All Chapters of SHADOWBORN: The Rise Of The Dragon Wolf : Chapter 191 - Chapter 195

Chapter 165NyxThe wedding — weddings, plural, because apparently one wasn't sufficient given the number of traditions that had legitimate claims on us — happened in the autumn.The wolf ceremony came first, which Lyra's and Lucian's pack organized with a thoroughness that suggested they had been planning it considerably longer than we had formally been engaged and were simply relieved to finally have an occasion to deploy the planning. It happened at dusk in the clearing outside the Silver Crescent pack territory, with the moon already visible in the early evening sky and every wolf from the coalition present.Which turned out to be an enormous number of people in a clearing that proved adequate to the task only because several of the more powerful shifters quietly expanded its boundaries about an hour before the ceremony started.Alex stood at the clearing's center looking like himself but more so — the same tousled black hair and steel-grey eyes that went amber in the moonlight,

Chapter 167Ryan's son was seven when he made his first shift, which happened in the apartment building courtyard on a Tuesday afternoon in full view of the retired teacher who lived on the ground floor and spent most of her afternoons tending the courtyard garden. She looked at the small wolf where a small boy had been, looked back at her garden, and said: "Well, that explains some things. Does he eat the bulbs or just dig?"Ryan stood speechless for approximately thirty seconds."The bulbs," his son said, shifting back with the easy fluency of the young. "But only the ones that smell wrong.""The tulips," the teacher said with the resigned tone of someone whose suspicions have been confirmed. "I knew something was getting at them."She became, over the following years, the building's unofficial coordinator of supernatural-adjacent practical matters, a role she accepted without ceremony and executed with considerable competence, and when she died at ninety-three she left a letter tha

Chapter 169NyxThe last session at Firebourn that season ended in the late afternoon with Maren saying "Adjourned" in the same level voice she brought to everything and the council filing out with the particular quality of people who have spent hours in contested discussion and are profoundly ready for the discussion to be over.I sat for a moment in the chamber after everyone else had gone, in the seat I now occupied by right of the eldest house recognition, and looked at the murals on the council room walls — the stories I'd spent two years slowly learning to read, the histories of both species that had run parallel for so long that the separation had started to seem natural to both sides even though it was only ever chosen.The panel with the hybrid figure was visible from where I sat, the outstretched hands and the two peoples leaning in, and I looked at it the way I always looked at it — with something that was gratitude and also challenge, a conversation between where we were a