The woman's words scattered through the hall and sank into the stones, passed between the erased faces on the walls, and touched the fourth line in Elara's chest like a cold finger. But this time, you did not come alone. There was no simple observation inside that sentence. It carried the tone of someone who had watched the same scene for centuries and noticed a small change for the first time.
Elara did not step back as she looked at the woman. She now knew that the thing before her was not the Moon Spirit. That knowledge did not comfort her. Because a being that was not the Moon Spirit but had been wounded by the same darkness as it could sometimes be more dangerous than the spirit itself. Perhaps the woman was a vessel. Or perhaps she had once been a body forced to become a vessel. But she was no longer only a woman. She was a wound that had remained inside the archive, learned to remember with the archive, and over time had begun to resemble the things it remembered.
