The scholar knelt in the silver dust at her hips, his long, ink-stained fingers trembling as he held the newborn child. He did not use a cloth; he wrapped her in the remaining silk of his high-collared sorcerer's cloak. Unlike her elder brother Kael, who had been born covered in the dense, platinum fur of a warrior prince, this child possessed skin as smooth and pale as fresh snow, and a thick tuft of liquid-silver hair that shimmered with an internal, lunar luminescence.
"Luna," Gwen breathed, her golden eyes fluttering open as she reached out her blistered, white-burned hands.
The name had not been debated in the strategy rooms of the Blackfang Fortress. It did not exist on the imperial ledger. It was a word pulled straight from the ancient, unwritten oral histories of the high ridge—the name of the first moon that had graced the northern valleys before the sky was chained by the Interstice.
