Lahat ng Kabanata ng LOST AND FOUND: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 50

The first light of dawn bled across the peaks like a slow wound, touching the shattered ridges where the storm had passed. Kaelen led Serenya through the mountain pass in silence, their boots scraping against frost-hardened earth. Mist pooled low in the valleys below, rolling like ghostly tides around the blackened trees.The ruins of the monastery stood ahead—half-swallowed by vines, its spires broken, its walls tilting as though the mountain itself had tried to forget them. Ravens wheeled in the distance, crying against the cold wind.Serenya stopped at the threshold, her breath fogging. The place stirred something deep within her—a strange, aching familiarity she couldn’t name. “I’ve been here before,” she whispered, though she couldn’t have known how.Kaelen’s hand brushed her arm. “Easy. This place feels wrong.” His voice was low, wary. His wolf senses prickled beneath his skin, a tension humming through his shoulders.The stone courtyard was littered with fragments of old carvin

The first light of dawn broke over the ravaged forest, pale and uncertain, like a hand that didn’t dare touch what remained of the night. Smoke hung low between the trees. The air was damp with ash and dew — the scent of endings, and beginnings too fragile to name.Kaelen knelt beside Serenya where she rested against the roots of a fallen oak. Her hair, still threaded with faint streaks of silver light, clung to her skin. She looked too still, too fragile, her breath shallow as mist.He brushed a thumb over her cheek, feeling warmth there — faint, but alive. “You’ve got to stop scaring me like this,” he murmured, voice hoarse.Her lips curved faintly. “You make it too easy.”Kaelen almost laughed, but it came out as a choked breath. “You just closed a rift that nearly tore the world in half. Forgive me for being a little on edge.”She stirred, wincing as she tried to sit up. “Did it stay closed?”He hesitated, glancing toward the glade. The air there still shimmered faintly, like wate

The circle burned brighter.Serenya tried to move, but her limbs wouldn’t answer. The light at her feet pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat, each flash pressing harder against her skin until it felt like the ground itself was breathing with her.“Kaelen,” she whispered, voice cracking. The sound barely carried beyond her lips.The forest had gone deathly silent. Even the wind refused to stir. Every tree leaned inward, their shadows trembling in the crimson wash of moonlight. The sigils under her knees shifted, reordering themselves in patterns too fluid to follow — alive, aware, whispering in a tongue that tasted like metal and memory.Then came the sound.A breath. Soft. Too close.“Serenya.”Her head snapped up. “Kaelen?”The voice came again, from behind this time — faint, fragmented, the way echoes behave in dreams. She spun around, scanning the ruins, her heart hammering.He stepped out from the edge of the mist.At least, it looked like him.Kaelen’s silhouette carried the same

The light swallowed everything.It wasn’t just brightness — it was a living force, searing through stone, air, and skin. Serenya’s scream vanished inside it, sound devoured by radiance. The vow’s circle burned white, then red, its sigils rising from the earth like molten chains.Kaelen hit the ground hard, his back cracking against the fractured altar. He tried to stand but the air itself pressed him down, dense and thrumming with power. The sound that filled the clearing wasn’t human — it was a chorus of thousands, whispering her name.“Serenya!”He could barely see her. Her figure was lost inside the inferno of light — a silhouette suspended midair, hair lifted by unseen wind, eyes glowing the same deep crimson as the moon above. The markings on her skin pulsed in rhythm with the circle beneath her feet. Each pulse was a heartbeat that wasn’t entirely her own.Kaelen crawled forward, arm outstretched. “Stop! You’re feeding it!”Her voice came back to him, faint but resolute. “I can’

The air still pulsed with heat.Kaelen stumbled through the ruin of the vow circle, boots grinding through glassy shards of burned sigil light. The cavern reeked of ozone and scorched earth. Smoke rose in slow, twisting threads that glowed faintly red, as if the stone itself hadn’t accepted what had just happened.He dropped to his knees beside the cratered heart of the circle. The light there still shimmered — faint, trembling — like veins refusing to stop bleeding.“Serenya!” His voice cracked against the cavern walls. “Serenya, answer me!”Nothing. Only the sound of stone settling, embers sighing.He pressed his palms into the glowing sigil marks that crawled across the ground. The heat burned through his skin, but he didn’t stop. “You promised me,” he whispered, jaw clenched. “You said the vow wouldn’t take you. You said—”The air shifted. Not with sound, not with movement — but with something subtler, older.A pulse. A soft, harmonic tremor that moved through the ruin like a brea