Lahat ng Kabanata ng HIS BABY GROWS INSIDE ME, BUT HIS HEART BELONGS TO HER : Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

Aria couldn’t move. Her boots felt welded to the ground, her heart gripped by a fear unlike anything she had known, not even when she’d faced the Balance or the Forgotten One. This was deeper. *Primal.* The kind of fear that came from seeing something the world had no name for.The child standing in the clearing the fusion of Rowan and Elara, or what remained of them watched her with ancient curiosity. Its smile was small, almost tender.“I was born yesterday,” it said. “But I’ve waited for millennia.”The words dropped like stones into silence.Kael stepped forward, his claws unsheathed, body trembling with restrained violence. “Where. Are. My. Children?”The being blinked, head tilting as if the concept of possession confused it.“They’re not gone,” it said. “They are *me.* And I am *them.* We’re not separate anymore. They opened the gate inside themselves, so I could step through.”Aria swallowed hard. “You used them. They were never meant to be vessels.”“They were never meant *no

The battlefield had quieted.Ash still floated like dark snowflakes in the air, and the sky above the Hollowed’s Bonefire ritual site remained cracked with streaks of unnatural red lightning, a remnant of the unstable rift. The Prophetess was gone, consumed or perhaps pulled into the rift she tried to control. But her presence lingered like poison in the wind.Aria stood on the edge of the scorched clearing, her heart thudding not with victory, but warning. Her fingertips were still warm from the last surge of power she’d released, burning through her veins like fire laced with grief. Around her, the survivors Kael, Callen, Lyra, and the warriors began to regroup, but the air vibrated with something unspoken.“Rowan,” Aria whispered, searching the treeline with a mother’s panic masked beneath battle fatigue. “Elara?”They had fought with them… bonded, glowing, united. But after the Prophetess vanished, both children had collapsed, their bodies limp, the magic around them sputtering ou

Aria’s scream tore through the chamber as Elara was swallowed by the red light.The glow pulsed once then disappeared as if it had never existed, sealing over with a whispering hiss. The space where Elara had stood was now nothing but scorched stone and silence. No portal. No shimmer. No trace.Aria scrambled across the cracked floor, her hands bleeding as she clawed at the place where her daughter had vanished. “Elara! Elara!”She pounded her fists against the ground until Kael pulled her back, arms wrapped tightly around her trembling form. She struggled against him, wild and unhearing, tears streaking her face. “No! I won’t leave her! She’s still here! I *felt* her!”Kael tightened his grip. “She’s not gone. Not completely. That was a portal not a death.”“How can you know that?” she spat, trying to tear away from him again.“Because if she were dead,” he said quietly, “you wouldn’t still feel her through the bond.”Those words pierced the veil of her panic.The bond.Aria closed h

The world held its breath.Aria stood at the center of the abandoned camp, the fire reduced to embers, the wind whispering through the trees like voices hiding in the dark. The glow of the rune **“Taken”** flickered on the forest floor, a cruel mark left in Elara’s place.Gone.Not run away. Not wandered off.*Taken.*Kael burst from the trees seconds later, his chest heaving, blood on his knuckles and panic in his eyes. “The southern sentries are gone. No struggle. No sign of retreat. Like they vanished into smoke.”Callen came behind him, blades drawn, his face tight. “Wardline collapse confirms it. Someone used gate magic. They didn’t just walk out of here they *pulled her through.*”Aria didn’t speak. Her fists clenched at her sides, nails digging crescent moons into her palms. Her breath came in controlled, shallow drawers because the moment she let it break, she would scream.Talia examined the rune again, tracing the edge with a whispering incantation. “It’s blood-sealed. Fresh

A single tear in the sky became a wound.Crimson lightning cracked across the heavens, splitting through clouds as if the realm itself had been slashed open. From that gash, they came.Not just shadows but *forms.*Twisting.Wailing.Smoldering.Creatures of smoke and bone, their bodies trailing fire and ash, their faces ever-shifting. They poured from the rupture like a reversed river, tumbling down with shrieks that pierced bone and soul alike.Kael stood before them, arms outstretched protectively in front of Aria and the children, whose unconscious bodies lay in a circle of crumbled glyphs. His voice was low, unyielding. “Form a shield wall. Now!”Callen was already there, swords drawn, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Kael. “What *are* they?”Mireya’s voice shook from the tree line. “They are the Veil’s forgotten. The remnants. The cursed ones who weren’t allowed rebirth or ruin. When the Third Gate was sealed, they were locked away.”Talia’s face had gone pale. “And sealing it