Bound by Moonlight and Magic
Ember didn’t breathe.
Not in the way Liora needed her to.
Her chest rose and fell faintly—so faintly it felt more like the memory of breathing than life itself. Her skin, kissed by ink and starlight, shimmered under Liora’s trembling fingers. The comet-tail of story-thread she clutched pulsed with unread magic, curling in the air like a serpent made of language and fate.
“She’s alive,” Thistle whispered, her voice barely audible above the rustle of the wind threading through the Sigil Tree. “But not fully… not entirely here.”
Liora pressed Ember’s head to her shoulder. “Then where the hell is the rest of her?”
Kael stepped closer, scanning the thin line of ink that pulsed in Ember’s grip. It slithered along the ground in indecipherable patterns, whisperin
