Semua Bab A Veil of Ash and Glass: Bab 21 - Bab 26

The forest knew before they did. It held itself wrong.Branches leaned away from the clearing, leaves suspended as if waiting for a command they did not want to hear. Even the light felt reluctant, thinning through the canopy like it might be punished for touching her.Umbra stood pressed to Althea’s leg, whining low in his chest. Not fear. Warning.Althea felt it too. A pressure behind her eyes. A tightness in her ribs that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with inevitability.They were alone.Truly alone.Luca stood a few feet away, hands loose at his sides, posture deceptively relaxed in the way of a man who knew a blade was coming and refused to flinch first. His gaze never left her face.“You’re shaking,” he said quietly.She hadn’t realized she was.“I’m fine,” she answered automatically, then stopped herself.The lie tasted wrong. Useless. “No. I’m not.”Umbra nudged her leg again, harder this time, as if insisting she stop pretending.She exhaled, slow and care

The realm did not welcome Luca. It did not repel him either. It existed around him with the disinterest of something ancient that did not care whether he endured.Silver stretched in every direction, neither solid nor fluid, rippling slowly as if responding to a tide he could not see. Above him, the sky held no sun, no moon—only a lattice of stars affixed too precisely to be natural.When he finally found his bearings, he realized that they were not stars. They were eyes. Observing.Luca inhaled carefully. The air felt thin and metallic, as if breathing along a blade’s edge. Each breath scraped. Each exhale fogged and fell instead of rising, gravity behaving as if someone had rewritten it mid-thought.He flexed his hand.They trembled, not from fear but from the residual pain from the tearing pull that had ripped him from Althea.But the bond still burned. Not comforting. Not reassuring. It was like a live wire that stretched through his chest, humming with distance and strain. When h

Althea didn’t realize that she had fallen asleep.Exhaustion hit her like a heavy door unexpectedly shutting, dragging her under before she could argue with it. One moment, she was seated against the trunk of a tree, Umbra’s weight warm and solid at her side. The next -Pressure. Like getting sucked into a vacuous black hole.Awareness slammed into her fully formed, breath knocked out of her chest as she surfaced somewhere that had no ground and too much space. Her bare feet met nothing. Her spine stiffened instinctively, balance searching for rules that weren’t there.“Where the fuck am I?” she thought.The forest was gone.The ache in her bones sharpened into clarity.And then -HIM.The bond tightened so fast it hurt.Althea gasped, one hand flying to her sternum as heat flooded her chest, sudden and starving, the thread between them pulled taut across a distance that felt hostile and wrong.She turned without thinking.Luca stood a few steps away. He looked like he’d been dragged