"They called her a nobody. They tried to break her spirit. But destiny had other plans." Elara Moonstone was raised as an orphan child in a cruel family, until her 18th birthday, when a sudden mark appeared on her chest and everything changed the next day after she went to school. Elara's life shatters when she learns of her royal Lycan lineage. Thrust into a world of magic, politics, and danger, she must embrace her true self to unite warring factions and reclaim her throne. With powerful allies by her side and love complicating her path, Elara's journey is one of self-discovery, resilience, and destiny.
View MoreElara Moonstone, an orphan raised in a cruel family, learned early how to disappear. How can she get quiet when everyone is being cruel to her?
She feels safer in the shadows, behind lockers, crowds, and silence.
In a town that looked at her as peculiar, she carried invisibility as a second skin.
She had no history of how she got there, no childhood pictures, no tearful relatives to claim her when she was left on the doorstep of the Harrow family when she was six with nothing but a little pendant and a name.
And Harrows, they were cruel.
Their Morrow Street house felt cold even when the furnace burned. Mr. Harrow spent his nights working and his days drinking. Mrs. Harrow smoked on the living room sofa, watched soap operas all day long, and feigned Elara's existence if it wasn't to clean something. Three years older than Elara, their son Garrett used her as a rumor he'd treat with scorn whenever he wasn't taunting her bizarre dreams and mumbling "freak" in the high school corridors.
But Elara no longer wept.
She traversed the world silently, hidden behind a veil of numbness. She obtained good grades, but not the type that garnered applause. She read books, but not the type exchanged in class. She drew items, ancient trees, howling wolves with piercing eyes, moons that fractured like glass, without knowing the reason they resided in her mind.
Until the day she turned eighteen.
It started with a dream.
She stood barefoot in a field of black flowers, the sky a velvet curtain of stars. A wolf with silver eyes approached her, silent and reverent. Behind it, a figure cloaked in shadow watched, unmoving. The wolf bowed. The figure vanished. When she looked down, the flowers had turned to ash.
She woke breathless. And then she screamed.
Because glowing on her shoulder, just below the collarbone, was a mark she had never seen before, circular, etched in what looked like light itself. The shape of a crescent moon with a slash through it.
Panic gripped her chest.
She scrubbed at it. Nothing. She tried to cover it. It bled through the fabric like a hidden truth finally revealed.
“Elara!” Mrs. Harrow’s voice banged at the door. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing,” she lied, throwing on a hoodie and hiding the mark as best she could.
The school that day was a blur. Her skin itched beneath her hoodie, the mark pulsing like a second heartbeat. People stared more than usual. Garrett laughed louder. But something was different. She could feel it.
Like her senses had sharpened overnight.
She could smell emotions, anxiety, desire and fear. Hear heartbeats in the silence. And worst of all, she could feel something watching her. Not from school. Not from town. From something older. Something hungry.
After her last class, she bolted, the need to get home replaced by the instinct to hide.
But she could not hide.
She rushed towards the forest to take a deep breath, to think about what was going on!
But she didn't know, as the moment Elara took a step in the forest, to sort things out, a sudden figure with shiny eyes, a fearsome personality, suddenly appeared, like he wanted to kill her. Elara screamed and started running deep into the forest.
