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Before the Queen: 34
Last Updated:
2025-05-11 00:04:13
Latest chapter
Bloodied Ashes Blood in the Wilds: 6
Lira (POV)The trees begin to thin, just enough to see the sky between their ribs.Twilight bleeds soft across the branches, dulling everything to bone-blue and silver. But I don’t need light to know what waits ahead. I can smell it.Smoke. Tannins. Old soap clinging to worn wool. The faintest edge of singed fur. All of it layered in a way that isn’t fresh. It’s not a fire burning now—it’s one that never fully went out. One that lives in walls. In clothes. In breath.My stomach turns. Not hard. Just enough to make my stride falter for half a second.Kael slows behind me. I don’t hear it in his steps—he doesn’t make any. I feel it in his breath. Just a beat of air pulled short.I don’t turn.The tether pulses once between us. Not urgent. Not angry. But... off. Warped in the way scent gets after too much blood has dried on the same stone.There’s a village up ahead. I see it now—low huts, wood-smoked and sagging in places, clustered tight like they’re bracing against the wind. A single
Bloodied Ashes Blood in the Wilds: 5
Kael (POV)The fire is out, but she still glows.Not with heat. Not with light.With something older. Something that doesn’t belong to her, but clings like it does.Lira sleeps twisted near the hearth, breath fogging in thin bursts, her body curled around the ache in her leg. Her face is slack, her lips slightly parted, and she has a smear of ash on her cheekbone. But it’s not the blood or the bruises that hold me still.It’s the mark.The spiral burned beneath her collarbone hasn’t faded. If anything, it’s brighter in the dark—glowing just faint enough to make it worse. Faint enough to be real. Not a scar. Not healed. Still living in her skin like it wants to speak.I don’t reach for it.I watch it.Trace it with my eyes, the way I would a ward I don’t understand.It pulses once.I feel it in the tether.And for a breath, I’m back there again— In the Queen’s war room. Her seal still wet on parchment. My mate’s voice behind me, ragged and screaming. Ash in my mouth. Blood on my b
Bloodied Ashes Blood in the Wilds: 4
Lira (POV)Morning doesn’t come. It bleeds in slow, gray and heavy. The outpost feels hollowed—emptied of something we didn’t see leave.Light doesn’t arrive. It seeps. Cold and dull and gray. I sit up slow, not rested—just... not unconscious anymore. My back aches from the floor. My leg’s worse—stiff with dried blood and something grinding beneath the skin. The fire’s long gone, just coals now, dull and bruised. Kael hasn’t moved from where he sat. Not asleep. Not exactly awake. Just… still. Watching the door like it might start breathing.We don’t speak. But the tether stirs faintly when I shift—warmth brushing against my ribs like it’s checking I’m still here. I ignore it and push myself upright, palms pressed to stone that feels too warm in places again. Wrong in a way that doesn’t leave bruises, only questions.We don’t stay long.Kael rises first. Rolls his shoulders like he’s shaking off something heavier than frost. He doesn’t offer to help. Doesn’t touch me. But he waits—jus
Bloodied Ashes Blood in the Wilds: 3
Lira (POV) The tether thrums behind me, and I hear the slow creak of Kael sinking down near the doorframe. Not inside. Not quite. Still guarding the threshold. His presence presses against the edge of the ruin, heavy as a storm cloud that hasn’t made up its mind. I don’t thank him. He doesn’t ask for it. I lean toward the hearth and press my hands against the stone—just to stay upright. It’s cold. But not dead. I move deeper on instinct, dragging my hand along the stone. The wall feels strange beneath my fingers—warm in places, pulsing in others. I find a mark near the hearth. A carved sigil, deep and soot-streaked, hidden beneath rot. I press my palm flat to it. Something under my ribs flinches. The tether tightens—sharp, sudden. He felt that. I pull away. Near it, a scrap of charcoal still clings to a slat of wood nailed to the post. A drawing, childlike, almost faded into nothing. A wolf. A handprint. A name that’s been rubbed away until it’s just scratches. And beside i
Bloodied Ashes Blood in the Wilds: 2
