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Chapter 20: The Quiet Between Storms
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2025-12-13 03:34:43
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A Veil of Ash and Glass Chapter 23: The Weight That Answered Back
The realm did not welcome Luca. It did not repel him either. It existed around him with the disinterest of something ancient that did not care whether he endured.Silver stretched in every direction, neither solid nor fluid, rippling slowly as if responding to a tide he could not see. Above him, the sky held no sun, no moon—only a lattice of stars affixed too precisely to be natural.When he finally found his bearings, he realized that they were not stars. They were eyes. Observing.Luca inhaled carefully. The air felt thin and metallic, as if breathing along a blade’s edge. Each breath scraped. Each exhale fogged and fell instead of rising, gravity behaving as if someone had rewritten it mid-thought.He flexed his hand.They trembled, not from fear but from the residual pain from the tearing pull that had ripped him from Althea.But the bond still burned. Not comforting. Not reassuring. It was like a live wire that stretched through his chest, humming with distance and strain. When h
A Veil of Ash and Glass Chapter 22: What The Gods Failed to Measure
Luca was gone. Not erased. Not severed, gone as if a door slammed too hard for the frame to survive.The bond still burned through Althea’s chest, stretched thin across something vast and hostile, pulled so tight it hummed. Umbra braced against her leg when her knees buckled, his weight immovable, his presence the only thing in the clearing that did not retreat from her.The forest already had.Trees leaned away as if her shadow carried consequences. Leaves hung suspended, unwilling to fall. Even the light came through cautiously fractured, as though it had learned the cost of touching her without permission.Althea dragged in a breath and tasted iron.Good.Pain meant orientation.She forced herself upright, one hand fisted in Umbra’s fur, the other pressed flat to her sternum where the bond pulsed like a live wire. It wasn’t absence she felt; it was tension.Pressure.A system under strain.“She called it physics,” Althea said quietly, to no one. “Like that made it justifiable.”Umb
A Veil of Ash and Glass Chapter 21: The Door the Gods Closed
The forest knew before they did. It held itself wrong.Branches leaned away from the clearing, leaves suspended as if waiting for a command they did not want to hear. Even the light felt reluctant, thinning through the canopy like it might be punished for touching her.Umbra stood pressed to Althea’s leg, whining low in his chest. Not fear. Warning.Althea felt it too. A pressure behind her eyes. A tightness in her ribs that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with inevitability.They were alone.Truly alone.Luca stood a few feet away, hands loose at his sides, posture deceptively relaxed in the way of a man who knew a blade was coming and refused to flinch first. His gaze never left her face.“You’re shaking,” he said quietly.She hadn’t realized she was.“I’m fine,” she answered automatically, then stopped herself.The lie tasted wrong. Useless. “No. I’m not.”Umbra nudged her leg again, harder this time, as if insisting she stop pretending.She exhaled, slow and care
A Veil of Ash and Glass Chapter 20: The Quiet Between Storms
The woods had not recovered from dawn. Branches leaned away from her as if afraid. Birds stayed quiet. Even the wind refused to touch her. The world was holding its breath in a way that made her chest ache.Althea sat on the porch steps with Umbra’s head on her lap, her thumb brushing the warm fur between his eyes. She didn’t speak. She didn’t trust her voice.Umbra nudged her hand again.“You’re worried,” she whispered.The dog huffed, offended by the understatement.She leaned her forehead against his. Her magic—exhausted and frayed—stirred miserably under her skin.“You felt it too,” she murmured. “When I—when it happened.”Umbra whined, low and heartbroken.Tears stung her eyes.Because he had felt it. He’d felt her choose someone else.Not over him—but over everything else she had ever been taught to need, obey, and fear.Her fingers curled tighter into his fur.“I’m sorry, mahal,” she breathed. “I didn’t mean for it to be real.”Umbra licked her cheek, strong and forgiving.She
A Veil of Ash and Glass Chapter 19: The Storm That Answered
The storm was not the first thing to feel Althea’s binding with Luca.Far above the Ashford woods, where clouds churned like bruised flesh across the sky, the moon should have been hidden. Instead, it glowed.Not bright. Not soft.Alive.A slow, deliberate pulse of silver light beat through the cloud cover as a giant heart thumped behind the storm.The pulse traveled outward—through the sky, through trembling branches, through the damp earth—and into a cavern older than the first whispered name for “god.”In the cavern, surrounded by fossils of forgotten creatures and the glitter of minerals no mortal language could name, a woman made of moonlight opened her eyes. A forgotten god.Mayari exhaled.Her breath frosted the air. Water froze. Shadow straightened.Her silver hair floated behind her as if suspended in the night sky itself. Skin like a polished pearl glowed faintly in the darkness. Her eyes were eclipses—deep, devouring, luminous.Something has woken her from her slumber. Not
A Veil of Ash and Glass Chapter 17: The Breaking Point
The penthouse felt unnaturally still, as if the air were holding its breath.Althea paced along the windows in restless circuits, Umbra following her with quiet, anxious whines.Afternoon sank into dusk, the sky bruising violet and gold as the city lit itself window by window. Every horn, every low rumble, and every distant footstep in the hallway tightened the muscles across her shoulders.Luca had been gone for hours.Her father’s silence was dangerous.Laurent’s panic was worse.But the look Luca wore when he left—the quiet, blazing promise behind his eyes—was the one she couldn’t shake.She dragged the sleeve of his hoodie over her fingers, trying to draw something calm out of the faint trace of his cologne. Umbra nudged her knee.“I know,” Althea whispered. “He should’ve been back by now.”Umbra huffed and padded toward the door before circling back again, mirroring her tension.Time crawled.The city settled into the night.Her heartbeat climbed steadily with it.Then the lock c
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