Chapter 73 FRAGMENTS OF DIVINITY
Light crashes through me like a tidal wave.
Not warm.
Not gentle.
It is sharp and merciless, slicing through every part of me with the precision of a blade forged from stars. I try to scream, but the sound dissolves into white static that fills my skull. My lungs seize. My heart turns molten. My bones vibrate with a frequency no human should survive.
I am drowning inside my own skin.
Inside my own soul.
The Goddess’s power floods into me, not like water but like an avalanche: heavy, unstoppable, crushing. I feel myself slipping beneath the weight of it, a single fragile candle trying to contain the sun.
Stop. Please stop.
But she does not stop.
Her light coils around my heart and tightens like a fist. My vision fractures into shards, each one sharp enough to cut. Then, suddenly, those shards shift, rearranging themselves into a world that is not this one.
A battlefield of stars stretches beneath my feet.
I blink and the forest disappears.
The sky becomes an ocean of swirling constellations and silver mist. The ground turns to shattered moonstone, glowing faintly beneath my bare feet. Everything feels ancient. Eternal. Heavy with memory.
A woman stands at the center of it all.
The Goddess.
But younger. Whole. Radiant.
Her eyes blaze like newborn suns. Her hair streams behind her in waves of molten silver. She holds a burning sphere against her chest, a small star pulsing wildly in her hands.
The Moonfire.
I step forward, my stomach twisting.
She is not gentle with it.
She is not reverent.
She treats it the way a warrior treats a blade.
Beneath her, shadows writhe like wounded creatures. They coil and bend as if in agony, their forms shifting without shape or mercy. She ignores them. Her focus remains fixed on the blazing sphere.
She presses it into her chest.
And screams.
Light detonates through her body. Cracks split across her skin, white and violent. The Moonfire surges into the sky, into the stars, into the moon itself. The ground shakes beneath her feet. The constellations tremble above her head.
She falls to her knees as the fire sinks deeper into her bones.
The Moonfire does not settle.
It rejects her.
It devours her.
Her voice echoes through the vision.
I contained the darkness.
But the cost was my soul.
The battlefield fractures. Stars fall inward. The world shatters like glass.
I gasp as I am hurled back into my body.
Air rushes into my lungs like a punch. Pain blooms across my ribs. The forest flickers in and out of focus, as if it cannot decide whether to be present in this moment or swallowed by another realm entirely. The trees bend away from me, trembling with fear or worship. I cannot tell which.
The power inside me is not settling.
It is cracking.
Like molten metal poured into a vessel too thin to hold it.
My heartbeat stutters. My vision blurs as more memories crash across my mind in relentless waves.
The Goddess forging the Moonfire.
The Shadow Woods swallowing an entire army centuries ago.
A silver dagger forged from her tears.
Wolves kneeling beneath a blood sky.
My own face crowned in fire.
Damien screaming into a collapsing world.
I stagger to my feet and choke on a sob. “No more. Please, no more.”
The visions do not listen.
They sharpen.
I see a city engulfed in silver flames, bodies dissolving into ash.
I see a pack split apart by a quake that tears the ground open.
I see a mountain break like pottery, divine lava spilling into the valley.
I see wolves shifting uncontrollably beneath a blood moon, their bodies wracked with agony.
And worst of all, I see myself.
Standing on a hill of bones, silver fire dripping from my fingers like blood.
“Stop,” I whisper. “Please stop.”
My knees buckle. I catch myself on trembling hands. My skin glows through the dirt, bright enough to burn shadows away.
The Goddess’s whisper presses into my skull.
This is what you hold.
This is what you were made for.
“No.” My voice cracks. “I was not made for this.”
The ground quivers beneath me. I slam my hand into the earth with every bit of strength I have left.
A shockwave bursts outward in a perfect ring of silver light. The ground splits. Leaves spiral into the air. The Shadow Wolf whimpers from its place near the edge of the clearing, still recovering from the Goddess’s earlier strike.
“I did not choose this,” I shout.
You were chosen.
“I do not want this power.”
Want is irrelevant.
My breath stutters. My heart aches. The pressure around my skull tightens as her voice grows colder.
You are killing me, I whisper.
You are becoming me.
The truth hits me like a falling star.
She does not want a vessel.
She wants a replacement.
She wants a body that will not fail the way hers is failing. A form she can pour herself into fully. A shape she can control long after her divinity shatters.
Me.
The light inside my chest pulses again, violent and desperate. It feels like a second heart trying to claw its way out of my ribs.
The forest dims.
The moon’s crack widens.
My vision darkens around the edges.
The Moonfire roars inside me.
“Damien,” I whisper, barely recognizable even to myself.
And then I feel it.
A faint thread.
A trembling link.
Our bond.
He is kneeling outside the forest.
He is calling my name.
He is breaking.
But the Goddess’s power smothers the bond before it can reach me fully.
Do not touch that, I choke. Do not take that from me.
Everything human will fade.
“No.”
You will forget him.
My heart cracks open. Tears burn down my face. My wolf howls inside me, raw and panicked, its voice ripping through the clearing.
NO.
The sound reverberates through the forest, shaking the leaves and the air and the sky. My hands claw into the dirt. My nails split. My breath drags out of me in painful shudders.
“I will not let you take him,” I sob. “I will not let you take any of me.”
Silence falls.
Heavy.
Cold.
Judging.
The Goddess’s voice slithers into my ear.
You do not get to choose.
Your fate was woven long before you were born.
I lift my head.
My voice shakes, but it does not break.
“My fate is mine.”
The Moonfire inside me flares. Not for her.
For me.
Light erupts through my skin. Violent. Defiant. Alive.
The forest shakes.
The air cracks.
The moon splits further above us.
My body rises off the ground again, but this time I refuse to surrender.
The Goddess shrieks inside my mind.
What are you doing?
I scream back.
“Remembering who I am.”
The world goes white.