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CHAPTER 107: Ash and Breath

Author: Myra TUC
last update Last Updated: 2025-09-13 16:05:23

The grass bent beneath us, damp with dew, cold enough to sting against my burns. I pressed Kieran tighter to my chest, as if the earth itself might rise to claim him if I loosened my grip. His skin was clammy, his breaths shallow, his fire dim but alive. That word ”Alive” alone was enough to keep me from breaking apart.

The girl sat slumped a few feet away, her knees pulled to her chest, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Dirt streaked her face, and blood still slicked the gouges on her ankle where the roots had torn her. In the moonlight, she looked almost hollow, like a candle burned too long.

But there was no time for collapse.

The whisper had followed us.

It coiled through the clearing, slipping over bark and leaf, brushing the back of my neck like a thousand breaths exhaled at once. Not words, not fully, but promise. The forest was patient. The forest was endless. And it would wait until Kieran faltered, until I faltered, to swallow us whole.

I swallowed hard, forcing streng
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  • THE LAST SHIFT: A Werewolf without a Wolf    CHAPTER 123: The Echoes of Chains

    The air in the hollowness changed again, not with fire this time, not with ash but with listening. As if all branches, every sprout of moss, every wolf beyond the canopy had quietened to listen to what we would choose next.I could almost feel the pressure of their waiting pressing against my chest.Kieran slowly rose, the light of the ember shimmering around him like a mantle. The girl scrambled to her feet behind us, still staring as if she was not sure if she should bow or run. I couldn’t blame her. Part of me wanted to bow too. Another part wanted to drag him back down, to hold him until I was sure he was still the boy and not only the fire.His voice broke the silence, steady with something huge. “The Root-Heart is gone. Its hold shattered. But this forest is not the only one scarred.My breath caught. “You mean… there are others.”He nodded once, slow. "Roots go deeper than we knew. We didn't have just one empty, one prison here. It was the oldest but not the only.The girl gas

  • THE LAST SHIFT: A Werewolf without a Wolf    CHAPTER 122: The Scars of Roots

    The howls of the wolves died somewhere in the canopy, and were echoed along a ridge or two, which I was not able to see. They continued to chant even after the hollow had been taken back by silence, as the last ring of a bell that was still vibrating in the air.None of us had moved for a long time. The girl was leant against the wall, and her chest sank and rose like it were hours that she had been running. The fire around Kieran was flickering, and no longer violent, nor blazing, but constant as though the spark were beginning to sleep. And me… I was torn between amazement and terror.The forest was alive. But it was also broken.New growths had been thrust everywhere through ash, green through black. But the fire had not left scars behind it. Splendid roots are torn open, zapped by centuries. Branches got entangled in hideous knots, so twisted that they will never be able to unravel.The disease had been burnt away by the fire, yes, but just like the fire it had left wounds.This

  • THE LAST SHIFT: A Werewolf without a Wolf    CHAPTER 121: What Survives

    The silence after fire was not empty.It was full.The hollow no longer groaned with rot, no longer pressed with suffocation, no longer carried the Root-Heart’s voice gnawing against marrow. Instead, it pulsed with something quieter, steadier, the hush of a forest remembering how to breathe.Ash drifted like slow snow. Each flake shimmered, caught in the rising light, before it sank into soil and vanished. Where it landed, moss stirred, vines reached, saplings unfurled tiny fingers of green. Life was not waiting, it was already coming back, cautious but insistent, the way wounds stitch themselves closed when the bleeding finally stops.The air still smelled of smoke, sharp and bitter, but underneath it something else stirred; rain, earth, resin, the scent of things mending.But the forest was not the only thing changed.Kieran stood before me, still wreathed in white fire. Yet the longer I looked, the less it looked like fire at all. It no longer flared or consumed, it drifted, soften

  • THE LAST SHIFT: A Werewolf without a Wolf    CHAPTER 120: The Breath of the Forest

    The dawn did not wait for us.It poured through the ruptured ceiling in rivers of light, striking the hollow’s ash until every grain shimmered like embers cooling on a hearth. The air smelled of both smoke and rain, scorched ruin and newborn earth. It was dissonant, fragile as though the world itself wasn’t sure yet whether it had died or been reborn.The forest exhaled.Branches high above cracked like bones being set right, groaning as they bent toward the sun. Leaves quivered, brittle at first, then softened with green as sap surged back into them. The ground heaved beneath us, roots loosening their grip, no longer strangling stone but releasing it.Kieran’s fire flared in response. Not as an attack, or as destruction, but as a language. The white blaze around us thinned, stretched, poured itself like threads of light into the cracks of bark, into the marrow of roots that had been blackened with the Root-Heart’s poison. Where it touched, rot receded. Where it lingered, life returne

  • THE LAST SHIFT: A Werewolf without a Wolf    CHAPTER 119: Ash and Dawn

    The hollow broke in its very breath. The cavern’s ceiling cracked open as if the earth itself had grown weary of harboring rot. Splinters of light spilled through fissures above, pale and trembling, like dawn remembered after endless night.The Root-Heart thrashed. What was left of its body convulsed, roots clawing into its own walls for purchase. Its once-immortal voice fractured, collapsing in on itself, a thousand syllables slurring into nothing more than a gasp.No… I am the first seed… the marrow of earth…The white fire did not answer. It consumed as answer. Each thread of flame unwound the Root-Heart’s claim, stripped it of its false eternity, until what remained wasn’t enemy, terror, or god… just a hollow knot of wood and sap, ancient but mortal at last.And still Kieran’s grip did not falter. His fire was not wild anymore; it was certain. His wings… our wings… beat slowly, steady, and relentlessly. They did not rage.The Root-Heart collapsed inward. Its sphere cracked in hal

  • THE LAST SHIFT: A Werewolf without a Wolf    CHAPTER 118: The Fire-Born

    The world did not end.It remade itself around us.The light that poured from the shattered ember was not fire as I had ever known it. It wasn’t heat or hunger, it was creation unchained. White flame flooded the hollow, each thread singing like a thousand voices braided into one, each flare carrying memory older than stone. It raced through me, through Kieran, through every crack the Root-Heart had driven into us, until I no longer knew where my body ended and the fire began.The forest screamed.Roots writhed against the blaze, their sap boiling black, their armor splintering to ash. The Root-Heart recoiled, its vast sphere quivering, veins bursting in sprays of steaming ichor. Shadows scattered like insects in a flood.And in the center of it all, Kieran’s hand gripped mine, no longer weak. His skin burned like molten gold beneath my palm, his breath no longer ragged but thunderous. His eyes snapped open, and the gold inside them was gone, replaced by fire so pure it made me flinch.

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