Semua Bab The Alpha King's Forbidden Mate: Bab 171 - Bab 180

The grass beneath Serena’s palm shimmered silver, then faded into gold. It wasn’t magic exactly—it was memory. The land was remembering her.Elias crouched beside her, one hand on her back, gaze fixed on the shifting colors in the ground.“That’s not normal,” he said softly.Serena lifted her hand. “It’s the forest. It remembers.”He helped her to her feet, eyes sharp. “You said something was planted inside you. From before. What exactly did you mean?”She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she looked out across the clearing. The obsidian stones circling the patch of silver grass now pulsed faintly, almost like they were alive.“It’s not just that I called the Gate,” Serena said. “It’s that I belonged to it. Before I ever understood what it was.”Elias frowned. “Are you saying it created you?”“No.” She met his gaze. “I’m saying someone gave me to it.”Back at the camp, Caine studied the child’s aura with narrowed eyes. He sat a few feet away from it, hands glowing softly with trackin

The ground did not rumble.It shuddered.A slow, deliberate tremor, like a breath drawn by something ancient. Something waiting.From the cliffs surrounding the Spire, a thin red mist began to rise—light as fog, but far more deliberate. It drifted, coiled, and listened. No birds cried. No wolves howled.It was the quiet of something holding its scream.Serena stood on the southern edge, overlooking the plains that stretched toward the western fault. The sky above was no longer blue. It was pale gold, sickly and tense, as though stained by fire that hadn’t reached the ground yet.Behind her, the camp held still.The child sat beneath the central archway, wrapped in a silken shawl Mira had stitched. It didn’t speak. It hadn’t since the vision.But its silver eyes never left Serena.Not once.“They’re coming,” Caine whispered as he stepped beside her.Serena’s jaw tightened. “Who?”“Not the Gate-born. Not yet. But the ones who remember what the Red Scar was.”She turned to him slowly. “T

The wind howled over the valley as if mourning something ancient.What lay ahead was not a battlefield, not a city. It was a graveyard made of whispers.They stood on the threshold of the Red Scar, and even the most battle-worn among them were silent.The child clutched Serena’s cloak tightly.“This is where the fire went to sleep,” it whispered.Serena nodded slowly. “And where it wants to wake.”The Red Scar looked like a wound carved into the earth itself.No birds flew here. No sound beyond the occasional hum of wind. Trees were petrified—twisted into skeletal spires. Charred roots jutted from cracked soil like bones. The scent of ash was not fresh, but eternal. Time itself had warped in this place.Caine dismounted first, runes blazing faintly along his hands. “The air is folding. Time's crooked here. You’ll feel... stretched.”“Like walking through someone else’s memory,” Mira added.Serena felt it immediately.The pressure. The pull.A voice brushing against her mind—her own vo

The sun barely rose that morning.Its light was dim—filtered through layers of fog and ember-streaked mist.Serena stood shirtless before a basin of cold water, her skin bare under the still air. Mira stood silently behind her, watching the fire-marked sigils now burned across her back.It hadn’t been there when she slept.But when she woke, the ache had been deep—bone-deep. And Mira had gasped when she peeled back the blankets.“I’ve seen battle wounds,” Mira whispered. “But this… this isn’t damage. This is design.”The sigil curved like a vine of light over Serena’s spine—glowing faintly golden, etched in symbols no one else recognized. Not even Caine.But Serena felt it.Like a second spine. A memory becoming bone.Kiva ran her fingers over the parchment, cross-referencing ancient maps and runes Caine had unsealed from the Ember Vault.“I think it’s the original mark of the Scarbinders,” she said at last. “But this version is different.”“How?” Elias asked.“This one doesn’t just b

The Scar tree didn’t sleep anymore.Its roots pulsed faintly beneath the soil, like a slow-beating heart under cracked skin. And Serena could feel it every time she stepped near it—a hum in her bones, a tension behind her eyes.The mark on her back flared more frequently now, sometimes waking her in the middle of the night, other times humming gently like a remembered lullaby.But this morning, it burned.Not from pain.From a message.She stumbled out of her tent just after dawn, still barefoot, dragging her fingers down the glowing sigils on her spine.Kiva spotted her first and rushed to her side.“It’s active again?” she asked.Serena nodded, sweat beading at her temple. “It’s not just reacting anymore. It’s transmitting something.”“To you?”“No,” Serena gasped. “To the flame.”By midmorning, the camp had gathered in a loose circle around the Scar.Caine brought a scroll of old flame-marks he’d unsealed from the Ember Vault.“They’re symbols,” he said, “but they’re also sounds.