Novel-novel oleh Christina Wilder

The silence after the shattering was absolute—so complete that it felt like a hand closing over Elaria’s mouth, over her heartbeat, over the pulse of the world.She hung suspended in the dark spiral Kael and Draven tore open, the two of them collapsing inward as the tether between them snapped like wet sinew. Their light scattered. The Gate-body imploded. The web of memory split into a thousand burning strands, each whipping through the void like a dying nerve.But none of that was what struck her.What struck her was the voice—the one that had called her by a name she did not remember, a name she felt under her skin like an old scar.“Finally,” it had said. Soft. The softness of something ancient enough to forget cruelty because it remembers eternity.“Finally, you hear me.”And now she stood—no, floated—inside the aftershock of that word.The void around her was no longer a void. It pulsed.With her.With who she had been.Her arms trembled as she lifted them, the skin flickering li

She couldn’t breathe.Not because breath was impossible here — breath was irrelevant — but because the truth pressing against her ribs had stolen every illusion of air her mind still clung to.You were never born, the voice had said.You were remembered.The words lived in her bones now, vibrating like a tuning fork struck by a divine hand. Elaria drifted in a space that was not space at all — a vast chamber of light where nothing cast a shadow because everything was the shadow. The walls, if there were walls, moved with the slow, tidal pulse of memory reformatting itself.She was suspended, body half-formed, half-light, threaded together by strands of blue and silver that pulsed like veins. The filaments seemed to be stitching her into a shape she no longer recognized. Her skin shimmered with shifting fragments of the selves she had worn across lifetimes — girl, daughter, healer, anchor, weapon. Each one flickered across her body like pages of a book being flipped too fast to read.A

There was no falling.There was no rising.There was only being undone.Elaria tried to breathe, but breath had never belonged to this place. The light that swallowed her in chapter 148 had not been illumination; it was remembrance, a force older than the first dawn, tearing open a seam inside her and pouring into it like molten memory.The voice that claimed her — you were mine before you were born — followed her through the rupture, curling around her like smoke with weight, shadow with purpose.It whispered again now.“Let me show you.”The world around her peeled apart.Not in a violent tear, but like petals unfolding backward — colors stripped from colors, shapes dissolving into their ancestors, time buckling into a soft, circular ache.She reached for something solid.There was nothing.She reached for her own name.There was less than nothing.The voice pressed close, behind her ear, inside her skull, beneath her ribs:“You were a tear in the Veil before you were a daughter of

Darkness had texture.Not the absence of light, not the blindness of shadow—this was something tactile, alive, aware. It slid over Elaria’s skin like a second pulse, a second breath, tasting her the way fire tastes oxygen.And then—That voice.That impossible, steady voice:“Mine.”The word hit her like a hand closing around the back of her neck.Elaria gasped.Or the world gasped with her—she couldn’t tell. The dark rippled outward in rings, each one sending a tremor through the void until every inch of it was vibrating with recognition.No shape.No face.But the voice pressed closer.“Elaria.”It spoke her name like the world had waited centuries just to say it properly.She tried to move—her limbs answered, but wrong, like they were remembering themselves in reverse. The darkness split around her, threads of it pulling away in jagged lines, revealing the faintest suggestion of form beneath her feet.A floor.A path.A web of fractured light stitched across an ocean of void.Her h

The plunge ended not with impact, but with unmaking.Light peeled Elaria apart strand by trembling strand, as though she were a tapestry the world finally had permission to unravel. Her breath vanished first, pulled into a glittering thread. Then her heartbeat. Then her name.Only her awareness remained—thin as a whisper in a storm that had forgotten what silence meant.Then the light spat her out.Not onto ground. Not into air.But into something living.Something that breathed through light. Something whose pulse was a rhythm older than the first Gate. Something that should not have been able to hold a mortal body—Except she wasn’t quite mortal anymore.Elaria gasped.The world around her reacted instantly.A wave of pale gold rippled beneath her, a surface that shimmered like water but burned like memory. Figures—half-formed, half-remembered—moved within the depths: faces she knew, faces she had lost, faces she had created in the marrow of her grief.Kael.Draven.Kael again, but

Light swallowed her.Not the soft, forgiving glow of healing magic—no, this was a vertical detonation, a column pulled upward like the spine of a god being torn open. It roared through her bones, through her breath, through the most fragile edges of her name. Elaria had no time to cry out. Her voice was stripped from her in the first heartbeat. Her shadow in the second.And in the third—Kael and Draven’s hands vanished.The last thing she saw of them was not their faces, not their eyes, not even the shapes they wore after the world shattered—just the impression of reach, of desperation, of two wills trying to reclaim her from the impossible.Then the light took everything.She rose without meaning to rise.She ascended without choosing to ascend.She became weightless, formless, unheld.**The column of light was not light at all.It was memory, liquefied. It was the Vale, rewritten. It was a mouth swallowing her whole.At first, she could hear nothing. Then, slowly—too slowly—the sil

