All Chapters of SHADOWBORN: The Rise Of The Dragon Wolf : Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

Chapter 156NyxFirebourn wasn't what I'd imagined, not that I'd had much chance to imagine it properly given that I'd only learned it existed through a diary written in a language that took me years to decode and a mother who'd taken most of her answers with her when she died.What I'd pictured, in the quiet corners of my mind where I let myself wonder about things I didn't have answers to, had been something vague and ancient — fire and sky and beings that breathed both like breathing was something you could do with your whole self, not just your lungs.What Firebourn actually was, was a citadel.Carved into the face of a mountain so old it had folded in on itself over millennia, its chambers and passages and great vaulted halls layered on top of each other in ways that had no obvious logic from the inside.But clearly followed some architecture that had developed over thousands of years of people building downward and inward and upward simultaneously, following the rock where it we

Chapter 158Nyx"She chose a wolf over her people. Over her responsibilities. Over her family. And she never came back, never sent word, never let me know whether she was alive or dead.""She raised me safe," I said while keeping my voice even. "Because both this world and the wolf world wanted her dead for the choice she made, and she knew it, and she made herself small enough to disappear because that was the only way to protect me.""She protected herself," Maren said sharply."She protected me," I said, and something sharpened in my chest because this mattered, this was the part that mattered most. "She died doing it. She died with my father's name on her lips and an apology she didn't have time to finish, and she sent me running in a direction she hoped would lead me somewhere safe even though she had no certainty it would. She protected me until her last breath and every breath before it, and she did it in a world that gave her no resources, no allies, no help from anyone — in

Chapter 160"By a margin of seven to five, it has been determined that Nyx Virelle will be recognized as a daughter of Firebourn through the eldest house, with all rights and protections that status carries."The words landed in my chest with a weight I hadn't anticipated.Daughter of Firebourn."Furthermore," he said while clearly finding each word more difficult than the last, "the council has voted, by the same margin, to formally revoke the standing order of hostility toward the Silver Crescent wolf line and its allied packs, contingent on a period of observation not less than one year during which no aggressive action will be taken by either side.""Contingent," I said carefully. "What are the conditions?""That you serve as the point of communication between our people and yours," said the woman to Maren's left, who had the deep green hem of the progressive alliance and had been watching me with the particular attention of someone who had been an ally since before I walked thro

Chapter 162NyxI looked at him sideways. "Seven to five suggests it wasn't obvious to everyone.""No," he agreed. "But it should have been."We stood looking at the ancient panel together while the torchlight moved across the carved figures, the hybrid form with hands extended to both sides, the two peoples leaning in from their separate histories toward the one figure that could reach them both."When you come back," Caen said carefully, "there will be young people here who want to understand what you are and what it means — not politically, but actually. Who want to know if the bridge in that panel is something that can still be built.""It can," I said while I looked at the hybrid figure's outstretched hands. "I'm standing here, aren't I?""You are," he said. "And that is, as it happens, the most compelling argument anyone has made in this citadel in the last two thousand years.".....Vesra came for me as the afternoon light was beginning its slow amber shift toward evening."It'

Chapter 164"I know," he said while the corner of his mouth moved. "You said so when you were half-unconscious on a battlefield while simultaneously trying to end a war. The timing was very you.""Very me," I agreed, and leaned forward and kissed him, and he kissed me back with the particular thoroughness of someone who has been denied something for three days and intends to account for every hour of it.....The weeks that followed the battle were not simple, but nothing had been simple for long enough that we'd stopped expecting it to be and started focusing on what was actually in front of us instead.Three packs needed tending. Wounded needed healing. Dead needed honoring in the ways their traditions required, and there were enough different traditions in our coalition that the ceremonies took the better part of a week and drew from customs that had never previously shared a space without hostility attached.But they shared space now, and the hostility was absent, and watching wol