Semua Bab The Forgotten Heiress: Rise of The Lycan Queen: Bab 251 - Bab 260

The Chain cracked.Not with a scream.Not with an explosion.Just a single, hollow sound, like a rib breaking in a sleeping god’s chest.Like history holding its breath, and exhaling.Seren stood still.Ash curled around her legs like thread from a forgotten loom, stirred by wind that came from nowhere and carried everything. The Chain of Thrones lay shattered at her feet, each link pulsing faintly as if torn between dying and being remembered. Some were red. Others smoked grey. A few whispered names too old for any mortal ear to recognise.She hadn’t flinched. She hadn’t wept.She had chosen.And choice, true choice, was louder than fire.Behind her, the voice of the God Below stirred the air, quieter now, less certain. Still vast, but cracked at the edges.“You could have ruled.”She turned slightly, enough to let her voice meet it like a blade through fog.“I did.”“Then why break it?”Her eyes glowed, gold at the center, silver at the edges, like wildfire seen through storm glass.

Seren remained on the stone platform long after the crowd had drifted into the quiet of uncertainty. Some had gone to their tents. Others stayed near the torchlines, whispering low prayers not meant for gods, but for fate, whatever shape it now wore.The ash didn’t fall tonight. It rose, spiraling slow and deliberate, as if listening. As if thinking.She felt it on her skin, soft as breath, waiting for her to move.“Fire that chooses to warm, not burn.”Kael’s words still echoed in her head, heavier than the silence that followed.She stepped down from the platform. The ground didn’t tremble, this time. But something under it did.A vibration, low and rhythmic. Not danger. Not yet.A reminder.She was being watched.Not by her people.By the Below.The spiral mark on her palm dimmed to coal-black again, a pulse quieting after a storm. She closed her fingers over it. It didn’t vanish. It never did. But the gesture gave her comfort. Control.She walked through the sleeping camp without

The war had not ended.But the blood had slowed.And that, somehow, made it worse.Because silence after slaughter wasn't quiet, it was a breathing, hulking thing, stretched taut like sinew across the ruins. It seeped into cracks, settled in marrow, and throbbed beneath skin like a second pulse. It haunted more fiercely than screams ever could.In the low-sunk dungeons beneath Emberhold, silence didn't rest. It screamed.Vessa moved down the corridor with the slow grace of someone walking through memory. Her boots brushed against grit and scattered ash, and the lantern in her hand spat and hissed with each breath of the cold, damp air. It cast fractured light, shards of warmth slicing through shadow, onto walls carved not by masons but by the desperate. Claw marks. Ash-runes. The stories of the damned etched by fingers, bone, or blood.No one had written them down.They didn’t have to.The walls remembered.So did she.She passed the cells in silence, each step echoing like a drumbeat

The storm came with no warning.Not from the sky.From the ground.It split the earth like a wound outside Blackfen Hollow, where the ashfields met the swamp-rot. Where the dust rose in spirals from dead roots and the air itself tasted like forgotten grief. The Dustborn army, thought broken, scattered, done, rose like revenants from the very soil they had scorched a generation ago. No heralds. No horns.Just war.And in their path stood Vessa.She hadn’t planned for a battle. Not today. She had ridden with no standard behind her, no burning sigil, no war priestesses or flame-barriers. Just a scouting band and her name. Her weapon was sharp. Her armor was light. She had not expected to need anything else.But the ground screamed.Dust born soldiers burst from the black earth in waves, armor stitched with chain and bone, eyes hollow and teeth filed for terror. They moved like ghosts made flesh, blades tearing into the Ash born flank before warnings could even rise.Vessa turned at the f

The first crack in the Dustborn did not thunder.It whispered.Not the sound of walls collapsing or armies clashing. Not even the sharp shock of a knife drawn in the dark. Instead, it came as a breath, trembling through ash, threading itself between hearts too tired for war. It was the ache of memory—a man standing on the edge of his life, facing the emptiness that comes when purpose slips away.Thalor the Flame-Seer, the shadow-voice behind Sirelia’s crownless throne, the mouthpiece of prophecy, the man who once turned tides and bent kings with a word, now found himself alone. The cliffs of Hollowspire rose jagged and high at his back, the valley below cloaked in the colour of dead embers. Even the wind was silent, as if reluctant to witness what must come next.He inhaled the scent of burnt earth, and for a moment, he remembered a time before ashes—a time when he’d carried fire in his hands, not just as magic, but as hope.Behind him, footsteps. Light, careful, respectful, the gait