Chapter Six
Malritha was born during the deepest moment of lunar eclipse, when the moon hung like an open wound in the night sky. The air itself seemed to hold its breath, caught between anticipation and dread.
The women of her line—seers all, guardians of the ancient moon temples—had gathered to welcome another daughter blessed by celestial grace. They burned sacred oils in silver vessels and chanted hymns that had not changed in ten thousand years, their voices rising like smoke toward the bloodied moon.
Yet when the child emerged, no cry pierced the silence. The room grew unnaturally cold, frost creeping across the stone floor from the infant's first exhalation. The midwife's hands trembled as she cut the cord—not from the chill, but from what she glimpsed in those first moments: something ancient looking back at her through newborn eyes.
Far below the temple, the tide retreated suddenly, dramatically, exposing seafloor that had never known air. Fish thrashed in sudden shallows, their silver bodies catching moonlight as they died. Somewhere in the deep, something vast and cold stirred from ancient slumber, sensing a kindred emptiness born into the world.
The midwife passed the infant to her mother with careful hands, her weathered face betraying nothing of what she had seen in the child's eyes: emptiness, a void where wonder should have bloomed. The new mother traced a finger along her daughter's cheek, waiting for the instinctive turn of lips, the reaching of tiny fingers that never came. The infant's gaze remained fixed on the crimson moon visible through the chamber window, as if recognizing an old friend.
"Name her Malritha," whispered the eldest seer, her blind eyes fixed on nothing and everything. When the others looked at her in confusion, they saw blood tears tracking down her ancient face. "She is born of the veiled moon, and her path will be shrouded. I have seen her in dreams that taste of salt and iron. She will bring great power and greater suffering. Both hers. Both ours."
Malritha grew like shadow stretching across stone—inevitable, silent, somehow wrong in a way no one could name.
Where other children of the temple ran with graceful limbs and laughter that echoed off painted walls, she moved with unhurried deliberation, her footfalls making no sound on the sanctum floors. Her frame remained angular, sharp-edged, as if molded from night itself, refusing the gentle curves that softened other girls as they aged.
The temple acolytes whispered when they thought she couldn't hear, their voices dropping to frightened murmurs when she passed.
"She doesn't sleep," one would say. "I've checked her chamber. Her bed is always cold."
"She asked me what it feels like to dream," another confided. "As if she doesn't know."
"There's something not right about that one," they agreed. "The way she watches. Like she's studying how to be human."
They kept their distance, crossing their fingers in secret signs against misfortune when her gaze fell upon them. Even her own mother grew distant, uncomfortable beneath the unblinking gaze of a child who never sought comfort, never reached for an embrace, never shed tears when others would have broken.
During childhood fevers, she merely stared at the ceiling, her skin burning with unnatural heat while her eyes remained cold and calculating. Eventually, they stopped trying to draw her into their circle, and Malritha retreated to the one place where solitude was sacred: the weaving halls.
It was there she found her purpose, amidst the ancient looms where seers had woven prophecy into cloth for generations. But typical thread held no allure for her. She sought something more potent, more pure, watching the temple weavers with silent intensity until they could no longer bear her presence and abandoned their work for the day.
Then, in the emptiness they left behind, she would run her fingers over their abandoned looms, listening to the whispers trapped between warp and weft.
The elders found her one night, standing before the remains of a leviathan, its bleached ribs curved like pale sentinels against the stone wall where they had been displayed for centuries. The massive bones had been harvested from a creature that beached itself the very night of her birth, its colossal body decaying on the shore for three days while no scavenger would touch it. The temple had claimed the skeleton as an omen, though none could agree on what it portended.
Malritha stood before it, her small hand pressed against the massive bone, her head tilted as if listening to a voice too deep for others to hear.
"They sing," she said without turning, her voice flat and cold as deep-sea currents. "They remember the deep. They remember the dark before light. They remember being gods."
The elders exchanged troubled glances, but before they could stop her, Malritha had begun. Her hands moved with uncanny skill, harvesting the massive ribs, shaping them with tools no child should have known how to wield, carving sigils that burned the eyes of those who looked too closely.
Within a fortnight, she had constructed something terrible and magnificent: a loom crafted from leviathan bone, its frame pulsing with faint internal light, as if the creature's spirit remained trapped within its ossified remains.
"Now," she said, her voice flat, devoid of pride or excitement, "I need the threads."
Her loom required no ordinary material. Malritha would wait until the full moon hung heavy in the night sky, then climb to the highest spire of the temple. There, with a spindle carved from driftwood and fingers dipped in saltwater, she would gather moonlight itself, pulling it from the air like silver silk, winding it onto bobbins made from the vertebrae of deep-sea creatures.
The first time the elders witnessed this, even their ancient wisdom failed them. They watched in silent awe as a girl of twelve pulled the light of heaven from the sky and wound it onto her unearthly spindle, her movements precise, her face expressionless as the moon she harvested.
When the light touched her fingers, it seemed to sink into her skin momentarily before emerging again as thread, as if her body were a loom of flesh, weaving the raw light into something tangible.
"What do you see in those threads, child?" the temple matriarch finally asked, her voice barely steadier than her hands.
Malritha didn't look up from her work. "Everything. Nothing. The paths between." Her fingers never stopped moving, the moonlight flowing through them as water through a sieve. "I see the king in the north who will die tomorrow with a fishbone in his throat. I see the child not yet conceived who will one day burn this temple to ashes. I see the leviathans swimming in the deepest trenches, dreaming dreams that would shatter our minds."
Her visions, when they came, were too precise to ignore.
She predicted the three-day storm that nearly sank the fishing fleet, describing the exact pattern of lightning that would split the harbormaster's oaken door. She knew when the mountain passes would close with unexpected snow, saving a caravan of traders who heeded her warning. She foresaw the birth of twin princes to the distant queen, one robust, one frail—and which would survive to see sunrise.
But no gods ever spoke to her directly, not in the way they spoke to other seers. The oracles would fall into trances, their bodies possessed by divine will, their mouths moving with words not their own. They would emerge dazed, blessed, touched by something greater. They would speak of voices like thunder, of divine hands guiding their own, of celestial whispers that left them forever changed.
Malritha knew only silence.
She was merely the conduit, never the chosen. The vessel, never the visited. This truth cut deeper than any mortal blade, carving an emptiness inside her that grew with each passing year, hollowing her from within until she felt like nothing more than a shell shaped vaguely like a woman, a hollow vessel waiting to be filled with something greater than herself.
By her twentieth year, Malritha had become a living shadow in the temple corridors. Her dark hair hung straight and lifeless to her waist, framing a face both ageless and untouched by laughter's lines or sorrow's creases. The other seers gave her a wide berth, unsettled by her stillness, her silence, the weight of her hollow gaze. Some claimed they could see through her in certain lights, as if she were becoming translucent, fading from the world even as she moved through it.
Only her loom kept her company, that grotesque marvel of bone and moonlight. She would sit before it for days, weaving threads of destiny into patterns only she could interpret, watching as lives intertwined, separated, ended. Through her hands passed the fates of kings and beggars, of sailors and mothers, of children yet unborn. She wove without emotion, without judgment, her fingers dancing across the threads with the cold precision of winter stars.
And yet, for all her power to see the tapestry of others' lives, her own remained a barren thread, singular and cold, untouched by the warmth of connection, unbranched by possibility. In the vast pattern of existence, she was a singular line, straight and unbroken, leading nowhere but into deeper isolation.
Until he came.