Aurora's POV
Waiting for me.
I tore my hand away from the tree, heart hammering. "This isn't possible."
"Then why is it happening?" Stefano asked quietly.
I shook my head. "I don't know."
But somewhere deep inside, something did.
I slept again later.
I don't remember choosing to.
The dreams found me anyway.
I stood on a plain of fractured stone under a sky that didn't belong to any world I recognized. The crescents hovered above me, no longer carved into anything, rotating slowly in open air.
Whole.
Broken.
Dark.
They did not fight.
They did not merge.
They communicated.
"You are late," a voice said.
Not male. Not female.
Not external.
"I didn't agree to this," I said.
The broken crescent pulsed faintly.
"You agreed to nothing," the voice replied. "That is why you were chosen."
"I wasn't chosen," I snapped. "I refused."
The dark crescent turned.
"Refusal is a form of acceptance" it said. "It alters trajectory."
The plain shifted.
