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Home / Werewolf / The Lycan’s Tribute: Claimed By My Foster Brothers / Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Lycan’s Tribute: Claimed By My Foster Brothers: Kabanata 61 - Kabanata 70

84 Kabanata

Uncanny encounter

Aurelia's POV.I couldn't move.I knew it wasn't him. Some part of my brain was saying that clearly, calmly, the way Kaelen would say it, this is not real, the ruins show you what you fear, Jaren told you this, you know this. That part was working fine.The rest of me was completely useless.Because it was his face. Exactly his face, the same space I had spent months trying not to think about too directly because thinking about it directly hurt in a way that didn't have a clean edge to it. His eyes. The way he tilted his head slightly when he was confused."Aurelia." His voice. Soft and lost and wrong in a way that took me a second to identify because it was almost right. "Why are you with them? Do you even remember me?"My throat closed."It's not him." Kaelen's voice, behind me, cutting through the thing that had wrapped around my chest. "Look at me. It is not him."I knew that. I did know that."Did you ever actually love me?" the voice said, and that was the one that got through t

What Lives Here

Aurelia's POV.The laughter left and took everything with it.No echoes. No residue of sound. Just the kind of silence that sits on your chest and makes you aware of your own heartbeat because there is nothing else to listen to.I looked at Kaelen.He was leaning against the wall with one hand pressed flat to the stone and the other doing the thing he thought he was hiding, pressed to his side, feeling for something he didn't want to find. His face was pale in the torchlight. Not dramatically, but enough that I noticed and couldn't un-notice."We need to stop." I said, keeping my voice low, "even just for a few minutes.""We can't." he said."Kaelen…""Torin and Rylan bought us time." he said, and his voice was steady even if the rest of him wasn't quite, "standing here wastes it. We move."I wanted to argue. I looked at his face and the set of his jaw and understood it would accomplish nothing. "What if they're hurt?" I said instead, "what if something happened back there and they're

Subtle confessions

Aurelia's POV.The scream went through my skull like something physical.I had my hands over my ears before I'd decided to move them and it made no difference because the sound wasn't coming through the air, it was just everywhere, inside the walls and inside my chest and inside every space between my thoughts that I'd thought was mine.Kaelen stepped in front of me."Stay close." he said, and his blade was already out.The creature lunged and there was no time after that for anything except the immediate and brutal reality of two people in a passage too narrow for comfort fighting something that had no face and didn't seem to notice when you hurt it. I was on Kaelen's left side because his left side was the one his wound wasn't on, keeping myself useful without getting in his way, and I caught the creature across what should have been its arm on the second pass. It recoiled back, staggered abit and lunged forward again for a second attack. This time Kade caught it with his blade to

The Valley below

Aurelia's POV.Something shook my shoulder and I came up out of sleep like breaking the surface of water, hand going for my blade before I was fully awake."Easy." Kaelen's voice. Close. "It's me."I exhaled and let my hand drop. "How long was I out?""Long enough." He was crouching in front of me, and in the last dying glow of the torch he looked better than he had, the grey color he had some hours ago gone from his face, his eyes were clearer. Rest had done something for him even if the floor of an underground alcove wasn't anyone's ideal idea of recovery conditions."You should have woken me sooner." I said."You needed it." He stood, carefully, one hand briefly touching his side in that habitual check. "How do you feel?""Like I slept on stone.""You did sleep on stone."I let out a chuckle, “right, I di" I said, and got up.We moved back into the passage and the first thing I noticed was the walls."Kaelen.""I see it."The symbols that had been glowing faintly when we came throu

The Valley Floor

Aurelia's POV.The path down the cliff face was technically a path in the same way that a collection of suggestions was technically a plan."That's not wide enough." I said, looking at it."It's wide enough." Kaelen said."For what? A very confident goat?""For us." He tested the first section with his foot, pressed his weight onto it, watched it hold. "Stay close to the wall and don't look down.""Why would I look down.""Everyone looks down." he said, and started moving.I looked down. Once. Then I kept my eyes on the rock face in front of me and focused on where my hands were and where my feet were going and tried not to think about the valley floor somewhere below us in the mist.Kaelen had set the pace, testing each step before fully resting on it, and I followed his exact line, put my feet where he'd put his, trusted his judgment about the rock.Halfway down, the path just ended.Not dramatically, not with warning. One moment it was there and the next Kaelen's foot went through

