All Chapters of THE SILVER LINING: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Night descended awry.Not quietly.Not kindly.It descended like a warning.A dull, guttural thrum beneath the earth. A shaking in the marrow of trees. And in Koralhollow village, which lies in the hills beyond the shadow of the Citadel, the ground fissured like it struggled to breathe.Mira, the midwife, had just completed boiling herbs for the twins' fever when she sensed it the faint change in the wind. The aroma of salt. Not sea-salt. Not healing. But something old. Drenched in decay.She spun toward her husband."Do you sense that?"Before he could respond, the window glass fractured—not shattered, but cleaved neatly down the center. As if it were crying.Then the scream.High. Hollow. Off.A child's scream but not from a child.Mira let go of the ladle and ran outside.And she saw it.Where sun root and bluegrain used to grow, her neighbors' crops had withered in minutes. Blackened stalks from root to blossom. Birds jerked in the air before they fell, feathers aflame mid-air.A

Because he knew he knew this was her fate.And not his.He had raised her bones, called storms to sew her heart back up, pleaded gods and ghosts and monsters one and all to give back her soul. But he could not tread this road with her. Not now. Not where she was headed.He finally raised his head.His eyes were bloodshot, wide, afire."I did everything," he breathed hoarsely, "to protect you."Krishna's voice shook. "And I am so thankful. But love that traps isn't love. It's fear."A long silence stretched between them thick and scorching. The storm outside raged on, mirroring the sorrow neither was brave enough to speak aloud.Ignatius bowed his head once more.Not in defeat.In reverence.Because he did not see her anymore as the girl who had cried in his arms, not as the phoenix he'd brought back from ashes but as what she had been all along.The Luna.The storm-walker.The revenge of rivers and roots.And not her keeper.Just the man who loved her."Go," he whispered, his voice br

Whole families forgot each other in the middle of a hug.The plague was no longer death. It was forgetting.And Perfera stoked it with joy."Every memory that loved her—every whisper that disobeyed me—vanished," she sang. "Let the world recall only me."Krishna walked through it all.Her feet scalded the rot.A monster attacked her throat she touched it once, and it burned to white ash.She met rebels along the way starved, battered, bloodied and held up not to command but to heal. A girl who had lost a leg reached out and touched Krishna's robes and screamed as bones mend once more.A blinded boy blinked. "I… I see…"Whispers spread quicker than death."She's real…""She's back.""She's going for the throne."At the entrance of the throne room, Miyal stumbled.She had seen the bodies. The terror. The murals defiled with Perfera's visage. The charred chandeliers shrouded with the robes of dead priestesses.Her wind was taken."I helped her," Miyal panted. "I did this."Krishna rested

The courtyard did not bleed anymore.Neither did it bloom.Miyal alone stood under the blackened tree, its branches twisted like burned ribs against the parchment-colored sky. Ash rustled with the wind, racing along the stone. The garden Krishna had begun to plant stayed stagnant,no green, no shoot. Only waiting ground.And Krishna was not there.She hadn't given Miyal the farewell she'd wanted. No hug goodbye. No final look. Only a silent leave at dawn, a voice on the wind:"Only when the roots are strong enough without me."But the roots still trembled for Miyal.And every morning, she'd catch herself waiting to hear footsteps. For the sound of Krishna's robes. For her laughter."Coward," Miyal growled at the empty space. "You ran again.The wind rustled but had nothing to say. A shard of moon-glass slid across the tile courtyard, snagging in the fold of her robe."I asked you to remain," Miyal said, her voice breaking. "I pleaded with you."Her words bounced back off charred walls

Miyal's return to the Citadel was quiet. His horse trotted along the darkened path as the last of the horrific plague hung in the air, though the land itself has started healing. People are rebuilding. Smoke plumes can be seen from a distance from where rubble is released because the people toil at night and day to rebuild what was lost in the Citadel.But Miyal did not feel it. The ground felt abandoned, as barren as the place in his chest where Krishna had once resided. Every step he took, he felt as though he was becoming further removed from her, further buried in the hollowness of the woman he had let down.Her words resonated inside him like a bell struck too harshly. You don't get to mourn me if you still have who I was.He had left her in the garden left her to plant seeds of something else, something that would never include him. There was no softness in her voice, no sorrow. Only resolve. Krishna had chosen to leave him, and the acrid finality of it had seared through his he