All Chapters of The Lycan’s Tribute: Claimed By My Foster Brothers: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

152 Chapters

What The Other Carries

Torin's POV.The door was the same as Rylan's. Same material, same quality of light thrown back wrong, same absence of anything that felt like a welcome. I put my hand on it and it opened the way Rylan's had opened, with the specific ease of something that had been waiting.I went in.The sound stopped behind me the same way silence stops when you press your palms over your ears. One moment the passage existed, Rylan and the figure and the low ambient presence of the ruins around us, and then the door closed and there was nothing.The room was circular. And the walls.Crystal from floor to ceiling, dense formations growing out of the stone in clusters, each surface angled differently, the whole room a geometry of reflection that caught the sourceless light and redistributed it in ways that had no clean logic. I looked at the nearest wall and there it was. The crystals showed me the great hall.Not the version in my memory that I had spent years editing, cutting the parts that were h

What’s to remember

Rylan's POV.The figure walked like it had taken this route a thousand times and found it unremarkable every single one of them, staff tapping stone in a rhythm that bounced off the close walls and came back slightly wrong. My arm was reminding me it existed.Not loudly. Just the persistent low throb of something that had been damaged. I kept it at the edge of my awareness and said nothing about it because saying something about it would mean Torin would start watching me for signs of deterioration, which was its own particular kind of exhausting.We walked.The figure spoke without turning, which appeared to be a habit."Do you know what this place was?" it said, "before it became what it became.""No." I said."That is fitting for someone your age" Not a judgment, just an observation. "The First Ones built their city on the bones of an ancient entity, something older than almost time itself. The bones remember what was built on them. It remembers everything that has happened above

The Valley Floor

Rylan's POV.The path down the cliff face was, technically, a path.In the same way that a single fraying rope over a canyon was technically a bridge. Present. Functional. "I'll go first." Torin said."Test each step before you put your weight on it." I said.He looked at me over his shoulder. "I know how to walk down a cliff, Rylan.""You know how to walk down a cliff the way you know how to do most things, which is with confidence that occasionally outpaces your actual assessment of the situation." I lashed back. "Aww, that's very poetic." he said mockingly, “'im going now, come meet me when you're done poeting. ""Test each step Mr confidence” "You already said that Socrates”"I'm saying it again."He started down and I followed close behind, watching his feet, watching the rock. The mist swallowed everything below. Whatever was down there was entirely theoretical from this angle. Which did not help, taking into consideration one can fall at any moment. Stone skittered off the

Days in the Heart

Kaelen's POV.Four days. Maybe five.The crystal veins in the walls held their pale glow at the exact same level around the clock, which made tracking time about as reliable as asking the ruins how they were feeling. My body said it had been longer. The guardian had warned us that time moved strangely down here. I had filed that under things that sounded philosophical until they became personal problems.I was crouched over the library vault floor for the third time that morning, or what I was calling morning, staring at the same dust patterns, when Aurelia appeared in the doorway."You've looked at that section twice already." she said."Three times to be precise" I said."And?""Same conclusion each time, which is either confirmation or a sign that I need to find a different hobby." I stood up, my side making the noise it made when I moved too quickly, which it had been making for four days and which I had been ignoring for four days, "whoever went through here knew exactly what the

Fragments of what’s left

Aurelia's POV.Kaelen had spent four days organizing what we found into something that could be handed to other people without causing immediate panic, and I could tell by the way he was standing in front of the murals that he was still not entirely happy with it."Right." he said, "I'll start with what I'm reasonably confident about, and then I'll tell you what I'm guessing, and then I'll tell you what I genuinely have no idea about. The categories are not equal in size.""How unequal?" Rylan said."The first category is small." Kaelen said.Torin looked at the murals. "Great start."Kaelen pointed to the panels in sequence, walking them through it the way he walked through everything, without rushing. The First Ones, the city they built, the bond they created. The something that went wrong, depicted in a panel that was more damaged than image at this point, whatever was carved there half-eaten by time. And then the final panel, the woman.Her face.Or the face that shared enough sim

