Ashes of the Unbound Luna

POV: Nyra

I wake before the guards come. I always do.

The sound of chains rattling travels through stone walls, cutting through sleep like a knife. After three years, I've learned to tell the difference between restless movement and true rage. Between the nights when Caelum fights his restraints because he's uncomfortable and the nights when his bloodline tears him apart from the inside.

Tonight, the chains rattle unevenly. Metal strikes stone in sharp, frantic bursts that echo through the hidden corridors between the royal chambers.

Tonight will be worse than usual.

I push myself up from the thin mattress and swing my legs over the side of the narrow bed. The stone floor is cold beneath my bare feet, but I barely notice anymore. Cold is better than some of the alternatives I've learned to live with.

My cell is small. Barely large enough for the bed, a basin, and a shelf. There's no window. No natural light ever reaches this deep beneath the palace. Just the faint glow of a single ice stone mounted near the door, its blue light making everything look corpse-pale.

I move through my routine without thinking. My hands know the steps by heart now.

First, I walk to the small basin in the corner and wash the dried blood from my fingers. The water is always cold, always stale, but it does the job. I scrub carefully, making sure to clean beneath my nails where the red tends to hide. The guards notice things like that. They comment on it when I'm not clean enough.

"Defective and dirty," they'll say. "What use are you then?"

I learned quickly that staying clean, staying useful, keeps me alive.

Next, I examine the bandages wrapped around my forearms. They're stained brown in places, evidence of how fresh the wounds beneath them really are. The cuts from two nights ago haven't fully closed yet. They never get enough time to heal properly before I have to open them again.

I peel the bandages away slowly, wincing at the sting where fabric has stuck to partially scabbed skin. The wounds beneath are angry and red, but not infected. That's something, at least.

I rewrap them with clean cloth from the small pile I keep folded on the shelf. The palace provides these, at least. They need me functional, after all. Dead tools are useless tools.

The fresh bandages hide the truth better. That matters when the guards look at me. When anyone looks at me. The court can't acknowledge what they're doing if the evidence isn't visible.

Then I choose a blade from the small collection I keep hidden beneath loose floorboards near the foot of my bed. I run my fingers along the edges carefully, testing their sharpness. Some are duller than others, worn down from use. Some are still relatively new, their edges clean and precise.

This one is thin enough to cut cleanly but sharp enough not to tear the skin too badly.

That matters more than most people would think. A clean cut heals better. Bleeds more predictably. Hurts less in the long run. I've learned these things through experience, through trial and error written in scars across my arms.

The preparation is as natural as breathing now. Three years will do that to a person. Three years of the same routine, the same purpose, the same destination every time those chains start rattling.

I hear footsteps echo in the corridor outside my door before I'm quite finished. Heavy boots striking stone in a rhythm I recognize. Slow and deliberate, like they have all the time in the world. Like I'm not a person waiting but an object to be retrieved when convenient.