AN: Welcome to the fifth official installment of Pearl Drops. Of course, there are the side stories involved in the whole process of this series, but this is numero cinco.
Summary: Hailley Green is easil the most powerful Daughter. Her gift is strong, and she seems to have control and ease in using it. She knows that her friends fear her for it, but that's okay. Hailley languishes in power, but not the responsibility it comes with. It's just not her thing. Of course, that was before the dreams. Before she purchases a seemingly harmless mask. Before Alessandro and his sister show up in her crumbling world.
When she wears the mask, Hailley feels like the world is hers. She has power. But she's blacking out every time she wears it, and her dreams shift from warnings to whispers of creating chaos. Things are getting out of control as the Daughters tell her of the horrible things she's doing while wearing the mask. Who is the god pushing her over the edge? Can she trust Alessandro to help her figure out the way to defeat the mask... And ultimately herself as she battles to for her freedom?
Disclaimer: I in no way, shape, or form own anything from Daughters of the Moon. That's strictly Lynne Ewing. What I do own includes: the new Daughters (Hailley, Torrence, Auriella, and Blaze), anything pertaining to the Shadow Gods (including Akhet/Celeste, Marquette, and Evan), Kearney, Alessandro, the Daughters of Mischief, and a host of other characters you have only heard of in Pearl Drops. ;3
Prologue
Once, in the prosperous lands of Egypt, there was a protective sun goddess by the name of Bast. She was the daughter of Amun-Ra, the deity protecting cats, and she represented the love of motherhood.
She was a gem among the gods and the people of Egypt. Bast became the wife of the highly esteemed Anubis, the brilliant light to his darkness.
Then the Greeks invaded Egypt's beautiful lands and took Bast's beautiful sunlight from her, replacing it with the luminescence of the moon. Where before she had languished under the sun with her father, now she toiled in the night sky as the goddess Aelurus.
Set, from his desert mantle, saw the suppressed anger Bast hid from the world and her beloved worshippers, even from her husband. The chaos god smiled. It was well rumored that his son, Anubis, was really the son of his most hated brother, Osiris. What a way todestroy something to his brother than by gifting little Bast with a way to be powerful again.
So, the god approached the goddess one night as she looked down angrily at the Greeks in her beautiful home. He offered to her a mask crafted to look like the fierce war goddess Sekhmet. With shaking hands, Bast took the mask, holding the lioness face in front of her own.
And for three nights a month, Bast left the sky to come back to Egypt, forgetting who she was supposed to be and what she was supposed to represent, wreaking havoc across her homelands.
Finally, Anubis caught on to Set's game and ripped the mask from his beautiful wife's face. She cried out in shock, the wondrous power it gave her gone now. He threw the mask into the shifting desert sands, to be lost from his weak wife's hands.
Now, when the moon goes dark, it is because Bast walks with her husband in the Underworld, repenting for the sins the mask of Set caused her to commit.