Chapter 120 THOSE WHO WORSHIP RUIN
The scream came from a woman named Isera, and it came because her son did not wake up breathing.
By the time I reached the lower ward, the sky was already paling toward morning, that thin uncertain hour where the world feels undecided about whether it wants to continue, and I found her kneeling on the floor of a one room stone house, her hands pressed flat against her child’s chest as though sheer will might convince his lungs to remember their purpose.
He was not burned. There were no marks on his skin, no sign of sickness, no visible wound that could be blamed or named or argued against. His body was warm, his face peaceful, his mouth parted slightly as though he had simply forgotten the next breath.
The scream I had heard was not the moment of his death.
It was the moment she understood that nothing had come to stop it.
“I prayed,” she kept saying, her voice fraying at the edges as though it had been used too many times already that night. “I felt the ground shake and I prayed. I saw the light in the sky and I prayed harder. I begged the Moon to look at us.”
She looked up at me then, and I felt the familiar shift ripple through the room, that subtle rearrangement of reality that happened now whenever people recognized who stood before them.
“You’re here,” she said, hope blooming too fast, too bright. “That means he can still be saved.”
I knelt across from her, close enough to feel the heat of grief rising off her skin, and for a terrible suspended moment, I considered reaching for the Moonfire, considered forcing breath back into a body that had already crossed some invisible threshold I could not see. But I did not.
“I can’t,” I said softly.
The hope did not shatter at once. It sagged first, as though her mind were trying to accommodate the words without believing them, and then it broke, collapsing inward into something sharper and more dangerous than despair.
“Then what are you for,” she demanded, her grief turning on me with sudden precision. “They said you were the answer. They said the world was changing because of you.”
I had no response that would not become a lie.
When I left, the scream did not follow me. That felt worse.
By midday, the story had already begun to change.
By nightfall, it had spread.
They did not say the boy died because the Moon had shifted wrong, or because the land was unsettled, or because the world was stumbling through consequences it did not yet understand. They said he died because the Moonfire had passed him by. They said he was not chosen. They said his mother had not offered enough.
The first gathering happened without intention, or at least that was how it appeared. A handful of people stood at the edge of the lower fields at dusk, staring up at the fractured glow above, their faces tilted skyward in identical angles of quiet yearning. Someone lit a fire. Someone else knelt. Someone whispered my name like a prayer and then like a confession.
I watched from the hill above them, Damien standing at my side, both of us still enough to pass for shadows among the stones.
“They’re afraid,” he said.
“I know.”
“And they’re trying to make meaning out of it.”
“I know.”
“They’re doing it wrong.”
I did not answer that. The truth was that I did not know what right would look like anymore.
Over the next days, the rituals took shape through imitation and desperation. They brought offerings to places where the ground still glimmered faintly with residual Moonfire, laying out bread and water and pieces of silver that caught the light and fractured it further. They sang low songs without words, their voices overlapping in strange uneven harmonies that made my skin prickle from a distance.
They did not ask me to come.
Instead, they spoke about me as though I were already listening, as though my presence were implied by the mere act of gathering. They spoke about sacrifice and balance and the necessity of ruin before renewal. They spoke about how the world had been complacent, how suffering was proof that change was working, how the fractures in the sky were signs of something holy breaking through.
They called it devotion.
I called it hunger.
One evening, a man approached the gates alone, his clothes dusted with ash, his eyes alight with something that looked almost like joy.
“She has accepted us,” he said before anyone could stop him.
Damien stepped forward, his posture rigid with barely leashed threat. “Accepted who.”
“The faithful,” the man replied, smiling. “Those who understand that pain is not a curse but a calling.”
I felt the Moonfire stir then, not urgently, not violently, but with a faint pulse of recognition that made my stomach turn.
“What did you do,” I asked.
The man looked at me at last, his smile widening as though he had been waiting for that moment all along. “We gave her something worthy.”
The truth came out slowly, piece by piece, as truths like that often do. A lamb, cut and bled at the edge of a fissure where the earth still hummed faintly at night. A man who had volunteered himself for fasting until collapse, believing deprivation would sharpen the Moon’s attention. A woman who had carved symbols into her arms, insisting that pain was a language gods understood better than words.
None of it had worked.
None of it had been answered.
And yet, instead of stopping, they doubled down, their faith hardening into something brittle and sharp that could not bend around contradiction.
“They will hurt themselves,” Damien said later, his voice low with anger he was struggling to contain.
“They already have,” I replied.
“And when it doesn’t work, they’ll decide it’s because they didn’t go far enough.”
I closed my eyes, the weight of his words settling deep in my chest. “Or they’ll decide it’s because I asked for more.”
That night, I dreamed of the boy who had not breathed, not as he was in life but as a quiet echo, standing at the edge of a field that would never grow again, his small hand lifted as though reaching for something just out of view.
When I woke, my palms burned faintly, not with heat but with the memory of having held something too fragile for power.
By morning, messengers arrived from beyond our borders, their faces tight with a fear that felt older than any single disaster. They spoke of gatherings in distant villages, of shrines raised to fractured moonlight, of people who spoke my name with reverence and terror in equal measure.
“They say ruin is purification,” one of them whispered. “They say the world must be broken open to be made right.”
I looked out at the sky, at the pale damaged glow that no longer obeyed familiar rhythms, and felt the distance inside me stretch further still.
Because somewhere beyond the walls, beyond the hills, beyond the reach of my restraint, people were hurting themselves in my name.
And worse than that, some of them were smiling while they did it.
That night, as the fractured moon climbed higher than it should have been able to, I felt the Moonfire shift, not in response to fear or grief, but to attention, as though something vast had turned its face toward the sound of worship. Then, someone raised a blade, lifted it toward the sky, and whispered that the Moon would finally see them now.