Chosen by the Moon, Claimed by Him

Chapter 18: Beneath the Moonbeam

The lake had no name on any map.

It sat in a fold of hills south of the Misty Forest, accessible by a trail that required the specific knowledge of a woman who had spent twenty years learning which plants grew near still water. The cottage was small and practical and smelled like dried lavender and woodsmoke, and the person who lived in it moved through it with the easy comfort of someone completely at peace with where they are.

She had no memory of wolves.

No memory of a kingdom or a trial or a prophecy—only her name, and her herbs, and a melody she sometimes hummed without knowing why it made her feel like she'd once stood in the center of something enormous.

She was crouching near the water's edge, cataloguing sedge, when the sound of footsteps reached her on the gravel path.

She turned.

The man was tall. Dark-haired, with the quality of stillness about him that she'd associate, if pressed, with someone who had spent time in forests. He stopped on the path as though her looking at him had frozen him mid-step.

She felt—something. Warm, involuntary, like a compass finding north.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

He didn't answer immediately. His eyes—gold, which she registered with no particular surprise, which was strange, because it should have been remarkable—moved over her face with the expression of someone finding something they had been told might no longer exist.

"I'm looking for someone," he said. His voice was careful. Not the carefulness of someone hiding something, but the carefulness of someone who is being very precise about what they say next, as though the words matter enormously.

"Who?"

"A woman named Ava." He took a step toward her. "A herbalist. She has—she used to have—a way of knowing what people feel before they say it. And she sang a song, once, that I have never been able to forget."

The warmth in her chest intensified.

Her hands were still. The sedge cataloguing had stopped existing.

"I know a song," she heard herself say.

Something broke open in his expression. Not dramatically—quietly. The way something sealed for a long time releases under very slight pressure, once the pressure has been consistently, carefully, applied.

"Would you sing it?" he asked.

She opened her mouth, and it came—the same melody, the circular, language-less tune that had been living in her chest since her mother had placed it there. She sang two bars.

He closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he was closer—she hadn't noticed him moving—and the gold in his eyes was the warmth of a fire you've been walking toward for a long time.

"I'm Lex," he said. "And I have—" He stopped. Reconsidered. The smile that crossed his face was small and certain, the smile of someone setting something down after a very long time of carrying it. "I know this will sound strange. But I feel as though I've been looking for you."

The warmth in her chest was a recognition she had no name for yet.

"It doesn't sound strange," she said.

She stood up from the water's edge and faced him fully, and the bond between them—ancient and patient and apparently unwilling to let a small thing like a memory sacrifice prevent it from doing what it had always intended to do—came back to life between them, quiet and certain as a tide returning.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

The moon was rising early, the way it sometimes did here, over the hills to the east. It turned the lake surface silver.

"No prophecies," Lex said quietly, as though finishing a sentence he'd been working on for a long time. "No duties. No crown." He looked at her like she was the whole of what he was looking at. "This time, I choose you entirely for who you are."

Ava felt the song still settling in the air around them.

She thought she might be beginning to remember something, not in images but in the shape of a feeling—the feeling of being known, completely and without condition, by someone who had decided once and never stopped deciding.

"Then choose well," she said.

And he smiled—the real one, the one she would later understand she had seen before, in a dream or a memory or something older than both—and somewhere above the lake, the moon rose full and clear, and shone down on them equally, without judgment, as it had for the five hundred years leading to this moment, and for all the uncounted time ahead.

End of Beneath the Moonbeam: A Lycan's Melody

"The whole world wanted her to become a symbol. Only he wanted her to be herself."