The day broke not with light, but noise.
Not cannon-fire. Not screaming. Not hoof or horn.
Silence, broken like a plate across the face of the world.
And then—falling. Small, fine. Like snow, except it cut the skin.
Moon-shards.
Not metaphor.
Not dream.
Real.
Ilyra stood at the eastern parapet as the sky rained knives made of broken silver. Her hand was raw from the ritual the night before, and her mind still echoed with too many versions of herself. But only one remained now. The one who had stayed. The one who had bled to remain real.
The Dominion had retreated. Temporarily. She knew the type of silence they left behind. Not a surrender.
A setup.
Kael leaned on his staff beside her. It was cracked down the center, and he had aged a decade overnight. "It's begun."
"It already did," Ilyra muttered.
"No." He pointed to the sky. "This is the true offensive."
The Shard had failed.
But the Dominion had planned for that.
Their doctrine always accounted for divine entropy, for outcomes that split under observation. They'd hoped to fracture the Reach by memory. When that failed, they reached higher. They aimed for the moons.
They didn't fire a cannon.
They cast a prayer.
The priest-engineers at Sereth Anuun had spent decades crafting it: a liturgy made of inverse laws, recursion, and stolen god-breath. It was fired at the Lesser Moon—Myrelune—the night-binder, the memory-keeper.
And now?
It was dying.
Even at dawn, the sky wept light from the wound in its edge. A third of it had broken clean, drifting like crystal bones across the blackening firmament.
With the moon dying, the wards of the Reach weakened. Time shook again, not fractured, but wounded. And in its pain, it bled possibilities.
At midday, the Dominion marched.
Not illusions. Not infiltrators.
Real armies.
They advanced over the horizon under banners of silk and starlight. Five columns deep. Not just soldiers this time, but war-beasts, relic-bearers, siege-giants shaped from hollowed mountains. A choir walked in front of them, faces blindfolded, throats sewn open to let only divine frequency pass.
Vess looked through the spy-glass and gave the first honest command of his life:
"Prepare to die holding the line."
No orders followed.
There was nothing left to coordinate.
They had all chosen this.
The defenders didn't chant.
They didn't scream.
They breathed.
Each soldier stood where they were.
Each one, already a grave waiting to be filled.
Ilyra walked the line one last time. She touched shoulders. Met eyes. Spoke no lies.
When she reached Kael, he was writing.
"What now?" she asked.
"Counter-script."
"For the prayer?"
"For the moon."
"You're going to heal it?"
"No." He looked up, smile wild, eyes rimmed with madness and clarity. "I'm going to finish breaking it. Properly."
She blinked.
"Why?"
"Because right now," he whispered, "it's bleeding meaning. And if I can crack it just right, I can write a new truth into the sky."
He held up the scroll. It glowed.
"What truth?"
He touched her hand. "That we won."
The Dominion arrived at the Reach at second dusk.
They expected chaos.
They found stillness.
That terrified them more.
They paused a mile out—out of respect, superstition, or simply awe.
The broken moon hung overhead, bleeding light like a dying god.
And Kael began to chant.
The spell was not loud.
It did not shine.
It was a lie, written carefully, threaded through centuries of half-truths and myth.
He invoked the name of the first moonborn king, the song of the harvest god, the original name of the river beneath the trench. He invoked love, fear, grief, and war.
And then he wrote the final word: Never.
And the moon shattered.
A sound like the unmaking of stars rang across the world.
The Reach disappeared in light.
And when it returned, everything was wrong.
But also right.
The moon was gone—entirely now. Not broken. Absent.
And so was the Dominion's spell.
Their war-beasts vanished. Not in blood, but revision. As if they had never been written into the page of the world.
A quarter of their soldiers collapsed, eyes smoking, unable to hold onto a narrative that no longer supported their purpose.
The choir fell silent.
And the Dominion general, armored in mirrored obsidian, fell to one knee.
Because now?
The truth had changed.
The Coalition hadn't won through strength.
They hadn't even survived through skill.
They had outlasted the story.
Ilyra stood among the survivors, looking up at a blank sky where a moon had been.
No moon.
No tide-binder.
No memory-anchor.
Just the stars.
She breathed.
The Dominion didn't retreat.
They ceased to pursue.
In the aftermath, the Reach was renamed.
It wasn't a tactical position anymore.
It was a place of transformation.
The Battle of Duskfall Reach was no longer a battle.
It became a shard-line event, a temporal fracture in the world's narrative record.
Bards could not agree on its sequence.
Scholars wept at the paradoxes.
Survivors gave contradictory accounts—and all of them were true.
But one thing remained certain:
The moon shattered.
And with it, the certainty of empires.
In the ruins of the orchard, now grown twisted and glass-barked, Ilyra found Kael's staff.
No sign of him.
Just a note, written in his own hand.
"There are stories where we win. I'm going to find them. Or make them."
She didn't cry.
Not yet.
She placed the staff in the ground.
Let the glass trees grow around it.
The war did not end.
But it changed.
The Dominion no longer advanced as they had.
They approached cautiously, uncertain now whether any truth could hold.
The Coalition rebuilt—not with steel, but with stories.
Every soldier, now a scribe.
Every trench, a line of a tale.
In the end, Ilyra walked into the orchard again.
She touched the glass tree that bore her name—one of many, all flickering, none fixed.
She whispered:
"We are real."
The trees sang.
And in the sky, where the moon once watched, the stars blinked.
As if writing something new.