VIVIAN

The door opened with no sound.

Vivian looked up first.

For a heartbeat she thought the chamber was empty—then the light shifted, and Elizabeth stepped through. Her usual composure was gone. The tilt of her chin was there, but the fire behind it had been blown out.

Her hair was damp with sweat. Mana clung to her skin in faint threads, curling off her shoulders like smoke after a storm. The air around her still hummed, faintly charged with the echo of whatever had happened inside.

Anmei’s fan stilled halfway open. “You look like hell.”

Elizabeth’s lips parted—then closed again. Her throat worked, but no sound came.

Sophie frowned. “What did you see?”

Elizabeth’s gaze flicked toward her, quick and bright, like a blade that had just remembered how sharp it was. Then she shook her head once, lacking her usual sarcasm or dryness.

Vivian’s breath caught in her throat. Of everyone here, Elizabeth was the one who always had a word—cutting, clever, impossible to ignore. Yet she refused to share or discuss anything, and she looked pale, as if she had seen a ghost. The silence felt heavy and deliberate.

That couldn't be a good thing.

The door behind her sealed with a sigh.

Serenya watched without speaking, only nodding faintly—as if this, too, was an answer.

Elizabeth brushed a stray lock of hair from her cheek, straightened her shoulders, and managed a single line.

“Let’s just say,” she murmured, voice rough, “all truths are meant to be shared. In due time.”

Then she walked past them, quiet as snowfall, and sank into one of the chairs. Vivian—and based on the looks, all the others—wanted to ask her more, ask her about what truth couldn’t be shared.

For some reason they didn’t, and the moment passed. There was a collective sort of exhale. They had all passed their trials—the echoes of which still hung in the stone.

Vivian found Sophie’s eyes. Sophie’s hands betrayed her composure, still faintly trembling. Her palms were dusted with the shimmer of mana-thread; her pulse was steady, but her gaze had gone distant.

The others waited with bated breath. The air was quieter now, heavy with expectation and the kind of fatigue that came after witnessing things they didn’t fully understand. Anmei leaned against a pillar, rolling her wrist idly. Marissa sat perfectly still, hands folded, pretending calm. The twins had their heads bowed, whispering to each other seriously.

Serenya watched them all with the tired patience of someone who had seen too many tests and too few lessons taken to heart. Her presence was softer now—lacking the tone of the playful vagabond or the trickster guide, but something closer to priesthood. The faint sigils on her skin glowed with a dim, steady rhythm, a pulse not entirely her own.

“You’ve done well,” she said at last. “Better than I expected.”

The women exchanged looks.

Sophie spoke up. “Was all this really necessary for us to get the Divine Moonsteel?”

“Yes,” Serenya replied. She gave Elizabeth a look. “More necessary than you know.”

Vivian and Sophie exchanged looks.

“What aren’t you telling us?” Sophie said. All the women remained quiet.

“There is much I am not telling you. It would be easier to list that. But knowledge carries a price you aren’t ready to bear. I can tell you that more tests will come.” Serenya turned, gesturing toward the far archway where spelllight without a source pooled against the floor in a perfect circle. “Tests of the body are simple. Tests of the mind—predictable. Tests of resolve are inevitable; tests of the heart are—heartbreaking. The tests you all endured were controlled and measurable. You came here led by magic and intuition. You scouted what was to come, and that created expectation. But your presence here was designed—directed, even if only by a nudge. So you were tested, and given the most basic of reflections.”

Sophie’s eyes narrowed. “You expected us. You knew we’d come.”

Serenya smiled. “Obviously. And now, I need you to understand what matters most.”

The women all looked at her. Vivian frowned, considering. What matters most? An odd question—one that changed depending on who asked it. How could anyone answer it correctly?

Serenya’s knowing smile was infuriating. “The goddess doesn’t care how sharp your sword is. She cares what you’ll cut for—and what you’ll do when you’re the one who’s cut in return.”

The room stilled.

Marissa was the one who spoke. “What is it you aren’t saying?”

Serenya’s response was soft. “Remember. Everything is a test of something.”

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Vivian inclined her head, voice low. “And so you’re leading us to another test? What is the purpose?”

Serenya’s expression softened. “Not a test of strength or even will. A test of bond. Of understanding. Of purity in what you carry.”

“Purity,” Marissa repeated, skeptical. “In us?”

“Not the kind priests care about,” Serenya said, amused. “The kind that matters when the world cracks and you have to decide whether to hold it together or let it break. Purity of intent.”

Sophie folded her arms. “That sounds like semi-philosophical nonsense.”

“The bare and hardened truth often does,” Serenya replied. “Come.”

She stepped toward the archway. The light across the floor brightened, filling the cracks in the stone like quicksilver veins. The mountain seemed to breathe.

“The next chamber is older than the shrine itself,” Serenya continued, her tone shifting. “This is where you all must walk together. This place is where fragments of divinity rest, scattered in pieces. What’s left of her waits for those who can bear the burden and stand.”

“There are remnants of a goddess? How is this related to Divine Moonsteel?” Marissa asked quietly.

The twin sisters exchanged glances. Vivian, silent and steady, examined the surroundings, clearly feeling the air change. The mana here was heavier—luminous but deep, like light bent through water.

Serenya reached the archway and turned to them, her voice softer now. “It has everything to do with Divine Moonsteel. You’ve each been weighed—body, spirit, and heart. But divinity’s favor is not given for skill. It’s given in recognition of the trials and obstacles you face. What you’re about to receive is responsibility.”

