes on the walls answered with a low, resonant hum that vibrated in her bones.
Again and again he poured, until she was drenched and shaking and the frost inside her lungs began to c***k.
The elders began the binding chant (Old Norse, older than memory). Their voices wove together like silver thread, rising and falling with the waterfall. The quartz ceiling caught the sound and flung it back as starlight.
Aurora’s legs buckled completely. Lucien caught her against his chest, one arm banded beneath her knees, the other cradling her spine. He sank until they were both submerged to the shoulders, only their faces above the glowing water.
“Look at me,” he commanded, voice breaking.
She forced her eyes open. His face was inches away, eyes pure molten silver, pupils blown wide with terror and fury and something ancient that looked a lot like prayer.
“You are not allowed to leave me,” he said fiercely. “Do you hear me? I waited two hundred and forty-five years. I will not lose you to frost.”
The cold surged again, vicious and laughing. Frost crawled across her lips, sealing them. Her heartbeat stuttered (once, twice).
Lucien did the only thing left in the world.
He kissed her like a man drowning kisses air.
His mouth crashed over hers, hot and desperate and alive. There was nothing gentle about it (teeth scraping, tongues tangling, a raw, furious demand that she stay). Aurora made a broken sound and kissed him back with everything she had left, fingers clawing into his wet hair, nails scraping his scalp, legs wrapping around his waist beneath the water because letting go felt like dying.
The bond detonated.
A visible shockwave of silver light exploded outward, rippling across the pool in perfect circles. The runes on the walls blazed white-hot. The quartz ceiling fractured the moonlight into a storm of diamonds. The elders’ chant soared into a triumphant roar and then fell suddenly silent.
Aurora felt the frost inside her chest shatter into a thousand harmless shards. Heat (scorching, golden heat) flooded every vein, every heartbeat, every secret place she’d kept frozen since she was ten years old. She sobbed into Lucien’s mouth, kissing him harder, deeper, tasting salt and terror and the first real warmth she’d felt in seventeen years.
He groaned (a sound torn from the bottom of his soul) and kissed her like he was trying to crawl inside her skin and live there forever. One hand fisted in her wet hair, the other splayed possessively across her lower back, pressing her so tightly against him she could feel his heart trying to hammer its way out of his ribs and into hers.
Minutes or hours later (time had lost all meaning) they broke apart, gasping. Their foreheads stayed pressed together, breath mingling in frantic clouds.
The frost was gone.
Aurora’s lips tingled. Her lungs worked again. The silver-blue veins had vanished as though they’d never existed.
Lucien’s eyes were still pure silver, but now they were wet.
“I’m sorry,” he rasped. “I couldn’t watch you die. I couldn’t—”
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Don’t be sorry. I’m not.”
She kissed him again (softer this time, wondering, tasting the salt of his tears). He made a helpless sound and let her, arms trembling around her like she was the only solid thing left in his universe.
When they finally pulled apart, the cavern was quiet except for the gentle lap of water and the elders’ soft, reverent breathing.
Eira’s voice floated across the pool, thick with emotion. “The first seal is broken. The bond drinks from both cups now. She will not freeze again tonight.”
Lucien didn’t look away from Aurora. “And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we prepare for the second seal,” Eira said simply. “Blood and truth. You know the old way.”
Aurora felt the weight of that settle between them like a stone.
Lucien lifted her from the water as though she were made of spun glass. Elders wrapped them both in thick towels warmed by the fire. Someone pressed a mug of something hot and spiced into her hands. She drank without tasting, too busy staring at Lucien’s mouth (swollen, red, trembling) and the way water still beaded on his lashes.
He noticed. His eyes darkened to molten mercury.
Later (much later), after dry clothes, after soup she didn’t remember eating, after being carried up three flights of stairs because her legs still felt like water, Aurora woke in the biggest bed she’d ever seen. Moonlight poured through arched windows, painting silver across the floorboards and the man sitting in the armchair beside her.
Lucien hadn’t changed. His hair was still damp, curling at the ends. His sweater clung to places the towel had missed. He sat forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped so tightly his knuckles were white.
Watching her like she might vanish.
She pushed up on one elbow. “Come here.”
He was across the room in two strides. She expected him to sit on the edge. Instead he climbed in fully clothed, pulled the quilts over them both, and tucked her against his chest so tightly she could feel his heart trying to match its rhythm to hers.
They fit. Terrifyingly. Perfectly.
“I can feel you,” she whispered against the hollow of his throat. “Not just warmth. Emotions. Like faint music underneath everything.”
He exhaled shakily. “The kiss broke the first seal. There are three. The second comes with blood willingly shared. The third…” His voice cracked. “The third is the vow under the aurora. After that, there is no undoing.”
Silence stretched, thick with moonlight and unsaid things.
Aurora traced the scar that crossed his collarbone with one careful finger. “Tell me something true, Lucien Vale.”
He was quiet so long she thought he wouldn’t answer.
Then:
“I used to stand outside your window every Christmas Eve for seventeen years,” he said, voice raw as an open wound. “I watched you pretend to sleep so the hurt wouldn’t find you awake. I watched you draw wolves on fogged glass and then erase them before morning. I watched you grow into the strongest, loneliest person I’d ever seen. And every year I hated the veil a little more because it kept me from carrying you away.”
Aurora’s heart cracked cleanly in two (one half for the girl who had cried alone, one half for the man who had stood guard in the dark and never once been able to touch her).
“I wish you had,” she said, and meant it with every frozen shard that had just melted inside her.
He made a sound like pain and held her tighter, nose buried in her damp hair, breathing her in like oxygen after centuries underwater.
Outside, the aurora still burned, impatient and magnificent.
Inside, two people who had spent lifetimes teaching themselves not to need anyone discovered that needing (when it was returned with every desperate beat of a heart) felt exactly like coming home.
Aurora fell asleep to the steady thunder of Lucien’s heartbeat and the new, impossible knowledge that some kisses could thaw even the oldest ice.
- Writer
