บททั้งหมดของ A Luna for the Lycan King: บทที่ 181 - บทที่ 186

AllissaI didn’t get to say be careful. I didn’t get to say anything. The goodbyes happen at a run, over your shoulder, half heard.There was no time for speeches. Eira’s hand closed hard on my arm. “Listen for my word.” Then she and Heath headed into the red dark.Heath took Eira and bent away along the terrace walks, toward the circle’s skirt, to get her close enough to reach the rite’s seam. Squall had the western sky, and any breath now he was going to make the whole mountain look at him. And Darren, Finn, and I had the only road my heart would allow. Up the servant ways. To the door of the man who had become an ally to Lyra.The inside of her mountain was built for wings, and we climbed it on feet, and every stair felt like it took ages.Finn took the point, stealthy as the wind. Darren counted the turns behind him in a whisper. Left, then left, then up. Heath’s drilling lived in all three of us now. We had memorized those lefts and rights in our sleep, and tonight our feet moved

AllissaMy daughter called her monster down out of the sky, and her monster came.The griffin never slowed. It stooped at the circle with its wings shut. Thorin stood in the stirrups the whole way down, ten years old and wrapped in rippling heat. What came off him wasn’t a boy’s fire, and it wasn’t his father’s. It was older than both, and it was furious. It struck the ward from above in the same breath that Lyra’s silver rose to meet it from below.The two lights found each other through the wording like hands finding hands in the dark.The bond between two children answered the ward and wording at once. Nothing was built to argue with that.The ward didn’t flicker this time. It broke. All of it, everywhere at once, and the sound it made breaking shrieked off the mountainside.Thorin came off the griffin’s back before it touched stone. He landed inside the circle between Onyssa and my daughter, small against everything, and he set his feet as he had once set them on a ridge in front

AllissaI saw it with my own eyes, the thing that had lived between those two children since a ballroom years ago. A line of light ran from my daughter’s outstretched hand straight into Thorin at the circle’s heart, and Lyra’s silver poured down it like water finding a channel. Thorin’s head came up. His hands came up with it, wrapped in her light, and he turned to the sleeping mountain, and he did something none of us knew he could do. That they could do.Crystal rose out of the circle. It climbed her flanks in clear sheets, over the battered wings, up the great neck, closing around the last of the First like ice closing over deep water, smooth and perfect and impossibly gentle, until the whole sleeping length of her lay held inside it, preserved down to the frost on her scales, and the moonlight came through it and lit her from every side.