LOGINAuthor The night arrived slowly to the Lannister estate, not in darkness, in a reddish hush, deep and heavy and quail-like, as though the air itself were waiting.The clouds were thin to-night, and on them the Blood Moon was swollen and looming above the treeline. Its color leaked over the windows, and the marble floors were blazed with rust. Three souls kept their house sleeping, but hearing this same beat of feet coming nearer.RainRain woke to fire.The dream was as sticky as ash to her skin, Kol was on his knees, his chest stabbed through by a black spear, and behind him stood Emory, with his eyes flaming gold.She jumped and sat up, her flesh covered with sweat. It was a heartbeat though she fancied that despite the dream the dream had pursued her into reality and that her room was dimly lit in red, the blood-coloured sky in her dream.Her pulse stuttered. The air was wrong. Heavy. Watching.Her legs fell out of the bed and she walked to the window. The glass was cold, and as s
AgathaI had always thought that punishment was over when the judgment was pronounced, that, when my sins had been pronounced, the burden would be taken off my shoulders. But I was wrong. Punishment didn't end. It simply changed shape.Mercy had been called by the Council. That was what they said that morning when they took me before them the last time, chained at the wrists, with guards to watch me, who shuddered were I to snort too loudly. The atmosphere in the room was full of incense and hypocrisy. Mercy, they said, because I had once been Kol Lannister’s mate. Mercy, because I had children. Mercy, because the family was already too broken to bear another death.So I was to live, but only within the walls of my room. Guarded, watched, whispered about. Mercy tasted a lot like exile.When they sent me back to the outer estate, I didn’t cry. I think I had run out of tears weeks ago, somewhere between betrayal and blood. Now, I only felt the dull ache of survival. The kind that
AuthorWhen morning came, it was red even through the mist that clung to the hills around the Lannister estate. From the looks of it all, it hdd as painted the white marble halls with a dash of rose and ash. And if anyone saw what was happening, it seemed like a quiet warning that something in the world was shifting, a balance tipping too far to be pulled back.Inside her room, Rain had not slept. Her journal lay open on the windowsill next to her, filled with drawings she couldn't remember making, sigils, faces, things that seemed more at home in the firelight than the daylight. She saw that some of the lines were written in her hand, and some were written in a script she didn't recognize at all.She continued to stare at them until she noticed her reflection in the window. It wasn't as if she had been trying to see herself. Staring into the reflection, she didn't recognize her own face; the girl looking back at her was no longer hollow, her hair hung loosely around her framed face,
KolI sat beneath the holographic crest of the Lannister pack projected at its center like a dying star, with my cane at my side, surrounded by men and women who once called me Alpha.“Let’s not waste time,” Elder Kalis said, his voice a viper’s hiss disguised as civility. “The packs are restless. The rogues regroup. Our borders weaken. And you—” he gestured toward me with deliberate contempt “—can barely stand without that cane.”The murmurs swelled. A few sympathetic glances flickered my way, Sorah’s among them, but most avoided my eyes. Power made them hungry. Fear made them bold.“You would do well to remember,” I said, keeping my voice calm, deliberate, “that a cane doesn’t weaken the man who carries it. It’s what keeps him walking after everyone else falls.”Kalis smirked, leaning forward. “Poetic. But the packs need strength, not poetry.” He turned to the room. “Therefore, I propose we appoint an Alpha Regent, someone young, capable, untainted by… recent scandal.”He didn’t eve
EliasThe whispers going about in the council wasn’t new. Infact, the news spread among us like mould left to rot in the corner of a house.I had been summoned under the pretense of a “private consultation,” though I knew better. Nothing in the Council of Elders happened privately anymore. Every word spoken here had an audience, seen or unseen.When I came into the chamber, it was dark. Robed elders sat silent in half a circle, with the odor of incense heavy in the air. The person who looked back at me was Sorah, composed, stable, one of the few remaining who had not yet sold her soul to politics. I mean, she learnt a great deal of a lesson after the last stunt she pulled.“Sit down, Elias,” she said, gesturing for me to sit. “Thank you for coming. We won’t keep you long.”Her tone told me otherwise.Kalis wasn’t here, which meant this wasn’t official. It was worse.Sorah leaned forward. “The Council is splitting. Some want to call for Kol’s removal. Others think a… transition of lea
RainSeveral hours had not elapsed when I fell asleep when the whisper started once again.At first it was a low murmur which I might have sworn was the wind but it was not the wind. It was inside me."Blood remembers."I was sitting in bed with a heaving chest. The moonlight streaming over my room had changed to pale gold and not silver, and this soft fire covered the walls. I glimpsed at my hands, my palms were heated again. It was not a flicker, but a living, throbbing light that was crawling under the flesh like rivers of molten sunshine.My heart thundered. I leaned my two palms on the mirror facing my bed. It was as though my fingers were touching water troubled by a rock. My reflection was flicking, and my eyes were not gray, but gold. It was not me looking back, at least, for a moment.It was her. The woman from my dreams. It was he who talked to me of smoke and ash.“Blood remembers,” she whispered again, my mouth moving a fraction before mine.I fell backward and struck the







