Semua Bab Rejected by the lycan king: Bab 41 - Bab 50

Duskfall was quiet again.Not the kind of quiet that follows fear, but the quiet of wounds beginning to scar. Of magic breathing easier. Of a kingdom learning how to exist without a crown.I walked the Hollow Garden barefoot, feeling the cooled stone beneath my steps. The once scorched trees were beginning to bloom again pale blue petals unfurling like the breath of peace. It felt almost foreign.I no longer wore the Hollow Crown.I no longer needed it.And yet, the magic hadn’t left me.It had settled deeper.Quieter.Like it finally trusted me.The Queen Who WasThe people called me the Hollow Queen still, though I rarely sat the throne. I spent most days among the Hollow-Blooded, teaching young ones how to wield magic through balance, not force. No more sigil branding. No more prophecy hunting. Just practice. Just living.One girl, Ava, had developed the ability to hear the past through objects. She could touch a broken chalice and whisper the arguments that had shattered it. Anoth

The cold gnawed at my bones long before we reached the base of the Elarion gate.We had traveled for six days. Six days through snowdrifts higher than our wolves, across frozen lakes that echoed beneath our feet like the drums of some buried god. The tundra had no name on our maps, only the label: Unreachable. It should have remained that way.But the pulse of the second gate had changed everything.Elarion waited ahead of us, shrouded in pale mist and silence. A black tower of glass, jagged like a shattered blade, rose from the heart of the tundra. Its surface didn’t reflect light. It drank it.Seris walked beside me, silent but steady, her breath forming halos in the frigid air. The stranger led the way, as he always had, unaffected by the cold, his silver eyes fixed on the tower with neither awe nor fear."It’s watching us," Seris whispered.I nodded. I felt it too.The CampWe set up camp just beyond the outer ring of stone that circled the tower like a barrier. I didn’t cross it.

The journey north felt different this time.I was not a queen on a warpath or a prophet heeding a vision. I was something smaller, simpler, and yet heavierA woman returning to the part of herself she had buried beneath the snow.We rode fast.Xander led a handful of Hollow blooded scouts while Seris rode beside me, silent but focused. Behind us, the wind carried no sound but the crunch of hooves over frostbitten earth. Even the air felt muted, as though the world was holding its breath.The ice thickened. The trees thinned.And ahead, the sky changed.It turned glassy.And the light bent wrong.Elarion was close.Arrival at the TowerThe black tower emerged from the snow like a blade stabbed into the sky.Dahlia stood near the stone perimeter, her cloak rimmed in frost, her posture alert.When I dismounted, she didn’t speak. She only opened her hand to show me the ring I’d given her, now cracked down the center."It started last night," she said. "The Gate is bleeding memories."Seri

I emerged from the Gate like a breath rising from cold water.The air hit me like a rebirth sharp, immediate, alive. Snow clung to my cloak. My lungs burned. The frost hadn’t retreated, but it no longer felt foreign. It felt like mine.The others were waiting. Rafael had arrived.He stood beside Dahlia, her eyes wide, her face pale. Seris knelt in the snow with her palms pressed to the earth, whispering something to the ice.Rafael rushed to me. "You were gone for two hours. We couldn’t follow you."I looked at the horizon."I wasn’t just gone. I was elsewhere."The Gate’s EchoBehind me, the Elarion tower pulsed.No longer cracked.Its glass shimmered with gentle light, the fracture sealed not with frost but with choice.The Gate had accepted my answer.And now, its silence was not warning.It was waiting.A new harmony had settled over the landscape, as though even the wind was listening now.ReunionRafael touched my hand, his warmth grounding me. "What did you see?""Versions of m

The snow thinned as we rode south.What began as frost and stillness soon gave way to red clay earth, then dry wind and sun-cracked stone. The transition from Elarion's chill to Valden's burn was not merely physical. It was elemental.The first gate tested memory.The second would test endurance.Seris said she dreamed of flame trees that bled sand, and skies that whispered names into her bones. Dahlia worked feverishly with her maps, trying to match the stars of the desert to the shifting sigils above the Hollow. She muttered phrases in old tongues, drawing arcane alignments in the dust as if decoding something older than language.And Rafael, ever alert, rode closer to me now than ever before."This time," he said, "I walk through the Gate with you."I didn’t argue. This gate would not be mine alone to face.The Desert of the ForgottenWe reached the outskirts of Valden after seven days of heat, stone, and shadow.The desert was a graveyard of broken monuments half-buried statues wi