Semua Bab Echoes of Ruin: Bab 41 - Bab 50

Dawn didn’t feel like a beginning. It felt like an apology. Too soft, too slow, too late. Light broke across the broken stained glass of the great atrium, splintering rainbows across the stone floors still slick with blood. Smoke drifted low to the ground, and the smell of burnt magic hung in the air thicker than the morning fog rolling in from the mountains. I sat on the front steps of Arcanum Hall, what was left of it, and watched the sun rise over a battlefield in the disguise of a school. The Interregnum had been held off. That was all the faculty seemed to say. Over and over, as if it were important. As if that could erase the way we’d been beaten. As if naming it a victory would lessen its taste. It didn’t. We’d won. Survived. That was all. The quad behind me was crowded with students and staff. Everyone stood in a quiet vigil as Headmaster Arx spoke names. He didn’t try to make his voice carry, but it still rang out across the courtyard, ragged with sleeplessness and the r

The sun crept, slow and lazy, over the horizon. Long fingers of amber light pooled in the courtyard where the university had bled and burned just one month prior. Graduation Day didn’t start with screams or celebration. No popping confetti cannons, no blaring music, no hands thrown up in the air with squeals of triumph. No one burst out of the arches, rushing to where the podium had been built. There were only students shuffling in from all directions, shoulders squared and straight in the light of everything they had endured to stand here today. The courtyard had been scrubbed and sanctified, not made new but made sacred. The stones were no longer scorched, the fractures filled, the blood erased but not forgotten. The sigil Ronan and I had etched with the rest of them, six crests, now bound by flame and forged in unity, was sealed into the ground before us, glowing dimly at its center like a pulse. Symbol, vow, and warning all at once. This school would never fall again. Caps were

I didn’t know how heavy Runebound soil felt until I stepped on it again. The wards knew me. Runes buried in the loam centuries past stirred, faint filaments of magic grazing my ankles, my spine, the nape of my neck. It had felt like home before, like safety. Now it was like being watched. Cataloged. Held up to something I no longer wanted to measure up to. Ronan did not flinch. He trod into Runebound soil at my side like it was his right, his hand brushing mine, not gripping, not claiming. Just…there. Solid. Present. My wolf relaxed at that, even as the runes hissed questions they did not yet understand. The pack came in waves. As they always did. Runebound celebrated the ritual, the ceremony, and the group watching. Wolves sat in the stone ring around the central glade, leaders in their tabards with their sigils stitched in, oracles with chalky fingers, shamans already murmuring prayers as if the coming was a tempest. And at the center were my parents. My father, Rowan Reed. Tal

The castle didn’t feel old. It felt new. The castle loomed over us like a stone crown, its towers scraping the pale morning light. It had been Seraphina’s once. It had been a gathering place for all dragons, united before a war that tore the clans apart. But now it was ours. We’d come here for our winter and spring breaks before, but something had changed since the last time we gathered under its great vaulted ceilings. It wasn’t just a place for the four of us to heal or huddle and plan in secret anymore. It was a fortress. A hearth. A symbol of something that had not existed in many lifetimes. A home. We crossed the threshold into the castle. The air buzzed around us with the low thrum of dragon magic. Old, familiar, and watchful. I didn’t twitch away from it. Neither did Nora. Lucien grumbled about the wards, and Elias winked at me, but even they could feel it. This place knew us again. Silent steps echoed around the empty halls, not because there was no one there, but because

By the time the sun crested the ridgeline and poured soft gold across the valley, I was already ankle-deep in fresh dirt and chalk lines, hands dusty with ash and silver ink. It was the third house of the day. Not the biggest, not the most important, but I was doing it with the same care I’d done the other two. A single-story cottage just past the outer circle of completed homes, close enough to the main road for convenience, far enough back for quiet. Kellan was somewhere behind me, grumbling at the construction crew about the load-bearing wall they’d overcut. Nora was across the way, arms crossed and sharp eyes on the work as if she was mentally cataloging every nail and beam. She looked good in the sun. A little smudged from helping haul building materials, hair in a messy braid that hung over one shoulder. Even with exhaustion etched around her eyes, even with a hundred decisions written in the furrow of her brow, she looked like home. And it was that feeling I tried to bottle