Episode 91

The Last Archive. It isn’t a place. It’s a being. Huddled in the lee of a dying nebula, a vast, amorphous shape woven from light that’s more ache than illumination. Compressed history. The sum total of every breath, every scream, every quiet dawn before the forgetting. It pulses weakly. Dying. The Unraveler’s shadow stains the edges of its form, sucking at the fading light. Hunting. Of course it is."Lily," Eira whispers, her voice thin, strained. She holds my good hand, the one not stone, her small fingers icy. "It hurts. It remembers… everything. All the hurt. All the gone." Her eyes are wide pools reflecting the Archive’s dying light, shimmering with unshed tears. She feels it. The collective trauma of existence. A billion billion sorrows echoing in one fragile mind.The Council comm crackles. Vultures circling. "Asset Lily. Preliminary scans confirm the entity’s composition. Pure chroniton-psychic residue. Incalculable strategic value. Secure it. Immediate extraction protocols aut

Last Updated : 2025-08-08

Episode 92

I am the prison. The boundary-realm. The walls. The air. The roots beneath. And the Unraveler is inside me.It shouldn’t hurt. I’m not flesh anymore. Not really. But it does. Gods, it does. Every drip of ichor is a needle of wrongness burrowing into the fabric of me, warping the trees into grotesque, pulsing things, turning the rivers into sluggish veins of half-clotted time. I can feel the infection spreading—tendrils of corruption threading through my borders, whispering in a voice that isn’t sound, just pressure against the inside of my skull.Lily.Not my name. Not really. Just the shape of it, warped and hollow. The Unraveler doesn’t speak. It echoes.I try to ignore it. Focus on the pain instead. The physical wrongness of the ichor seeping into the soil, the way the air shudders when I breathe (do I breathe? I don’t know anymore). The Child is here, somewhere—small and bright and terrified, flitting through the mutated undergrowth like a ghost. I feel her presence like a hand pr

Last Updated : 2025-08-09

Episode 93

"Cramped. Uncomfortable. Like wearing skin three sizes too small." A pause. Heavy. Meaningful. "You understand confinement, Warden. Don’t you?"It knows. Gods, it knows. It finds the raw edges of my solitude, the gnawing void where Kieran’s ghost-whisper used to be, where the Child’s starlight gaze feels colder every cycle. It probes the loneliness like a tongue exploring a rotten tooth. Deliberate. Precise."Just a little stretch. A fraction. Enough to… breathe. Would that be so terrible?" The whisper is almost soothing. Reasonable. A friend sharing a burden. "I could show you things. Truths the Child keeps locked away. Why the stars really burn. What waits beyond the edge of… everything. The reason your scars ache when the void wind blows east."Forbidden cosmic truths. The lure is obscene. Terrifying. And part of me… the fractured, lonely part… leans in. Just a fraction. Just enough to feel the chill promise of knowledge, of an end to the crushing isolation. The whisper curls aroun

Last Updated : 2025-08-10

Episode 94

The Garden’s wild magic has always felt like sunlight through leaves—warm, messy, alive. Now it’s… sharp. A wire pulled too tight. Every breath feels like it might cut me from the inside.He’s here. Or—what’s left of him.I can’t look straight at Arthur without my stomach folding in on itself. The edges of him bleed into the air, like smoke trying to decide if it wants to be shadow or flame. His eyes aren’t his eyes. Not the brown that used to ground me. They’re glassy, pale green, light bending wrong in them, and when he tilts his head the way he used to when he was teasing me, it’s not teasing now. It’s calculation.The Council’s corruption has wrapped around him like barbed wire, threaded into the shape of a man I remember holding my hand on the ridge above the old city, whispering about building something better. My chest hurts. Not from the running—though I’ve been running since the wards fell—but from the way memory keeps stabbing through me.He takes a step forward. Not loud. N

Last Updated : 2025-08-11

All Chapters of BOUGHT BY CRUELEST ALPHA: Chapter 91 - Chapter 94

Episode 91

Episode 92

Episode 93

Episode 94