Lahat ng Kabanata ng BARBARIAN: The Mad Alpha Is My Mate.: Kabanata 151 - Kabanata 160

The news reached them before the group had finished counting their wounded. More messengers arrived within the hour, each one carrying a worse account than the last—packs crossing borders they'd respected for generations, villages burning under torches lit in the name of a threat that had already died beneath Asterion's shattered plaza."Some blame the Mad Wolf's return," one runner reported, breathless, kneeling before the Warden and the gathered group alike. "Others have heard rumors of what happened at Vaelor. They blame the two of you directly. They believe you woke whatever's been tearing through their lands."Caierre felt the words land like a physical blow. "We didn't wake it. We ended it.""They don't know that," the old man said, grim. "And even if they did, I am not certain it would change anything at this point. Fear rarely waits for accurate information before choosing where to point itself."Alvar's jaw tightened. "Then we go correct it. In person, if that's what it takes

The camp fell into chaos the moment the count came up short a second time."Everyone, sound off!" Grant's voice cracked through the clearing, sharp with barely restrained panic. "Names, now!"They went through it fast—Morwen, the old man, Grant himself, Rowan already moving toward the treeline with his blade drawn, scanning for any sign of a struggle. Alvar stayed close to Caierre, hand never leaving his, both of them counting alongside the others with rising dread.One of the Guardians who'd traveled with them from Asterion, a quiet, steady presence named Ferris who had barely spoken more than a handful of words the entire journey, was gone."There's no trail," Rowan called back, voice tight, crouching low near the edge of the clearing where the frost lay thick and undisturbed. "No footprints. No scent, no sign of a fight, nothing dragged through the brush. It's as if he simply walked out of the light and never came back.""That's not encouraging," Grant muttered, already moving to c

The thing crawling free of the portal bore no resemblance to the creature they'd faced beneath Asterion. That one had held some vast, terrible coherence, a shape enormous enough to fill an entire ruined plaza. This was different—smaller, more contained, but somehow worse for it, its body shifting endlessly between smoke and something closer to flesh, crimson veins pulsing visible beneath skin that never settled into any fixed form long enough to be studied properly. Two eyes opened within the shifting dark, glowing faint and steady, and the moment they found Caierre, Alvar felt the bond in his own chest tighten so sharply he nearly cried out from the pain of it secondhand."Behind me," Alvar said, already moving, pulling Caierre back with one arm while raising his sword with the other. Grant and Rowan closed ranks on either side without needing to be told, weapons raised, forming a loose, desperate wall between Caierre and whatever now stood watching him with such unnerving patience

The memory tore through him with a force that eclipsed everything that had come before it, and this time Caierre didn't merely witness—he understood, completely, every choice that had brought a thousand years of grief spiraling down toward this single, crumbling chamber.He stood in the throne room of ancient Vaelor, wounded Fenrir bleeding beside him, the first kings arrayed in horrified silence while a dark mass writhed beneath the very floor they stood upon. He remembered the fear in every face turned toward him. He remembered, more clearly than anything, the decision that had followed it.He had chosen to bind himself to Fenrir. Freely. Not because the kings demanded it, not because circumstance had left him no other option, but because he had believed—desperately, hopefully—that the bond would give Fenrir enough strength to resist whatever the darkness beneath the palace was trying to make of him.The creature had not been born from nothing. It had been born from the fear of king

The chamber stayed silent long after the portal's light had fully died, but the silence did nothing to ease the cold, tightening dread settling deeper into Caierre's chest with every passing second. He couldn't stop turning Fenrir's final words over in his mind. The first king. A name he'd never heard spoken directly in any of the fragmented history he'd pieced together across weeks of memory and grief.Rowan crossed slowly to the broken seal, crouching beside the still-glowing markings scattered thick across the dust-choked floor. "If that was truly the first king," he said, voice careful, "then everything we were ever taught about the curse was wrong.""Not everything," Lucien said.Every head turned toward him at once.~~Lucien stood near the shattered wall Alvar had gone crashing through earlier, his expression grim in a way Caierre hadn't seen on him since Asterion's collapse."His name was Aeric," Lucien said, quiet, careful, like each word cost him something to release after c