All Chapters of MAD END'S DECEPTION: Chapter 391 - Chapter 399

ARAHEENThe tea hit her tongue with honey, smoke, flowers, and something sharper beneath it, something bright enough to feel dangerous. It went down hot. For a moment, it felt like she had swallowed a strip of sunlight.Then the weight left her body.The room vanished. She drifted in the cosmic sprawl around her, light and sound spread wide in every direction. She couldn’t feel Gildeon beside her anymore, but she knew he was there. She knew he was being dragged through the same thing.Ahead of her hung a sphere of white light. Not a star, but a gateway. It stirred the same memory as the Dark Plane portal she had seen through her mother’s eyes, but this one carried no threat. There was no cold nor dread. It pulled instead.Araheen moved toward it, and as soon as she passed through, knowledge crashed over her all at once.Color. Light. Shape. Sound. Taste. Scent. Touch. Everything slammed into her in one brutal rus

NARRATOR’S POVThe wound in the fabric of the world pulsed at the center of the crater, a black tear that throbbed like something alive. Around it, the earth had caved in, forming a wide basin of broken stone and loose dirt. Dense forest ringed the crater on all sides, dark and still, its trees packed so tightly they looked like a wall.The elder witches who had tried to seal the breach lay scattered across the ground where they had fallen. Their mouths hung open. Their bodies were shriveled and dry, skin pulled tight over bone. Their eye sockets were empty. Their limbs had stiffened into bent, twisted angles.Yonah sat at the crater’s edge, cross-legged, his back straight, his eyes closed, his white hair shifting in the wind. He was deep in a trance, waiting.Then the cold reached him.It started in his core, frosting upward into his chest until his whole body went numb. Fine grains of ice seemed to gather over his ski

ARAHEENShe watched Gildeon shift into his ultimate True Form. She had once believed nothing could surpass the majesty of his full dragon form.This was way beyond that.What rose into the ravaged sky now was not merely a dragon, but a coronation made flesh.His body had grown broader, longer, more sovereign in every line. The black of his scales remained, but now it was overtaken by more gold—rich, molten, radiant gold that streamed over him in commanding patterns, sheathing his throat, his chest, the curve of his ribs, and the heavy arches of his limbs. He looked to be wearing a gilded armor blessed by the divine light.Fire flowed along the ridges of his spine like living silk, pouring from one spiked crest to the next in bright rivers. His eyes, twin orbs of black and gold, became deeper and blazing all at once, like eclipsed suns lit from within.His wings alone could have undone her breath. The first pair was his

ARAHEENAfter Yonah had been brought down, she and Gildeon returned at once to the Shining Keeper’s domain, shadow-walking once more through the Dark Plane. Both of them were exhausted, drained to the very marrow by the battle—Gildeon especially, his body still struggling to mend the grave injuries he had sustained. Even so, they pressed onward, spending what little strength remained on the journey.Araheen had also chosen not to tell him about Kohina just yet. She would not burden his mind while something far too important still remained to be done.When they arrived back in the domain, they found the Creator exactly as they had left her.She lay upon an elevated bed of flowers at the heart of the garden, a stab wound in her chest where Gildeon had driven Yonah’s dagger. Fresh golden blood still welled slowly around it, as though the wound had been preserved in the very state of her death.Araheen drew out her ph

ARAHEENAfter the breaches had been sealed, the Hunters, the sylphs, the salamanders, the witches, and the human soldiers managed to slaughter the remaining beasts that had ravaged Earthland. Even so, millions had died.The Hunters were then granted a special power by the Shining Keeper—the ability to alter the memories of lower mortals on a vast scale. Time itself was frozen across the world, and every living being, save for the higher mortals, was put to sleep.Buildings were repaired in an instant. Roads were restored from ruin. Cities and towns rose whole again. Everything destroyed across the surrounding lands was returned to the state it had been in before the intrusion. Even the severed bodies of the dead were made whole once more, though their lives could not be restored.The Hunters altered everyone’s memories, fabricating a history in which a devastating pandemic had swept across the world and claimed millions of liv