Lira (POV)The snow swallows Kael’s footsteps faster than I can follow them.I drag my weight through the trench he leaves, my feet scraping where they should be stepping, half my balance riding on fury and frostbitten adrenaline. My thigh feels like it’s been stitched together wrong. Every time I put weight on it, it sings. Sharp, bitter music through torn nerves and cracked bone.We don’t speak.I don’t ask where we’re going. He doesn’t offer.The trees begin to thin—just slightly. Enough that the silence changes. Less suffocating, more… watchful. The air here feels wrong in a different way. Not blood wrong. Not Pit wrong.Older.I feel it first in the tether. A twist. A pull. Not from Kael. From the place.It’s up ahead—a shape hunched beneath a drooping slope of earth and snow, half-buried in ash and roots. At first, I think it’s just another ruin. Then I see the stonework. The arch. The symbols burned into the exposed beams—barely legible under rot and time.The symbols don’t jus
Bloodied Ashes Blood in the Wilds: 1
Lira (POV)The blood on the snow isn’t mine—not all of it. But it steams like it knows me. Like it wants to crawl back into my skin.I wake mid-shift, my body bent wrong, bones caught between what I was and what they tried to make me. My spine arches halfway into something feral, and its angle makes my vision split. One side is red. One side is black. My teeth are still too long for my jaw. My hands end in claws that don’t belong to this shape.I taste copper on my tongue and ash in the back of my throat. The moon’s gone, but its burn still crawls across my skin like frostbite under the ribs.The snow beneath me is packed with footprints—mine, Kael’s, something else. It’s blood-crusted and scorched where I thrashed. I don’t remember stopping.My chest heaves once, twice. Then, the tether pulls tight.It doesn’t tug like a leash.It pulses—warm and wrong—inside my sternum like a second heartbeat. Not just around me, not even beside me. It’s in me. It’s laced through my ribs, snared in
Bloodied Ashes Before the Queen: 34
Kael (POV)She’s not screaming anymore, not because the pain stopped but because it claimed her.The snow around her is steaming. Her skin is splitting in places it shouldn’t. The silver in her scars pulses like a curse trying to crawl out. Something not wolf-born. Magic that tastes wrong tastes old. Not feral, not divine.But familiar.Blood Queen.The Wilds recoil like they remember what bled from her line the last time it rose.I stand motionless, staring at her eyes, which beg not to be taken by it. My wolf thrashes inside me, not out of fear or pity but understanding.It’s not her magic that’s breaking her, but the way it was forcefully given and awoken—the way it never asked.I step to the edge of the circle, and the wards hiss against the air like they know what’s next.I let go. I let the shift take me.It doesn’t hurt, not for me. It slips over me like breath into my lungs as my shoulders roll wide, bones extend, fur black as soot spilling over my skin, swallowing scars and f
Bloodied Ashes Before the Queen: 33
Kael (POV)I smell it before I see it.The Wilds shift around us, something so subtle that most wouldn’t notice. The trees stop breathing, and the winds go still. Frost curls across the ground in shapes too deliberate to be natural, feathered like fangs dragging through powder.Somewhere behind us, the birds go silent mid-call, even the crows.She doesn’t stir yet, but I can feel it in the tether. Tightening.I climb the ridge alone; snow crunches beneath my boots, and my breath mists slow and steady. But it’s not the cold that makes me pause; it’s the weight in the air. Heavy, ancient, like the forest is holding its breath, waiting for something old to wakeThe moon crests the trees; it’s full and as red as spilled blood. “She’s going to change,” I murmur, my voice flat.Not a question, not a hope, but a certainty carved in bone. This isn’t her first shift, but this is her first Blood Moon since her magic has woken. That’s different and worse.Shifters born of blood feel the pull and
Bloodied Ashes Before the Queen: 32
Kael (POV)She wakes like she means to kill me.No warning. No breath. Just violence.Her fist slams into my shoulder before her eyes even open. Solid hit. Good form. Would’ve floored someone weaker.But I’m not someone weaker.She lunges. Snarling. Clawing. The tether snaps taut between us. Her nails rake my chest. Blood beads. I don’t stop her.Her bite’s still weeping on my shoulder. My ribs bruise where her elbow landed. I let it happen. Let her write fury into my skin like a vow.She knocks me against the hearth. Stone bites my spine. Doesn’t matter. She needs this. Needs to fight something she can touch.I let her—for a second.Then I move.She doesn’t expect fast. Not from someone built like a wall. I flip her. Press her into the stone. One knee pins her hips. One hand on her wrists. The other—The other waits.She thrashes beneath me. Teeth flashing. Elbow jamming into my ribs.Doesn’t matter.I don’t blink. Don’t speak.Let her scream. Let her spit in my face.I can take all
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