Chapter 98. The Unfinished Choice

The candles lost their courage first.

Wicks whispered, flames drew themselves small, then pinched to smoke. The chapel did not go dark so much as it remembered what dark felt like. Stone leaned closer. Breath sounded like cloth.

And she came in with the night.

Not through the door—as the door. The First Luna stepped out of the seam like a woman stepping through a closet she owned. Crown of bone and moonflower, petals clean as winter breath. Her eyes found me, and the bond tightened as if it knew it had just been weighed by an older scale.

“Little heir,” she said, voice soft as milk, starved as knives. “You paused.”

“I was speaking,” I said, as if announcing my own name might teach my mouth how to work in a room the moon had just left.

Kael shifted half a step, a wall that thought about being a blade and chose otherwise. Syra’s spear tip lowered without scraping stone. Neris’s knife did not glint; it waited.

“Don’t,” Mavienne warned th