The hospital was quiet.
Nyra sat in the hallway outside her mother's room, still soaked from the battle in the metro station. Her jeans were torn. Her skin steamed faintly. She had wrapped her hand in bandages torn from a hospital curtain.
No one asked questions.
People looked at her and turned away, as if something primal told them: Don't get involved.
Inside the room, machines beeped softly. Her mother was asleep. Breathing shallow. Pale skin illuminated by moonlight coming through the window.
Nyra had always wondered—why the moon comforted her.
Now she knew.
After the encounter with Kael, Aarav had walked her here. He sat at the end of the corridor, head bowed, thinking, spinning a coin of light between his fingers.
He hadn't said much since.
Neither had she.
But inside her, something was waking up.
Flashback: Her Childhood.
She remembered being 6. Standing at the beach with her mother as the waves pulled forward unnaturally—high tide during a full moon. Everyone else ran from the water.
But Nyra?
She stepped into it.
The ocean didn't resist her.
It danced.
Now.
She rose from the hallway and walked silently to the back courtyard of the hospital.
There was a small, circular fountain. The moon was full overhead, high and bright. She stood before the water, shaking.
"Why do I feel like this?" she whispered."Why does it hurt?"
She knelt. Placed her hand on the surface.
The water vibrated—gently. Then rippled out in perfect concentric circles.
Then—it rose.
A sphere of water lifted from the fountain, spinning like a miniature moon. It reflected the real moon above it. Nyra reached out—
And suddenly she wasn't alone.
The Moonlight Memory.
A woman stood in the garden behind her. Not her mother.
Someone else.
Long silver hair, robes like flowing light, a calm presence like gravity at rest. Her voice wasn't heard—it was felt.
"You are not the first."
Nyra turned, heart pounding.
The woman raised her hand and pointed upward.
"The moon remembers.It reflects all things. Even pain. Even light not its own.Your power is not to create...It is to balance."
Nyra's throat tightened.
"But I couldn't stop him."
The woman stepped forward and gently touched her forehead.
"Because you don't know who you are yet."
The water sphere floated between them. It began to glow—bright silver-blue, brighter than moonlight, as if channeling the lunar tide itself.
"The oceans respond to you.So will blood. So will memory.The moon is not just a mirror.It's a keeper."
The woman faded like mist.
The water sphere collapsed back into the fountain with a gentle splash.
Nyra stood alone—but not lost.
She understood now.
Kael's heat would always spread.
But her role… was to cool the fire, to slow the tide, to reflect the destruction back upon itself.
She was the vessel of stillness.
The last breath before eruption.
The moon had woken.
Later that night.
She returned to Aarav, sitting silently on the bench outside.
He looked up.
She didn't say anything. Just sat beside him.
And for the first time in a long while, they looked at each other—not as kids who went to the same school.
But as forces orbiting the same cosmic war.