Aria didn’t hit the ground.She didn’t hit anything.She just kept falling—through heat, through shadow, through an endless roar like the belly of a burning world screaming.The volcanic light above shrank into a thin, trembling slit. The last thing she saw was Auren’s face—his, not the god’s—twisted in terror as he reached for her and failed.Then it all went dark.And then—Not dark.Alive.Hands—cold, ancient, whisper-thin—wrapped around Aria’s wrists.Her descent stopped so abruptly her bones rattled. She hung suspended in a void that rippled like liquid shadow, the air humming with something older than realms.Aria sucked in a breath, but it felt like inhaling frost and embers at the same time.“What—” she choked out.The hands drew her closer.A shape emerged. First eyes—silver, vertical-pupiled, glowing like cracks through eternity. Then cheekbones sharp enough to cut, hair like drifting starlight, skin the color of moonstone fractured by veins of black fire.The being wasn’t b

The world snapped back together around Aria like a ribcage closing.Stone. Heat. Darkness.Then—light. Blistering, furious light.Aria sucked in a broken gasp as she materialized on her hands and knees atop jagged volcanic rock, the ground pulsing with internal fire. Her skin smoked where it touched the surface, the scent of scorched flesh stinging her nose. Her ears rang. Her vision refused to settle.The realm hadn’t merely shifted.It screamed.Wind knifed past her face—sulfurous, hot, screaming with the faint, endless whispers of thousands of captured souls. A cracked, bleeding sky stretched overhead, red fissures racing across it like frantic veins.And Auren’s god-possessed silhouette dropped out of the air behind her.No, not Auren.The god wearing him.His features were too still, too carved, too empty even in their rage. The eyes glowed molten-gold, brighter than the volcanic vents erupting around them. His body flickered with seams of divine light, like something much bigger

The earth swallowed Kael.Not like a pit opening—no.Like a mouth closing.I threw myself forward, nails tearing against glowing runes, but the ground sealed over him with a pulse that shook my marrow. The throb beneath my palms was no longer a heartbeat.It was a countdown.His scream still echoed through the collapsing cavern—human, wolf, and divine layered into a sound that ripped my soul in half.“KAEL!” I shouted, slamming both fists into the floor.The runes flickered weakly under my touch, but they didn’t break. They didn’t respond. As if this place—this realm beneath realms—had already chosen its master.And that master was dragging Kael into himself.I forced myself to my feet, breath shaking. The cavern stretched in every direction—a hollow world of white light and pulsing symbols—but now the glow felt sickened, like veins infected with shadow.A whisper traveled through the chamber, brushing the back of my neck.“Aria…”Kael’s voice—thin, distant, drowned in static.My hear

Aria hit the ground with a bone-rattling crack of light.It wasn’t stone she landed on.It wasn’t earth.It wasn’t any surface she could name.It felt like falling onto a heartbeat.The floor throbbed beneath her, slow and colossal, like the pulse of something ancient sleeping beneath layers of reality. Her breath tore from her lungs. The chamber above—the one with Auren, the god, the spectral wolves—was gone.No ceiling.No walls.Just a vast, endless expanse bathed in dim white glow, as though she stood inside the chest cavity of a god.Aria groaned and pushed herself up.A cold wind swept across her skin, carrying the scent of…Wolves.Stars.Ash.Memory.She stood slowly, turning in a slow circle.The ground was engraved with thousands of overlapping runes, some glowing faintly, some dead. They resembled constellations carved into the flesh of the world. And as she stepped forward, the runes brightened beneath her feet, reacting to her presence.Her pulse skyrocketed.“Where am I?

The Chamber of the LostAria spun toward the slamming doors——and the name on her tongue died before it reached her lips.Standing in the doorway…Bruised.Bleeding.Barely upright.Breathing like every inhale was a war he was losing—AUREN.The real one.Not the god wearing his face.Not the echo that chased her across collapsing realms.This was him—her Auren—with his golden skin ashen, his wolf flickering like a dying flame behind his eyes, and his body swaying as if held up by sheer rage and the bond alone.“A–Auren?”Her voice cracked.He staggered one step forward, gripping the doorframe as if he might fold to the ground without it.“Aria,” he rasped, relief breaking over his face like sunrise through storm. “You’re—you’re alive. I felt you fall. I—”His knees buckled.Aria lunged and caught him before he hit the floor. His body slumped against her, too warm, too fragile, trembling violently. She gathered him close, hands hovering everywhere—his jaw, his chest, the side of his n

The Fall Between RealmsAria did not fall—she was ripped downward, dragged through layers of collapsing reality like a stone hurled through stained glass.The realms shattered around her.Shards of places she recognized—forests, moonscapes, oceans suspended in sky—fractured into bright splinters that cut across her skin as she tumbled through them. Her magic screamed, unraveling, recoiling, reforming, fighting to shield her from the collapse.Too fast—too many pieces—too much power—But none of that terror compared to the thing diving after her.Auren’s face.A god’s hunger.One single purpose: her.“Aria.”The voice was wrong. It carried Auren’s cadence, Auren’s softness—but beneath it throbbed a vastness, a cold, ancient timbre that rattled through the dimensions splitting around them.She twisted mid-fall.The god wearing Auren’s body was behind her, arms outstretched, gold eyes pulsing with something vast and starved.Not love.Possession.Not mate-bond.Claim.He was gaining on h