The Bone Throne did not creak. It shifted.Subtly. Imperceptibly. As if the old skybeast still breathed beneath its petrified ribcage, exhaling once every few centuries in protest of the weight now seated atop its spine.Sirelia sat motionless for a long while. Blood trickled in slender lines beneath her robes, seeping into the obsidian veins that webbed the dais. The pain was constant. Rhythmic. Not dulled. Not numbed. It was deliberate. Ritual.Each drop a vow.Each breath a refusal to scream.The court dared not move until she did. Around her, the hall of Hollowspire stood in its ruinous majesty, arched bones and broken glass, tapestries half-eaten by fire and time. Where once there had been clerics, there were now shadows. Where once light streamed through high stained windows, only dust dared enter.A kingdom turned mausoleum.And still, she ruled.General Kareth knelt closest, spine rigid despite his wounds. The bandage over his eye had not been changed since the siege; it was a
Seren remained on the stone platform long after the crowd had drifted into the quiet of uncertainty. Some had gone to their tents. Others stayed near the torchlines, whispering low prayers not meant for gods, but for fate, whatever shape it now wore.The ash didn’t fall tonight. It rose, spiraling slow and deliberate, as if listening. As if thinking.She felt it on her skin, soft as breath, waiting for her to move.“Fire that chooses to warm, not burn.”Kael’s words still echoed in her head, heavier than the silence that followed.She stepped down from the platform. The ground didn’t tremble, this time. But something under it did.A vibration, low and rhythmic. Not danger. Not yet.A reminder.She was being watched.Not by her people.By the Below.The spiral mark on her palm dimmed to coal-black again, a pulse quieting after a storm. She closed her fingers over it. It didn’t vanish. It never did. But the gesture gave her comfort. Control.She walked through the sleeping camp without
The campfire did not crackle.It breathed.A slow, steady exhalation of warmth and ember, pulsing in rhythm with the spiral scorched into Seren’s palm. Around her, the Ashborn kept their vigil in reverent silence, too awed, or too afraid, to draw near. They whispered still, though. Not to her, but to one another, their voices threading through the dark like mist curling over grave soil. They whispered of the old songs, of fire before it was bound in lanterns or leashed to prayer. Of gods who walked with bare feet on molten earth. Of names too ancient for memory, too dangerous for speech.And above them all, Seren sat alone.Not out of grief, or solitude.But because something had followed her back.The fire.Not Elara’s fire. Not the moon’s tempered flame or the sacred hearth of queens.This was older. Wilder. Fire that remembered devouring stars.The spiral on her hand throbbed again, and Seren looked down. The soot-mark glimmered faintly, no longer red, but a deep, sullen violet. A
The Chain cracked.Not with a scream.Not with an explosion.Just a single, hollow sound, like a rib breaking in a sleeping god’s chest.Like history holding its breath, and exhaling.Seren stood still.Ash curled around her legs like thread from a forgotten loom, stirred by wind that came from nowhere and carried everything. The Chain of Thrones lay shattered at her feet, each link pulsing faintly as if torn between dying and being remembered. Some were red. Others smoked grey. A few whispered names too old for any mortal ear to recognise.She hadn’t flinched. She hadn’t wept.She had chosen.And choice, true choice, was louder than fire.Behind her, the voice of the God Below stirred the air, quieter now, less certain. Still vast, but cracked at the edges.“You could have ruled.”She turned slightly, enough to let her voice meet it like a blade through fog.“I did.”“Then why break it?”Her eyes glowed, gold at the center, silver at the edges, like wildfire seen through storm glass.
The altar isn’t grand.It’s quiet.Low to the ground. Ancient. A block of cracked black stone, veined with molten rune-light that pulses not with heat, but heartbeat, faint and deliberate. A slow rhythm, like a memory taking its first breath after centuries of silence.No gold. No ornaments. No stained glass or hymnals.Only a single object rests atop the altar.The Chain of Thrones.A coil of obsidian links, each one carved with a single forgotten name. Some whisper red, others bleed slow drifts of pale dust. Each name once belonged to a woman who bore flame in her chest and weight in her crown. A queen. A curse. A story half-told. All bound to silence by the link before it.Now,One link remains open.Waiting.For her.Seren approaches slowly, breath shallow, feet silent.The air buzzes around her like the final note of a song unplayed. Her limbs are light, her stomach stone. She can feel the god behind her. Not watching. Listening.“You may leave,” it offers, voice like a stone gat
The doors did not open.They exhaled.With a sound like stone remembering breath, like bone shifting beneath the skin of the world, the Temple Below parted its mouth to welcome the one who walked without a crown.Seren stepped forward.Alone.No fanfare. No Ashborn flanking her sides. Just the steady rhythm of her boots on blackened stone. She had asked them to stay behind. Not out of pride, but out of knowing. This path was not meant for armies. Not even for kin.Only her.And it led down.The first steps were carved from what might once have been ribs, long, spiraled, and half-turned to fossil, half-turned to glowing sigil. They glimmered faintly beneath her soles, not illuminating the way, but revealing memory. Language carved into marrow. Prayer etched into death.With every step, the warmth of the world above faded behind her, replaced by a new pressure, heavy, intimate. Not cold, but full. As if the very air remembered things she had not yet lived.This temple was not a ruin.It
Welcome to GoodNovel world of fiction. If you like this novel, or you are an idealist hoping to explore a perfect world, and also want to become an original novel author online to increase income, you can join our family to read or create various types of books, such as romance novel, epic reading, werewolf novel, fantasy novel, history novel and so on. If you are a reader, high quality novels can be selected here. If you are an author, you can obtain more inspiration from others to create more brilliant works, what's more, your works on our platform will catch more attention and win more admiration from readers.
Comments