The scout came back three weeks later. By then, I could walk the length of the sanctuary without a healer following me. Not quickly. Not without pain. But on my own.

My ribs had stopped feeling like knives every time I breathed. My shoulder still protested if I lifted my arm too

My first full shift happened five months after the fall. It was not beautiful. It was not graceful. And it definitely did not feel like coming home.

It felt like every bone in my body had decided to break at once.

"Again," Isolde said.

I was on my knees in the moonstone

Three years after I fell from the Moon Rift, Blackthorn closed its gates in my face. I almost laughed. The walls looked smaller than I remembered. That was the first thing I noticed.

The second was the guard captain standing above the gatehouse, pretending not to recogn