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CHAPTER 111

Author: ANNA COLLINS
last update Last Updated: 2025-08-04 23:27:42

1: The Road to Ashen Cradle

We left the Spiral Keep at first light, the air sharp with the scent of burning pine. The sky still bore streaks of smoke from the Hollowed Flame’s advance in the west, casting everything in a haze of crimson and ash. I rode beside Rafael, both of us cloaked in leathers etched with protection sigils by the Keepers. Behind us, a small battalion of elite guards trailed silently, their eyes scanning every tree and stone.

But it wasn’t the threat of battle that haunted me it was the pull.

The Spiral still hummed in my veins. And the mark below my collarbone the one shaped like a spiral wreathed in fire pulsed as if alive, leading me east. Toward the Ashen Cradle. Toward answers we couldn’t yet name.

“What do you think we’ll find there?” I asked Rafael, who hadn’t spoken in some time.

“If the Ember Archives are real, then perhaps truth. Maybe even a way to stop what’s coming.”

“And if they’re not?”

He met my gaze. “Then we burn trying.”

We camped briefly in
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  • Rejected by the lycan king   CHAPTER 121

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  • Rejected by the lycan king   CHAPTER 120

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  • Rejected by the lycan king   CHAPTER 119

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  • Rejected by the lycan king   CHAPTER 118

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  • Rejected by the lycan king   CHAPTER 117

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  • Rejected by the lycan king   CHAPTER 116

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