เข้าสู่ระบบIn my dreams, I saw her. The Lady in Black with her face obscured with the sheer black veil. I was in a small garden and the sky was dark grey with streaks of blue lightening. It terrified me. I looked around and saw roses that were bla
Sage.The order came down two days after Aurora's departure, delivered by a Council courier who wouldn't meet my eyes when he handed me the summons."Emergency execution order," Nessa read over my shoulder, disbelief cracking her voice. "Twenty-three feral Omegas, scheduled for termination in the Arena. Tomorrow at dawn.""On what grounds.""Public safety. Same language they used for the triplets' hearing." She looked up at me, horror dawning. "Sage, these are patients. Some of them are still under active treatment here."My blood went cold. "How many of th
Sage.The heat started three hours after the bond network collapse, once the terminal had gone quiet and Nessa had finally convinced me to lie down on the workshop cot instead of standing back up.At first I told myself it was fever. Ordinary exhaustion, the kind that came after absorbing three hundred and twelve strangers' worth of grief into a body that had never been built to hold that much.Then my skin started to glow."Sage." Dominic's voice, sharp with alarm, from somewhere near the door. "Your arms."I looked down and understood immediately why he s
Sage.Kieran left an hour after the chains stopped visibly reacting, quiet in a way I'd never seen from him, like a man walking out of surgery he hadn't consented to. I watched him go from the window, still turning the shape of it over in my own mind, an entire species of grief I'd never questioned, rearranging itself in real time.I didn't have the luxury of sitting with it. Not with everything else waiting."You should eat something," Nessa said, finding me still standing at the window twenty minutes later. "You've been running on adrenaline and revelation for three days straight.""I will. After I finish something I started before Ki
Sage.I hadn't planned to look at Kieran that way. It happened by accident, mid-argument, three days after the Sovereign of One confrontation with Dominic, while Kieran was in my office trying to explain again why he'd once let the Council pressure him into signing away visitation rights during my darkest year with Noah."I didn't have a choice," he said, pacing in front of my desk. "The Ancient Covenant gave the Council direct authority over custody disputes involving anchor children. I fought it as hard as the law allowed.""As hard as the law allowed," I repeated, skeptical."Yes.""That's always been your line, Kieran. As hard as the law allowed. As hard as tradition allowed. As hard as the Covenant allowed. Have you ever once stopped to ask yourself why you never seem able to push past that particular wall?""Because it's the law," he said, frustration bleeding into his voice. "Because breaking Covenant law isn't a small thing, Sage, it's…"Something in the phrase snagged at me,
SageI found the ledger tucked inside Dominic's desk drawer three days later, not because I was looking for it, but because I'd gone searching for a pen and found something else entirely.It wasn't the financial ledger he'd already shown me. This was different, a logistics document, coded in a shorthand I didn't immediately recognize, dense with names and dates and troop designations that meant nothing to me on their surface.I should have left it alone. I didn't."Dominic," I called, flipping through the pages with growing unease. "What is this?"He appear
Sage.More of them poured out of the tree line the moment we thought we'd found a rhythm, at least a dozen fresh constructs joining the fray, and I felt the stretched, slowed quality of Chrono-Predatory phasing start to strain against how many threats it needed to track at once."There's too many," I called to Dominic, ducking under a swiping bone claw and driving my palm into a Bone-Singer's ribcage, shattering it from the inside with a burst of Source-laced force. "We need to fall back to a chokepoint.""There's a ravine, thirty yards east," he shouted back, parrying two attacks at once with brutal, economical precision. "Narrow enough to limit how many can reach us simultaneously."







