Library
Search
Home / Paranormal / The Blood Bound Legacy / Chapter 198: What Walks Beyond the Trees

Share

Chapter 198: What Walks Beyond the Trees

Author: Anala
last update Last Updated: 2025-05-25 08:59:35

That thought followed him as he climbed out of the tunnel, up through the spiral of stone that seemed to recognize his steps now—smoother underfoot, subtly warm, and faintly thrumming with life. Each step upward felt heavier than the one before, as if gravity itself had changed since he’d descended. Or perhaps it was simply the knowledge of what he carried now, etched in the center of his chest, humming just beneath his skin.

When he emerged into the cabin, it was still night—or something pretending to be night. The moon hung in the sky like a dull coin, washed in rust-colored haze. The trees outside the window weren’t moving, but they no longer looked still. They seemed to breathe, their branches swaying without wind, their roots whispering against the frozen ground.

Dain closed the hatch behind him and sat on the edge of the hearth. His blade, untouched, still rested on the table where he had left it. He stared at it for a long time, as if the iron might offer answers where magic ha
Continue to read this book for free
Scan code to download App
Locked Chapter
Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Latest chapter

  • The Blood Bound Legacy   Chapter 206: The Name She Buried

    Sariah stood still in the center of her chamber, though calling it a “chamber” no longer felt accurate. The place was not made of walls anymore. It breathed now, shifting, folding in upon itself, reflecting every ripple in the current of the Vein like wind stirring a still lake.She felt it before she heard it. Not a sound. Not a word. Just a decision. The Council had moved. Not against her. Not directly.But toward someone they had locked away in thought and memory, someone she hadn’t dared let herself think about in years. They had whispered a name behind closed walls, and the Vein had carried that whisper straight to her core. Not because it wanted her to stop them. Not because it favored her. But because it knew the weight that name still held within her.Her fingers curled into fists as her breath stilled. “You wouldn’t,” she murmured, though even as she said it, she knew that of course they would.Of course, Marell would.He had always known where her heart broke. And he had nev

  • The Blood Bound Legacy    Chapter 205: The Breach No Longer Ignored

    The chamber was colder than usual.Not physically, the stone walls were kept at a neutral temperature by ancient sigils carved in the mortar centuries ago. But the atmosphere had changed. The kind of chill that settles when something larger than the room itself has arrived, unseen but undeniable.High Councilor Marell stood at the head of the table, palms resting flat against the blackwood surface. His fingers twitched once, barely noticeable, as he stared at the floating sigil rotating slowly above the center of the table. A vein-line pulse flickered through it, erratic and sharp.“That’s the third breach this week,” muttered Councilor Elda, the youngest voice in the room but perhaps the one with the most urgency. Her dark eyes followed the flicker, then shot toward Marell. “We can’t pretend this is just bleed-off anymore.”“It’s not,” said Councilor Vyre. His voice was rough, aged from more than time, and he didn’t look up from the spread of parchment in front of him. “It’s targeted

  • The Blood Bound Legacy   Chapter 204: The Echo That Wasn't His

    The first thing he felt was heat—not from the hearth, which had burned low hours ago, but from beneath the floor itself. A soft warmth, pulsing like breath, spread through the soles of his boots and into his legs. Dain remained crouched near the corner where the knocking had stopped, unsure if he had drifted off or if the world had simply shifted around him while he blinked.The moment he exhaled, the room dissolved.Not violently. Not with fire or noise. It simply... changed.The wooden walls gave way to stone, smooth, gray, and damp, lit by a flickering torchlight that danced on surfaces he had never seen before. The musty air of the tavern room was replaced by something ancient and cold, laced with the smell of smoke and moss and something faintly sweet, like pressed herbs left too long in the dark.He didn’t panic.Somewhere deep inside, a part of him accepted the change as if he’d walked through this memory before. Maybe he had. Maybe it had always been waiting for him.The corri

  • The Blood Bound Legacy    Chapter 203: Breach and Consequence

    Sariah hadn’t meant to call him by name.She hadn’t even been sure it would work, not from the Vein’s core. The laws governing her shape had changed since she left mortality behind, and even though her awareness stretched across ley lines and dreaming minds, that name—his name—carried a gravity that still felt almost too human.Yet the moment it left her lips, something had responded. She had felt the subtle recoil in the strands around her, as if the Vein itself had gasped in recognition. The tether to Dain hadn’t snapped, hadn’t faltered. It had surged.And that was the part she hadn’t anticipated.Now she stood at the nexus of her realm—no longer a room or a cave, but a wide, silver plane ringed by mirrors and memory—and tried to still herself. Not calm. Calm was no longer something she experienced like she used to. No, stillness now meant restraint. Control. The discipline not to push too hard into that tether, not to unravel the fragile boundary between their lives with too much

  • The Blood Bound Legacy    Chapter 202: The Knocking Beneath

    Dain lay on the narrow bed, fully clothed, his eyes open and fixed on the ceiling above him as if he were trying to read meaning in the old wood. The room had settled into that unnerving kind of silence that wasn't truly quiet, but rather filled with the absence of all the familiar sounds that should have been present. No creaks of the old inn adjusting to the cold, no shifting of the wind outside the window, and certainly no voices from the tavern below. Just stillness, too perfect to be natural, and the slow, rhythmic pulse of something beneath his skin.The mark on his chest dormant during daylight, tolerable during the walk through the village, had started to hum again the moment he’d shut the door behind him. Not painful, but insistent, as if responding to something in the very bones of the place. He hadn’t dared remove his shirt since he arrived.Not out of modesty, but because a small, growing part of him feared what might happen if the mark was left exposed for too long in thi

  • The Blood Bound Legacy    Chapter 201: The Village That Forgot Its Name

    It took Dain another two days to reach the edge of the forest. The deeper he walked, the more the air changed, not just in temperature, but in texture, as if the wind had begun to carry weight rather than cold. The trees grew stranger too, more twisted the farther he went, their bark darker, their limbs bent at strange angles, not from age, but something else. Something recent.By the time the path opened into the small valley below, the sky had turned a shade too dark for mid-morning, and the birds had gone completely silent.He saw the smoke first, thin ribbons curling from chimneys, too few for the number of houses scattered across the slope. Some had collapsed roofs. Others looked deserted, windows boarded or broken. A weathered sign stood at the edge of the trail, its letters so faded they were unreadable.Dain stood there a moment, staring at the broken sign and the stillness beyond.It should’ve felt like any other mountain village. He’d passed a dozen like it in his younger ye

More Chapters

You may also like

Explore and read good novels for free
Free access to a vast number of good novels on GoodNovel app. Download the books you like and read anywhere & anytime.
Read books for free on the app
SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP
DMCA.com Protection Status