Unwanted shifts

Aurelia's POV.The prisoner's cell had one job for the last however many centuries and that was to be deeply unpleasant to exist in, and it was still very committed to that job.I came back alone, knelt at the loose stone, lifted it. Nothing underneath except more stone and the ghost of where the journal had been sitting.My wolf turned her attention to the left wall.What? I thought at her.She didn't answer. She just kept looking at the wall with the specific energy of someone who has spotted something and is waiting for you to catch up.I followed her attention and found the symbol. Low down, half buried under dust, edges sharper than everything around it. Looked recent, in the geological sense of the word.That one, my wolf said, or the impression of it anyway. She didn't use words exactly. More like a feeling shaped like a pointed finger that was now pointing at something. I'm aware of it. I said. What about it?She pushed forward slightly.I'm not just going to press my hand on

The Symbol and the altar

Aurelia's POV.The cell had not changed.Which, given everything that had happened since I last stood in it, felt like a personal slight.I led them to the symbol, low on the left wall, half under its dust, and Kaelen went straight to it like a person who had been thinking about it and was finally getting a chance to do something about that.He crouched, fingers hovering just above the surface. "The base carving is original. Same age as everything else in this room." He tilted his head at the angle he used when something was interesting to him against his will. "But the top layer has been re-cut. Someone went over it again.""How recently?" Rylan said."Last few years. Possibly less.""Who would do that?" Rylan said.Kaelen opened his mouth."Zane." Torin said, from the doorway, before Kaelen could answer. "He was here multiple times. We know that from the journal." He looked at the symbol "It was most likely him."My wolf had been staring at the symbol since we walked in.Don't. I to

The Lab

Aurelia's POV.Rylan led us into the side passage and I immediately understood why he had not described it in detail before bringing us here.Some things you just had to experience for yourself.The walls were bare, which after days of symbol-covered stone felt almost disorienting, and the air changed as we went deeper, growing colder and sitting differently in the chest, the kind of air that had been sealed somewhere unpleasant for a long time and had taken on the personality of whatever it was sealed with.Then the smell arrived."Something died in here." Torin said, covering his nose with his sleeve."Something died in here a while ago." Rylan said, "and some things died in here more recently than that."My wolf flattened her ears.Hard agree. I told her.The passage opened into a chamber and I stood in the entrance and looked at it and my stomach made a decision about how it felt before my brain had finished processing the information.Stone tables along every wall. Rusted instrum

What was brought home

Kade’s POV.The pack grounds below looked exactly the way I liked them to look. Ordered. Quiet. Every wolf in their place, doing their function, the whole operation running well. I found it satisfying for approximately thirty seconds before the patience wore through again."Anything?" I said, without turning from the window."Patience." Aldric said, from the table.My jaw tightened. "I've been patient. I went to the ruin. I went down into the heart of that place which I would not recommend to anyone and which I will not be repeating. I retrieved the book." He turned. "I have been patient for days. I would like results."Aldric did not look up from the page his finger was tracing, a diagram of a wolf split open by lines of light in a way that was either symbolic or deeply literal and I had not decided which reading bothered him more. "The First Ones were close." he said, in the tone he used for things he found genuinely impressive, which was rare enough to be notable. "The formula is

Corvus

POV: KadeThe guard stood there like a kid who’d just been caught stealing cookies from the Alpha’s personal stash. I hated that look. It meant bad news.“They’re gone, Alpha,” he said. “The mansion’s empty.”I stared at him for a good five seconds. “Empty how? Like, nobody’s home empty, or we’ve-been-robbed empty?”He swallowed. “Empty as in… no one’s there, sir. No guards. No servants. No triplets. Beds haven’t been slept in for days. Looks like they left a while ago.”I waved him out before I said something I’d actually regret. The door clicked shut. I turned to Aldric.“Days,” I said. “They’ve been gone for days. And nobody thought to mention this to me?”Aldric didn’t even look up from that stupid book. “Did you ask anyone to check before now?”“That’s not the point.”“That’s exactly the point.” He turned a page. Slow. Deliberate. Like he had all the time in the world and I was just background noise.I wanted to throw something at his head. A book. A chair. Maybe him.Instead, I

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