The Last Tail Of The Fallen Luna

Chapter 2: The Papers Beside Her Bed.

Seraphina's POV

I felt the ache first in my chest, dull and hollow, as something had been dug from me, leaving a hole. The second thing I felt was the stiff, hospital sheets against my skin in the palace hospital. I closed my eyes for a second longer, my hands gripping, my mind saying, "When I open my eyes Kael will be there. He always was. After the third defeat, after the fifth, he had been the first face I saw.

I opened my eyes.

A stack of papers was placed on my seat beside my bed, and Elder Magnus Voss was seated in the chair, sitting on his knee.

Not Kael.

I tried to stand up quickly and the room spun. "Where is Kael?"

Magnus folded the papers over his hands. "The king is in a meeting of the council."

"A council meeting." I waited for him to say more; I waited for the rest of the sentence to make sense! It never came." I lost another child, Magnus, my seventh. And he's in a meeting?"

"It's a significant meeting," Magnus said.

"Is that meeting more important than his mate? "My voice cracked on the word mate and I hated myself for it.

I did not get a response from Magnus. He just looked at me, as he does to all of us, calm and unreadable, as though we are all problems in need of a solution, the right paperwork.

"I didn't come here to talk about the King's time," he said. "I came to serve one purpose."

He took the papers off his knee and placed them on the blanket in front of me.

"Sign these."

I glanced at them but didn't touch them. "What are they?"

He smiled and said, "read them and you'll understand".

I took the first page up. My hands trembled, but I am not sure if it was from the exhaustion that still weighed on my bones or the cold that was creeping over my stomach as I saw the lines and lines of people below me. I read the words twice before they really made it to me.

The abdications of the title of Luna was a voluntary act.

I looked up at him. "It's forcing me to resign," he said.

"Yes."

"Why?" I already knew why. I had to hear it from his mouth.

"You understand why, Seraphina." Magnus' voice was even and patient, as one might explain to a child. "A Luna that gets weaker with each season; a Luna that does not carry the line can not stand beside the King; the council has made its decision."

"The council's decision." I put the papers down and wrapped my fingers around the blanket. "Not mine. Not Kael's."

"Kael has already said 'yes'."

The words made a deeper impact than they were meant to. "I don't think you're telling me the truth."

At his side he took out another page, and held it toward me without speaking. I could tell it was the one I was looking for from the bottom of the signature. I had seen that hand sign on my wedding contract 5 years back. I had seen it sign declarations of war, treaties, trade agreements. I was familiar with Kael's signature as I was with my own.

It was there. The Council has approved this at the bottom and Kael had signed.

I shook my head, "No. No, I want to hear it from him, not from you, not from a piece of paper. I want Kael standing in this room telling me himself.

"Seraphina-"

"No Magnus, bring him to me. " My voice rose and I didn't mind if anyone heard it through the walls of the hospital. "Or else I won't sign a thing."

For a long, weary time, we did this back and forth, with Magnus saying exactly the same thing to me, and me refusing to listen unless Kael was brought to me.

"Very well," he replied. "I will fetch him."

I sat there, in that too-white room, alone, with the papers on my blanket, as if they might change if I looked at them long enough, and he left.

The door opened again, and then it was Kael who walked through.

A hundred different ways I'd imagined this moment but none of them had been as perfect as it was. In each version, Kael walked across the room and took my hand and said it was a mistake, he would fix it, that the council could not do anything about it. I didn't trust him in all of these versions.

Instead he stood by the door. He didn't come closer.

"Kael." I looked for some expression, anything, in his face. "Please, tell me, it is not true."

"Seraphina." He called my name softly, I barely heard it. "The council has decided and I have agreed with them."

"You've agreed with it." I said it back to him very slowly, like it might be easier for him if I said it slower. "Kael, look at me, look at what I am now."

"This has taken its toll on you." He said . "I see that."

"Do you?" I rolled the blanket back , and shifted to my wolf form so he could see what was left of my tails, they were thinner than before, and only after did he avert his gaze did I shift back to human form. "I lost six of these to try to give you an heir, Kael. Six. I've shed blood for this kingdom, I've buried seven children that never took their first breath, and the one time I need you to stand beside me, not behind that council table, you send Magnus with papers."

"It isn't personal." He says.

"It isn't personal?" I laughed aloud, a crackling sound. "I am your mate."

"I love you." It was a straightforward statement, devoid of any sentimentality, as though love were an external reality to each of his decisions. "That's never changed, but love isn't the answer to what the kingdom needs, Seraphina. I'm the king. I have to think of what my people need. What the future of my line is."

My chest froze, colder than even when Magnus was first sitting beside my bed.

"So that's why, that's why," I replied. "My years, my body, my tails, and I am being exchanged for your line's future."

Kael didn't answer. He didn't need to. He never spoke a word that was louder than his silence.

I picked up the papers that were on the blanket, and I signed my name at the bottom, without giving it a second thought, because if I did think about it I knew that I'd break down before I even left this room. I signed it quickly, my hand making hard marks on the parchment, and when I had finished I collected the sheets, and I got up from the bed on legs that barely supported me.

I walked over to Kael and shoved the papers into his chest with such force that some papers fell on the ground between us.

"There," I said. "You have what your council is looking for."

Then I walked past him out of the room, out of the hospital wing, out through the palace halls where servants lowered their eyes, not even looking at me. I didn't look back. Not once. I walked on through when the corridor opened up to the courtyard and when the courtyard opened up to the gates and when the gates opened up to open road and when the open road opened up to trees.

I don't know how long I walked. Grief has no clock. I only know that at some point, as I walked, the palace was behind me, swallowed by the dark line of the forest, and I didn't care where my feet were taking me as long as it was away.

I didn't realize that I had wandered till the trees were unfamiliar, till the air itself seemed to change, thinner and wrong.

Rogue territory.

When the thought came to me, it was too late.

I heard them first, heard the low growls, heard the shapes moving quickly and near, in the shadows between the trees. My body was exhausted, I started to run, but it wasn't going to happen. Three tails and a heart broken by grief were too slow for rogues bred for the hunt.

Before I had taken twenty steps they surrounded me.

I felt the impact on the back of my head.

"Take her" was the last thing I heard.