Semua Bab The Mate Games: Bab 181 - Bab 183

Many decades ago…It was after midnight when the knock came.Not loud. Not hurried. Just… a sound.Three gentle taps. Like the wind brushing bone.And I knew.I don’t get many visitors.None, actually.Lira hasn’t come in two weeks. I told her not to. She didn’t argue. She never does when she knows I’m on the edge of something. And tonight—tonight was the edge.I didn’t move at first. I sat by the hearth, hands buried in the old blanket again, heart thudding like war drums beneath my ribs.Another knock. Softer this time.Not impatient. Not angry. Just… present.And still, I didn’t rise.I kept thinking, What if it isn’t him?But worse—What if it is?For all my writing, my dreaming, my hoping… I was not ready.Not truly.I thought I would be.But when the moment came, my body remembered every reason I had once run.The visions. The screams. The prophecies. The blood.I stared at the door like it might speak first.It didn’t.But something beyond it breathed.I rose slowly, every muscl

Many decade ago…I heard it again today.His name.Carried on the wind.Not spoken aloud, not by Lira or the villagers or the trees, but in that strange way the world sometimes speaks when no one else is listening. A whisper, delicate and cold, brushing the back of my neck while I stood by the cliff’s edge watching the sea.I turned, half-expecting to see him standing there again, silent as ever. But the path behind me was empty. Just the trees, and the sound of distant wings overhead.And still, I felt it.His name.Like breath caught in a throat. Like a secret too heavy to carry.I don’t say it aloud. Not here. Not yet. It’s a tether I’m not ready to pull.Maybe because I fear what answering it might summon.Or maybe because saying it feels like permission. And I still don’t know what I’m giving permission for.Lira says there are rumors now. Whispers threading through the mountain towns and riverside camps. A boy—no, a young man—who walks alone beneath the moonlight. Who doesn’t sp