No Way Back

Rylan's POV.I heard Kaelen and Aurelia's footsteps fade into the left passage and then there was no more time to think about them."Let's take this thing down together." Torin said, beside me, blade up."Together." I said.The creature came.It was fast in a way that made no sense given the size of it, at some point I stopped trying to make sense of the movement and just tracked it. It came for me first.I got my blade up and deflected the first swipe but the second caught me across the chest, claws raking through the armor, and the impact sent me back two steps. Not down. I registered the sting of it and filed it away for later."Rylan…""I'm up." I said, already moving back in.Torin drove his blade into its shoulder from the left and the creature made that sound, the bone-deep was widely unsettling, and it threw him. Not swiped, not pushed. Threw him, full force into the passage wall, and the sound of his back hitting stone was something I felt in my back teeth."Torin.""Still h

Treasure Hunters

Kaelen's POV.The man's eyes found us and I had my hand on my blade before he opened his mouth.He didn't reach for a weapon. He just stared at us for a second and then he said, "Oh thank god."Not what I was expecting."We thought we were the only ones down here." He said it with genuine relief, which told me either he was an extraordinarily good liar or he was exactly what he appeared to be, which was a person who had been alone in an ancient underground ruin for long enough to find two strangers hiding behind a wall actively comforting.The woman beside him lowered the weapon she'd half-raised, slowly, her eyes moving over us with the careful assessment of someone running calculations.I stepped out from behind the wall, putting myself between them and Aurelia, which was automatic at this point."Who are you." I said."Friendly." the man said, immediately, with the energy of someone who had learned to establish that particular fact quickly in situations like this one. "Very friendl

The Heart of Dracos

Aurelia's POV.Kai talked the whole way through the mist."...third time we came down here, Mira nearly fell into one of those dark pools…""I didn't nearly fall." Mira said, from behind us."You were at a 45 degree angle.""I was leaning.""Toward the pool.""I was looking at something.""You were looking at it from a 45 degree angle while nearly falling into it." Kai said, then turned to me like I was a neutral party, "she was nearly in the pool.""I believe you." I said.Mira made a sound behind us that suggested she had opinions about that.Kaelen walked beside me, saying little, his silence more alert than usual, tuned to the mist and what might be sitting inside it. Kai noticed eventually, sideways."So." he said, "your group. How exactly does a group get separated in a place like this?""The passages shifted." Kaelen said."Shifted how.""The way passages shift down here. We were on one side, they were on the other."Kai looked at him for a second. "You're not going to tell me

The Hoodef figure

Rylan's POV.The dagger spun slowly in the air above the stone table, glowing with the same faint pulse as the symbols on the walls, and the figure in the entrance stood with its staff raised and said absolutely nothing.I pushed Torin back with one arm and kept my blade up."Who are you." I said.Nothing."I asked you a question."The figure's head tilted slightly. The hood hid everything above the mouth. The staff lowered by maybe two inches, which was not lowering it but was something. The dagger kept spinning."Who are you." I said again, and this time I put more of myself into it, the particular version of my voice that I had learned over years got people to take me seriously faster than the alternative.The figure spoke."Many men have come through these ruins." The voice was neither old nor young, neither entirely one thing nor another. "Some cross paths with me. Some do not." A pause. "You have. So I ask again what you have not yet answered." The hood turned slightly, taking i

House of mirrors

Rylan's POV.The passage behind the hooded figure split into two.Not obviously, not with any signage or indication Just two openings side by side, each sealed with a door made of something I didn't recognize, material that was neither stone nor wood nor metal but caught the torchlight and threw it back changed, altered, like the surface had an opinion about the light it received."One each." the figure said.Torin looked at me. I looked at the doors."What's inside?" I said."What you carry." the figure said, which was consistent with its approach of answering questions in ways that technically answered them but didn't really answer them as well. I put my hand on the left door. It opened like it had been expecting me, no resistance, no sound, which was somehow worse than if it had been difficult.I went in and the door closed behind me and the sound of the passage, the faint ambient presence of Torin and the figure and the dagger and all of it, simply stopped. Like a hand placed ove

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