Se connecterāThe departure of Kaelen and Elara to the Crystalline Silence was not a death, but to the Blackwood Pack, it felt like the sun had been extinguished. For eighteen years, the Manor had been the center of the supernatural universe. Now, it was a hollowed-out monument of marble and memories.āI stood at the head of the long table in the War Roomāthe same room where my mother had once faced down Silas Vane and the Ghost Council. I, Aero Thorne, was now the Alpha of the South, but as I looked at the empty seat beside me where Lyra should have been sitting, I felt less like a King and more like a boy holding a live grenade.āThe room was filled with the scents of agitated wolves. Varick, now aged and scarred but still as stubborn as a mountain, sat to my left. To my right were the new leaders of the coastal packsāmen and women who had grown up on stories of my parents' divinity and were now looking for any sign of weakness in their son.ā"The border skirmishes in the East are not stopping,
The eighteenth birthday of the Thorne twins was not marked by a ball or a debut. There were no invitations sent to the neighboring packs, and no celebratory bonfires lit the hills of the Blackwood estate. Instead, Thorne Manor was under a state of total atmospheric lockdown.I stood in the center of the subterranean reinforced chamberāa room my father had designed for high-energy physics, now repurposed as a spiritual grounding rod. The walls were lined with lead and silver, etched with every ward I had learned across a thousand lives. At the center of the room, Aero and Lyra sat back-to-back.They were no longer children. Aero had grown into a mirror image of Kaelenābroad-shouldered, golden-eyed, and radiating a heat that made the air shimmer. Lyra was my shadowāslight, ethereal, with hair that seemed to float in a gravity-free pocket, her eyes a deep, swirling violet that looked like the birth of a nebula."The alignment is in ten minutes," Kaelen said, his voice tight. He stood by
The years following the sealing of the Mirror Well were supposed to be a time of peace, a golden era for the Blackwood Pack. But peace is often just a mask for a different kind of war. While the world outside our borders began to forget the "Year of the Black Moon," Thorne Manor became a fortress of secrets. We had traded the overt horror of the Hollowed for the insidious rot of a conspiracy that refused to die.I stood in the center of the grand library, the air thick with the scent of old parchment and the electric ozone that always seemed to follow me now. My hair, once pure white, was now a striking marble of snow and shadowāthe black streaks serving as a permanent map of the void I had anchored. I was thirty-five now, but in the reflection of the dark wood paneling, I looked exactly as I had the day I walked out of the Still-Lands. The immortality of the Luna was no longer a blessing; it was a static, unchanging prison."They're moving again, Elara," Kaelen said, stepping into th
The silence that followed the sealing of the Mirror Well was more deafening than the roar of the void had been. It was a vacuum of sound, a heavy, pressurized stillness that felt as though the world itself was holding its breath, waiting to see if the patch would hold. I lay in the snow, my head cradled in Kaelenās lap, watching the sky. The black ring around the moon had vanished, but the stars that remained seemed sharper, colder, and somehow closer than they had ever been before.My body felt like an empty cathedral. The roaring fire of the lunar energy that had defined my existence for a thousand lifetimes had been dampened, replaced by a strange, humming resonance. I was no longer just a vessel of the moon; I was the anchor of a bridge. I could feel the weight of the solid diamond pillar behind meāthe physical manifestation of my will and my childrenās powerāand I knew that as long as my heart beat, that door would remain shut."Don't you ever do that again," Kaelen whispered, hi
The descent into the valley felt like walking into the throat of a dying god. The air here was thin and tasted of copper, and the aurora borealis overhead had stopped dancing; it hung like jagged, frozen shards of obsidian and violet glass.At the center of the valley lay the Mirror Well. It wasn't a well made of stone, but a massive, circular depression in the earth where the ground had turned to liquid mercury. It reflected the black-ringed moon with a clarity that was terrifyingābecause the reflection wasn't of our world. In the silver liquid, I could see a version of the valley that was dead, frozen, and ruled by a sky of endless stars."This is it," Kaelen whispered, his hand resting on the hilt of his broadsword. The runes on the blade were glowing a frantic, warning red. "The intersection."The Manifestation of the VoidAs we approached the edge, the liquid mercury began to churn. From the depths, a shape rose. It wasn't the "Mother" as I remembered herāthe violet-eyed parasite
The Still-Lands didnāt just absorb sound; they absorbed hope. As the Silas-puppet unhinged its jaw, the hundreds of Hollowed behind him began to vibrate, a collective humming that set my teeth on edge. It was the sound of a vacuum trying to fill itself with our very souls."Form a circle!" Kaelen roared.The Blackwood elite and Varickās Northern warriors snapped into a defensive perimeter, a ring of fur and steel centered around me and the twins. But the Hollowed weren't interested in the soldiers. They moved with a hive-mind fluidity, ignoring the swords and claws, flowing toward the center like ink toward a blotter."Aero, Lyraāhold onto me," I commanded.The Shattered GeometryThe Silas-thing lunged. He didn't run; he folded space. One moment he was thirty yards away, the next he was a blur of shadow inches from my face. Kaelen intercepted him mid-air, his massive jaws locking onto the creature's shoulder.There was no blood. Instead, a cloud of black vapor erupted from the wound,







