LOGINThere will be 2 more updates this week.
Allissa After the ridge … it was different. We traveled differently. Before it, we had been chasing her. After it, we were planning something. Everyone felt the difference. The pain from the ridge slowly faded. None of us talked about how easily we had been injured. We now understood that we were no match for Onyssa physically. Strength wasn’t our language right now … it was patience. The words Darren had growled into me on that ridge stayed where he put them. In my desperation, he was giving me his strength to hold on to. We made a celestial being, you and I. I know we did, but I didn’t have my celestial baby. And because of this, I still spiraled most evenings, but I waited and did it silently. The only reason I wasn’t breaking was because of him. I knew if I broke, he would too. We needed each other. In order to get Lyra back, we had to hold it together. Darren had started sitting with Thorin at the dusk reports, close enough that their shoulders touched, and neither of t
LyleI sent the word down myself. All clear. Come up. It’s over.Kieran came out of the doors first at a dead sprint. He saw his mother, launched off the top step, and Dayanara caught him out of the air and went down on both knees in the yard dirt to hold him. She shut her eyes and didn’t let go for a long time. My chest finally loosened, watching them.Ember came galloping out next and went straight for Gunnar, who put the little one up on his shoulder. Somewhere above us Ciera laughed, and I realized I hadn’t heard her do that since the night of the party.Gunnar watched his youngest chew on his shoulder guard and made no move to stop it. “We flew through two nights,” he told me. “We weren’t going to camp twice.”
LyleDayanara and Gunnar had been gone longer than anybody had said out loud the night they left. My mate has never once in her life come home early just to ease a man’s chest. But the sky over the southern hills stayed empty morning after morning, and I was getting anxious.I was waiting and guarding the castle. I just didn’t know what I was guarding it from.The children stayed in the heart of the castle, in the warded room with no windows and one door, where the walls hummed with everything my mate layered into them before she flew. We made it a world instead of a shelter, because children can smell the difference. Evette read to them in the mornings and Hessa kept the meals coming. The room that the crown keeps for its worst hour was filled up with blocks and blankets and children’s stories.Kieran ran the place like a very small garrison commander. He posted Ember at the door each night, which Ember understood not at all and performed beautifully, and he gave me reports when I ca
OnyssaI think about this plainly, since no one else alive is old enough to.The gods sealed their bright experiment to my kind’s own heir. A god-sealed bond is a seed, and a seed does what seeds do. In a grown pair it has roots down through everything the two of them are, and pulling it out takes the ground along with it. Their own mongrel histories teach that lesson, the throne that broke such a bond with a blade and bled for it down a hundred years of sons. But in a child the seed is new. It sits shallow, barely beneath the surface of two small hearts. The weeping sky thins the seal, the old words lift the bond out whole, and the wound closes clean because there is hardly any wound to close.That is why it must be now, while she is small. Not cruelty. Every season I wait, the roots go deeper and the kindness costs more, until on
OnyssaThe little prince growled at me.I have been threatened by gods and their weather. I stood in the first dark and watched the world learn what burning was. And on that ridge, a whelp the size of my foot put himself between me and his people, bared his milk fangs, and told the last of the First what she would not be taking, and of everything I left lying in the frost that day, he is the only part I carried home.The rest of them behaved as expected. The pup king got up twice, which I will grant him, since his line has never learned the mercy of staying down. The mother threw her small lightning at me and watched it fail. The water child built her pretty wall, and the soldier put his own body over the boy, which was the only intelligent act performed on that ridge, my own attendance included.I was careful with them. A breath, no fire, weight measured to a hair. They will ache and they will live, and someday, if any of this is ever understood, someone will notice that the monster
AllissaThat was all. Her breath rolled over us, and the world went white with cold and slammed us flat. My lightning grounded out on her scales like rain off a roof. Eira’s wall froze solid in the air and dropped on us in pieces. Squall was knocked spinning by one beat of her wing and hit the shelf hard enough to shake it. I struck the rock and lost the sky, and when I found it again Darren was mid-leap in his white lycan shape and she caught him out of the air under one talon and pinned him to the stone the way a cat pins a leaf.“Enough.”Her cold pressed down on all of us like a hand. Smoke burned like a live coal against my sternum, one point of heat in all that white.“Do you feel it now, little king?” She leaned, only slightly, and the stone cracked under my mate, and the scream tore out of me before I knew it was mine. “This is the lesson the blind one should have taught you at her pools. I was flying before your gods thought to write their rules. If I wanted your deaths, you
The months slipped away, barely recognizable, barely there, and then suddenly it was as if I’d always been alone, like it was normal to pad through the halls without Darren by my side. Calls, messages, each one fleeting, each one hurting as much as it healed. I touched the place where he should hav
AllissaI was losing the war with my own body.Every contraction hit like a meteor, atomic and intense. My knees were up, my hands curled so tight I was gouging the tender skin of my own palms. Sweat slicked my scalp, pooled in the valley of my chest, and trickled down the sides of my face in slow,
The grand ballroom of the Lycan Kingdom was wall-to-wall with every noble, dignitary, and hanger-on that the new alliance could scrape from the edges of the world.I stood at the center of it all, holding my six-month-old daughter in my arms. Lyra was heavier than she looked, which was saying someth
AllissaEira flung herself over me, her magic a last-ditch wall of icy blue, but Angelica’s attack punched right through. The pressure slammed me to the bed, pinned me by the throat, and for one long, surreal second, everything went quiet. I saw Eira on the floor, twitching but alive, her hands clam







