Life After Legacy

Chapter 1

SPOILER ALERT!!! (Literally, the second sentence has a spoiler)
IF YOU DO NOT LIKE SPOILERS AND HAVEN'T READ LEGACY, DO NOT READ (YET)
Disclaimer-All characters belong to Shannon Messenger. This is a fanfiction for kotlc (keeper of the lost cities).

I'm in shock.

Oralie, my biological mother, let me see the only forbidden secret on her cache. Did she do it to gain my trust? To help me? To make me forgive her? To distract me?

~Flashback~
(Some of this is straight out of the book. Everything up to the part where they are about to open the cache belongs to Shannon Messenger.)

"I have no idea what that means," I tell Oralie.

"Don't you?" Oralie stretched out her arm and snapped her fingers, making a tiny glass sphere the size of a marble appear in the center of her palm.

A cache.

My heart started beating ten times faster. "You're saying stellarlune is a Forgotten Secret."

"It's part of one, at least. This one." She raised the cache to my eye level — and when the light hit the glass, it caught the tiny blue crystal set into the middle.

The only inner crystal.

"You only have one Forgotten Secret?" I had to ask.

Kenric's cache had glittered with seven.

"Empaths shatter more easily, so the Council has to be very selective with how often they involve me in their more fraught situations. And the only challenge that they've ever decided was desperate enough to need my help was this one." She tilted her hand, letting the cache roll slowly around her palm. "And... it had something to do with stellarlune. So I'm willing to help you access the memory - but only if you promise we'll face this truth together."

I plucked the cache from Oralie's palm, watching the light shift in the tiny inner crystal, which was more of a pale blue than a deep blue. "If this was your idea of mother-daughter bonding..."

"No - this is about trust. If I show you what's in the cache, I'll be violating some of the most fundamental vows I've made as a Councillor. And your the only person I'm willing to help take that risk for."

I snorted. "Right, because my very existence violates a ton more vows you made."

Oralie sighs, but admitted, "That too."

There was no warmth in her voice, no regret in her eyes.

But... maybe I didn't need there to be.

I don't need another mother.
I needed answers.
That's what Oralie is offering me.
One, at least.
One truth that had been erased.
And I wanted it.
Needed it.

And Keefe might never wake up without it.

But my conscience still forced me to say, " I thought the Forgotten Secrets were things that could damage your sanity if you remembered them."