Chapter 75 Why Lunas Were Erased
Aurora:
I didn’t go looking for answers.
That was the part I kept coming back to later, when the weight of the conversation settled in.
I hadn’t stormed into Agnes’s space demanding explanations or pushing for secrets I wasn’t ready to hold.
I was merely trying to understand why my chest felt wrong every time someone said the word Luna Line as if it were either a blessing or a crime.
Agnes was in the low room near the eastern wall, the one that smelled faintly of herbs and old paper. She didn’t call it an archive, but that’s what it was. Shelves built into stone, scrolls wrapped in cloth, books with spines worn smooth from hands that had turned their pages too many times to count.
I stood near the doorway for a long moment before she looked up.
“You can come in,” she said, without lifting her head. “You’ve been standing there long enough.”
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. The sound was soft, final in a way that made my spine straighten.
“I don’t want a lecture,” I said before I could overthink it. “And I don’t want myths.”
Agnes nodded slowly. “Good. I don’t give those anymore.”
She set aside what she’d been reading and gestured to the chair across from her. I sat, folding my hands in my lap to keep them still.
“I keep hearing the same thing,” I said. “That Lunas were powerful. That they were dangerous. That the Council feared them.”
She tilted her head. “Feared is a convenient word.”
I waited.
Agnes leaned back, fingers steepled, eyes sharp in a way that made it clear this wasn’t a story she told often. “The Council did not fail to control Lunas,” she said. “They chose not to try.”
That caught my attention. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if control isn’t the goal,” she replied.
I frowned. “Then what was?”
“Order.”
The word landed flat, heavy. Not dramatic. Administrative.
Agnes continued, her voice steady. “The Council is not built on strength. It’s built on predictability. On rules that can be enforced the same way, every time, regardless of who is involved.”
I shifted in my seat. “And Lunas didn’t fit.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
I opened my mouth to correct her, then stopped. She wasn’t talking about me specifically. Not really.
“Luna magic doesn’t command,” Agnes went on. “It doesn’t issue orders or force obedience. It doesn’t even ask. It exists, and people respond to it without realizing they’re doing so.”
I thought of the training ring. Of how emotions had settled without anyone telling them to. Of how people drifted closer or farther from me depending on how I felt, not what I said.
“You realign things,” Agnes said. “Rooms. Groups. Packs. You change the emotional gravity of a space. Hierarchies rely on distance and fear. Alignment collapses both.”
“So they erased it,” I said quietly.
She nodded. “They erased us.”
The word us surprised me more than anything else she’d said.
“You remember,” I said.
“I was trained to forget,” Agnes corrected. “I chose not to.”
She stood and moved to one of the shelves, pulling down a thin ledger bound in dark leather. She didn’t open it. Just held it.
“This is a census,” she said. “Or what passed for one. Before the purge.”
My throat tightened. “You kept records.”
“I kept absences,” she replied. “Names that stopped appearing. Bloodlines that ended quietly. Children who never made it into the next revision.”
I stared at the ledger, at the weight of it in her hands. “They didn’t even try to rule them?”
Agnes shook her head. “Ruling requires hierarchy. Lunas dissolve it by standing in the room. People stop looking up and start looking around. The Council saw that once and never forgot it.”
A strange, hollow understanding settled in my chest.
All this time, I’d wondered if there was something I was supposed to become. Some role I was meant to step into. Hidden royalty. A crown I didn’t know how to wear.
“That was never it,” I said.
“No,” Agnes agreed. “There was no throne. That’s what terrified them.”
I let out a slow breath. “So I’m not dangerous because of what I can do.”
“You’re dangerous because of what happens when you don’t do anything at all,” she said. “When you simply exist.”
The room felt smaller suddenly. Not oppressive. Just honest.
I thought about the pack. About how people watched me, not with suspicion exactly, but with awareness. About how tensions shifted when I entered a space, even when I said nothing.
“I don’t tell anyone what to feel,” I said.
“I know,” Agnes said gently. “That’s the problem.”
Silence stretched between us. Not uncomfortable. Just heavy.
“They didn’t just kill Lunas,” I said. “They erased the idea of them.”
“Yes.”
“And when that didn’t work?” I asked.
“They dissected what they could capture,” she said, her voice hardening. “Tried to isolate the effect. Bottle it. Weaponize it. They failed.”
“Because it isn’t a thing,” I said slowly. “It’s… relational.”
Agnes smiled faintly. “You’re learning.”
I looked down at my hands. They were steady now. Mine again.
“So what am I supposed to do with this?” I asked. “Knowing that just standing in a room changes it?”
“You do what you’ve been doing,” she said. “You learn endurance. You learn when to step back. You learn how not to disappear under the weight of other people’s responses.”
“That’s it?”
“For now,” Agnes said. “The Council fears chaos. Not because it’s violent. Because it’s uncontrollable. Alignment can’t be legislated.”
I stood, the movement slow, deliberate. “They’re not hunting me because I’m powerful.”
“No,” she said. “They’re hunting you because if enough people align naturally, the Council becomes irrelevant.”
That reframed everything.
The Council wasn’t a tyrant afraid of being overthrown.
It was a system afraid of being bypassed.
I reached for the door, then paused. “Why tell me this now?”
Agnes met my gaze. “Because you’re past the point of thinking you’re special. And before the point of thinking you’re a savior. That’s the only safe place to learn the truth.”
I nodded once. When I stepped back outside, the island felt the same as it had before. Solid. Quiet. Alive.
But I didn’t.
For the first time, I understood that what the Council feared wasn’t what I might become.
It was what I already was.