Sophie’s brow furrowed. “Responsibility for what?”

“To acknowledge and support,” Serenya said. “To build.”

The light surged, spilling across her boots, climbing the walls in thin silver branches. “The final offering waits. Come and see what remains of divinity in worlds where the darkness falls.”

The chamber beyond stirred, awakening like something that had slept for centuries.

Serenya stepped through first. The others followed, one by one, carried forward by the quiet weight of inevitability.

The inner sanctum was older than the stone around it.

Vivian felt it before she saw it—the hush, the pull in her bones, the stillness that did not belong to mortal air. The corridor narrowed into an arched chamber veined with pale power that could only be described as silver moonlight caught and held in every curve and crevice of the room. The walls breathed softly, as if the mountain itself remembered the pulse of something divine.

Serenya led them in silence. Her usual mirth was gone, replaced by a quiet that felt almost like reverence. The others followed—Sophie at her side, Anmei close behind, the twins whispering to one another, Marissa keeping a cautious hand on her fan.

The floor glimmered faintly beneath their boots, and with each step, lines of light unfolded—thin runes tracing paths toward the raised dais at the center of the room.

Atop it waited an altar of stone and moonlight, its surface smooth enough to hold reflection.

“This,” Serenya said at last, her voice echoing softly through the chamber, “is what remains of her.”

No one asked who her was.

The air answered instead. A diminished glow gathered above the altar—at first formless, then trembling into mist and breath until it formed the outline of a figure not quite human. When Vivian narrowed her eyes, she could almost see the figure of a body—or more like the memory of one: a woman-shaped absence lost in shadow and smoke.

A voice came not from the air, but from all around them.

You came far, little ones.

Sophie’s hand twitched. “Is that—”

“A goddess,” Serenya said simply. “Or what’s left when worship runs thin, destruction and chaos consume, and centuries forget their prayers.”

Vivian blinked. “The gods… they’re real?”

The voice rippled through the chamber again, warm and cold at once.

As real as faded names and forgotten oaths.

Light bent downward, coalescing into the altar. The stone split along hidden seams, unfolding like petals. From its heart rose a shard of metal the color of frozen dawn—neither steel nor silver, but something that shimmered between both.

It was not forged; it was manufactured.

Thin filaments of light webbed through it like veins. The shape was strange—Vivian thought it might have been a broken fragment, a sword’s core or a sculptor’s ingot, but it was instead an intricate crescent of interlocking layers too delicate to put into words. Lines ran across its surface in exact, deliberate geometry, as though some intelligence had created it and written on it with light in a language no one knew.

The girls stepped closer.

“It’s beautiful,” Marissa whispered.

Sophie frowned. “What is it, really?”

Serenya smiled, small and tired. “A fragment of a promise. Metal and knowledge touched by mortal and divine alike. This Divine Moonsteel is progressive will made solid—the memory and desire of a goddess who could not stay but is desperate to protect.”

She reached out, her hand hovering just above the shard. “She poured what remained of herself into matter, so mortals could shape what she no longer could.”

Sophie’s eyes flicked toward the light still flickering above the altar. “So she’s real? Like… really real?”

Serenya looked back over her shoulder, amused despite herself. “If she weren’t, child, I’d have a much easier job.”

A faint laugh rippled through the light—more emotion than sound.

I remain. Outside looking in. Shepherd seeking flock. Patron seeking champion.

Vivian stepped forward, taking in the gleaming metal. “And what are we meant to do with it?”

“Carry it,” Serenya said. “Deliver it, then bind it to something that matters.” Her gaze softened. “The Moonsteel doesn’t just create power or connection—it amplifies intention, solidifies completion. It remembers the one who wields it. What you build from it will remember you.”

The voice folded around her words, a harmony underneath:

What you join, I cannot unmake.

The light flared. All of them dropped to one knee—not commanded or compelled. But they did it anyway.

Every rune in the chamber lit at once, lunar white filling the cracks of the world.

When it dimmed, the shard remained—humming softly, the air around it alive with quiet power.

Serenya exhaled, steady but pale. “Take it,” she said. “Carefully. It will remember who touches it first.”

Vivian hesitated, then reached out but stopped. On impulse she brought out a clean white handkerchief and wrapped the delicate piece of magic and metal in it. The Divine Moonsteel met her handkerchief-covered hand like water turned solid. Warm at first, then cool. Weightless. The veins of light within it pulsed once, in rhythm with her heartbeat, then stilled.

Sophie leaned close, curiosity breaking reverence. “It’s… not uniform. Look at the edges. It’s shaped like—”

“—a fragment,” Anmei murmured. “Like it’s meant to fit into something else.”

“Everything fits somewhere,” Serenya said softly.

Vivian lifted the shard, silver light washing across her face. “What do we do now?”

“Now?” Serenya smiled faintly. “Now you leave. Before I faint. Divinity has a sense of drama but no sense of moderation. Please deliver this to the one who is supposed to have it.”

The faintest whisper followed, as though from behind her:

He will know its name and purpose.

Serenya’s eyes flickered, unreadable. “He always does,” she murmured.

The Moonsteel’s glow faded to a quiet shimmer in Vivian’s hands.

They left the chamber together, the goddess’s echo trailing after them like a breath that refused to end.