The first thing Lyra felt was weight.
Not the heavy drag of exhaustion, but the grounded certainty of her own body. She knew she was lying on the stone floor of the ritual chamber, but it felt… different. The cold beneath her was alive with whispers. The air itself seemed to hum in her lungs, and every flicker of the priestesses' torches burned brighter than fire had any right to burn.
When she opened her eyes, the world was not as it had been.
The flames along the walls burned in shades of gold she had never seen—warm, luminous, almost liquid. And beyond them, the moonlight spilling through the carved slits in the ceiling had form, substance, curling through the air like pale smoke. She could see the currents of both—the Fire and the Moon—threading through the chamber, weaving together in slow spirals that converged… in her.
Her first breath was sharp, her second deliberate. She sat up.
The nearest priestess stepped back so suddenly her incense bowl clattered against the floor.
