Se connecterSeven DaysWe gathered that night in the library, exhausted, and I found myself looking around the circle with a heaviness I hadn't carried since the morning after the mourning flower first appeared on my pillow."We need a plan for if the wards fail before the eclipse," Kieran said, once everyone had settled, his voice steady despite the exhaustion pulling at the corners of his eyes. "Not a hopeful assumption that they'll hold. A real plan.""If they fail early," Akira said, "the covenant collapses unmanaged, the way the chaos faction wants. Whatever waits on the other side arrives without any of the preparation we've spent weeks building.""Then we accelerate," I said. "If there's any chance the wards fail before the eclipse actually arrives, we can't afford to wait for the exact astronomical moment Mireille's notes described.""That's dangerous," Kaiden said. "The release clause requires the eclipse's peak specifically. Acting outside that window might mean the clause simply doesn'
The Chaos Faction Shows ItselfIt found us on the seventh day, not the eighth, arriving a full day sooner than any of us had braced for, which was, I understood later, exactly the point.I was in the training yard alone at dawn, my palm pressed against the dead oak, the crack in its bark now wide enough that I could fit two fingers into the gap if I wanted to.The ground beneath my feet shuddered, once, hard enough that I stumbled and caught myself against the trunk. A heartbeat later, a second tremor followed, deeper this time. I heard, distant but unmistakable, the sound of stone cracking somewhere beyond the castle walls, a low, grinding groan that seemed to travel through the earth itself."Rory!" Kieran's voice, sharp with alarm, carrying across the yard as he sprinted toward me, half-dressed, clearly roused from sleep by the same tremor, his bare feet careless against the frost-hardened grass."I'm fine," I said, though my heart was hammering, my hand still pressed flat against
Eight DaysWe rode back to the castle in a silence heavier than the one we'd carried leaving it, and I spent the journey turning Shane's warning over from every angle I could manage, trying to fit it against everything the Keepers had already shown us, the ledger's two hands, Wren's gentle warning to Priya decades ago, the strange, patient cruelty of watching generations suffer without intervening, the whole shape of it too large to hold steady in my mind all at once."Do you believe him," Kieran asked, once we'd settled back in the library, the others gathered close around the long table, waiting to hear what had passed at the gate, Priya still pale from the morning's news, Elara sitting close beside her."I believe he believes it," I said carefully. "Whether Wren told him the truth, or told him a version calculated to serve some purpose we haven't guessed yet, I can't say for certain. But I don't think he was lying about how it felt, learning he'd been used.""A divided faction of a
The Gate at DuskKieran refused, at first, to let me go alone, and I refused, in turn, to bring the full circle to a meeting Shane had specifically framed as private, and we spent the better part of an afternoon negotiating a compromise neither of us was fully satisfied with, both of us arguing our positions with the particular stubbornness that came from caring too much about the outcome to simply defer. In the end, Kieran and Akira came with me, the rest of the circle holding position at the tunnel entrance, close enough to reach us quickly if the meeting turned into something worse than words, though I noticed Victor had insisted on scouting the approach himself an hour before we left, unwilling to trust the path to secondhand reports alone.We approached the gate slowly as dusk began to settle, the last light of the day bleeding orange across the black river behind it, staining the water the color of something molten. Kieran stopped us a good distance out, his eyes moving methodic
Nine DaysThe peace didn't last. It never did in this story, and some tired, wiser part of me had stopped expecting it to by the time the guard came pounding on the library door the next morning, breathless, his face carrying the particular gray of a man who'd ridden hard through the night, his boots still tracking mud across the threshold in his haste to deliver the news before he'd even caught his breath fully."Alpha," he gasped, finding Kieran already on his feet, the two of us having risen early to continue the training we'd fallen into a routine of these past weeks. "A rider came through the northern checkpoint an hour ago. Says he carries a message from Alpha Gledova, meant for Rory directly.""Bring him in," Kieran said, though I could hear the wariness threading through the order, his hand finding the small of my back in an unconscious, protective gesture he'd stopped bothering to hide from anyone weeks ago.We gathered in the library within minutes, the whole circle assembli
Ten DaysWe gathered in the library that evening, all seven of us, and I found myself looking around at each face with a different understanding than I'd carried even a week before, Victor's guilt now spoken aloud and settling into something steadier, Marcus's quiet confession still waiting for its moment with his father, Kaiden's old hesitation finally named instead of buried, a small pile of ash still faintly visible on the courtyard stones outside where we'd burned Mireille's map together only an hour before."I want to say something," I told them, once the evening's usual planning had wound down, Akira's charts and Mireille's notes spread across the table between us. "Not about the eclipse. About us. The Keepers warned that doubt fractures the circle. I've spent the last several days watching some of that doubt come loose, and I think it's made all of us stronger, even though it didn't feel that way in the moment.""Then let's finish it properly," Elara said. "Before the eclipse
CHAPTER 5.He killed her.My body froze in shock, as I was suddenly being pulled away by some mighty hands. Swiftly, I was picked up like a piece of trash, and thrown into a large black van, which resembled an ambulance. Then, the journey began.As I sat behind that van in darkness, the wave of un
CHAPTER 4.Claimed by the mortuary attendant.The stench of decayed smell suddenly hit my nostrils. It was just so much to ignore. As I tried to open my eyes, I felt a direct sharp pain directly at the back of my head. Just then, the dawn of realization hit me."Where am I?" I mumbled in weakness.
CHAPTER 3.As I ran back to my abode with a heavy heart, the thoughts of what surrounded me seemed to overwhelm me. It felt like there was a big eye which was watching all my movements. "Run... Run... Run...!" My inner wolf growled from the inside, and I melted down in fear. This was just the seco
CHAPTER TWO.I was woken up by the sharp ray of sunlight directly on my eyes. "Are you okay?" I heard a blurry voice, and as I made to lift up my head, I felt a sharp ache on my head. My head was really hurting."Where am I?" I asked with an overwhelmed voice. "Stay still, Rory..." I heard Becky







