Nova's POV
She was eight years old and the sky was on fire.
She knew she was dreaming. Some distant part of her knew the part that had learned, over sixteen years of the same dream, to recognize the specific quality of the burning air, the way the fire moved wrong, too slow and too bright, the way sound arrived late like it was travelling from somewhere far away.
She knew. And it didn't help.
The Moonstone Kingdom burned the way it had always burned in this dream completely, without hurry, with the thoroughness of something that intended to leave nothing. The towers she had climbed as a child. The library her mother kept locked. The corridor outside her bedroom where she had slept until she was six with the door open because she was afraid of the dark and her mother had never once made her feel ashamed of that.
All of it, burning.
And in the middle of it, her mother.
