جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 820

Ivonne's povThe first thirty minutes inside the Aldenmere were, if I was being completely honest with myself, deeply boring and anticlimactic.The forest was dense and stubborn and required actual physical work to get through , with branches low enough to force us into a crouch, undergrowth so thick in places that we had to use our knives to clear a path, roots breaking through the ground at unpredictable angles that caught our feet if we weren't watching carefully.But beyond the physical inconvenience of it, there was nothing.No supernatural shifting paths. No sounds that shouldn't be there. No creeping sensation of being observed by something ancient and intentional. Just dark, overgrown, uncooperative forest that smelled of damp soil and old bark and absolutely nothing else.I kept waiting for something to happen and nothing did."Is it always like this at the beginning?" I asked, pushing a branch out of my face."No," Thorin said, cutting through a particularly stubborn section

Ivonne's POV:"Mummy," The girl had called me and the word hung in the air between us and refused to dissolve the way impossible things were supposed to."I —" I looked down at the small arms wrapped around my waist and then up at Thorin, whose expression had moved through confusion and arrived somewhere close to alarm."No, she is mistaken, I don't know her," I said, and my voice came out strange and thin. "Thorin, I have never seen this child before in my life.""Then why is she —""I don't know," I said.The girl pulled back just far enough to look up at me, and the directness of her gaze was startling — not the uncertain, frightened look of a lost child but something steadier and older than her face suggested. Her eyes were dark and clear and completely certain."You do know me," she said quietly. "You're my mummy.""Sweetheart," I said carefully, crouching down to her level, trying to keep my voice gentle even though my heart was hammering. "I think you might be confused. I don'

Ivonne's POV:"Give me the spirit. Give me Ulfris." She tilted her head the other way. "And I will give you every piece of justice you and your baby and your mother have ever deserved."The silence that followed Seraphina's request stretched long enough that I could hear my own pulse."Why would you want that?" I finally said. "Why would a forest want my spirit?"Seraphina's expression didn't change but something shifted behind her eyes... It was something older than her face, something that had been waiting patiently behind the child's features this whole time.She poke "Because the spirit Ulfris came from this forest," she said simply. "This is where all spirits come to mix with your world. This is the threshold between the mortal world and the world of spirits, and Ulfris crossed that threshold when it was not supposed to.It chose to enter Ivanna centuries ago without our permission, without sanction, breaking every rule that governs what spirits are and what they are allowed to d

Ivonne's povThe entity was gone, not retreated, not hiding, simply absent, as if the force that had come out of me had unmade its presence in this space entirely.I stayed where I was for a moment, just breathing and wondering how the hell Ulfris had managed to blast a great mountain spirit like that.And to my shock, Ulfris responded."That was not me," Ulfris said, and for the first time in all the time of carrying this spirit, I heard something in its voice that I was almost certain was shock. I did not do that."W-whta? What are you saying?," I asked."That was you. Your power. Not mine." Ulfris said again and I froze."B-But how is that possible? I'm not that powerful," I asked again.The silence that followed was different from the entity's silence ... it was the silence of something being understood for the first time."We are merging faster than the Oracle calculated," Ulfris said finally. "What just happened should not have been possible for you yet. The fact that it was me

Ivonne's povThorin was on the ground a short distance away, half-sunk into what looked like a patch of dark, wet earth — except it wasn't behaving like earth at all.It was moving, and it was pulling.And nearly half his body was already submerged, his arms still free but sinking. His face was also pale and drawn in a way that looked less like exhaustion and more like life was actively being taken out of him.It was obvious that he was dying."Thorin!" I ran to him and dropped to my knees at the edge of the pit, grabbing both his arms and pulling with everything I had. He didn't move. The ground held him like it had teeth."What happened?" I said, pulling again, my voice rising into something close to panic. "Thorin, talk to me, what is this?"He managed a weak, broken laugh that turned into a grimace. "Wrong place," he said, the words slurring slightly. "Wrong... step."Behind me, Seraphina laughed — actually laughed, light and amused, like this was entertaining."What is this?" I d