Semua Bab Blood of the Black Moon: Bab 11 - Bab 20

They left the citadel under a sky the color of iron. Fog clung to the cliffs and swallowed sound, making every step feel like trespass. Kaelira kept her palm over the faint glow of her mark as if she could smother it through sheer stubbornness. Beside her, Zevran moved with the same measured economy that had always felt unshakable—until tonight. The bond carried a subtle hitch in his breath, a thin thread of strain he didn’t acknowledge and probably hoped she wouldn’t notice. She noticed. They didn’t speak until the citadel’s runes dimmed behind them and the land fell away to frost-silvered pines. Zevran chose a shelf of stone half-hidden by wind-stunted juniper and set a small warding circle with a soldier’s precision. Silver light webbed the ground, gentle as spider silk. “Not too bright,” Kaelira said, because silence made the bond too loud. “Serane will feel anything stronger.” “She already knows where we

The Witchfire Plains began where the forests ended—an endless stretch of scorched glass that once had been earth. Heat shimmered even though no sun pierced the ash-clouds; lightning crawled silently across the horizon, feeding on the residue of old spells. Kaelira tightened her cloak around Taren, who rode slumped before her on Zevran’s horse. The boy’s pulse was steady, but faint, like a candle refusing to go out. She could still see the rune he’d drawn—the circle and the three dots—burned faintly on the inside of his wrist. Zevran rode ahead, scanning the flat horizon. The plains made him uneasy. She felt it through the bond: a pressure behind her sternum, a heartbeat she couldn’t separate from her own. “You’ve been quiet,” she said. “Listening.” “To what?” He didn’t turn. “To how alive this place still is.” The wind hissed across the cracked glass, carrying whispers that sound

The tower fell for an eternity before it stopped.Stone screamed against stone, and then they were still—no sound but the echo of settling dust and Kaelira’s heart punching against her ribs. When her ears cleared, she heard Zevran’s breathing beside her, slow and deliberate. Alive.Light seeped up through the cracks in the floor, gold and red like veins of living metal. Kaelira pushed herself upright. They weren’t in the tower anymore. They were beneath it, in the hollow the witches had carved centuries ago. A subterranean cathedral built of obsidian ribs and molten glass.“The heart’s pulse,” Zevran murmured, scanning the cavern walls. “We’re sitting inside it.”Kaelira turned toward the staircase that no longer led up—just a black maw now, breathing dust. “Serane dropped us here on purpose.”Taren scrambled closer, eyes wide and shining in the red light. “She said she brought the door.”Kaelira’s jaw tightened. “And we wer

Dawn never quite arrived.The Witchfire storm burned the horizon white, then guttered to ash, leaving the sky the color of old iron. Smoke drifted in ragged curtains across the broken bridge, carrying the metallic tang of spells burned out and bodies that never were. The Dominion ranks had withdrawn before sunrise—orderly, eerily silent—leaving only scorched glass and sigils cooling like brands.Kaelira stood at the cliff’s edge until the last echo of marching faded. Her wolf paced under her skin, restless. The witch in her counted breaths, measuring the way the bond dragged and then steadied, dragged and steadied, until Zevran’s pulse matched hers again.“You didn’t overreach,” he said quietly behind her. “You leashed it.”She didn’t turn. “Barely.”“Barely is the difference between living and legend.”She huffed a laugh that wasn’t one. “Legends die, too.”“Eventually.”His presence settled beside her, close b

The Gate of Echoes did not lead down.It led in.The stairs coiled only a dozen turns before dissolving into a corridor of mirror-stone veined with slow lightning. The air was cold enough to ache. Each breath clouded, drifted, and became another ghost on the glass.Taren walked half a step behind Kaelira, one hand fisted in the back seam of her cloak the way a child holds a tether in a crowd. The boy had stopped asking if Zevran was alive. The bond answered that question with a thin, stubborn pulse—faint, distant, unbroken.Measured, she told herself. Even now.The corridor widened into a chamber like a cut geode: facets everywhere, each catching a version of her that wasn’t exactly hers. One wore a crown of pale antlers. One cradled a sleeping child whose veins glowed like rivers. One stood alone in a world made of ash.Taren’s breath hitched. “Which one is real?”“None,” Kaelira said. “All.”A ripple ran through th