All Chapters of Blood of the Black Moon: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The arch sealed behind their heels with a breath that sounded almost satisfied, and the air sharpened to a clean, merciless cold. Frost crawled outward from the threshold and then stopped dead, as if remembering its borders. Before them, the Winter Court rose from a ring of black pines—white stone cut with such precision it looked poured, towers like spears, banners like blades. No torches burned along the walls; the light here belonged to snow and star.Taren shivered. Kaelira pulled him closer beneath her cloak. Zevran stood a fraction forward, shoulders squared, gaze raking the battlements not for weakness but for custom. This was a place of rules. Survival here would be written, not won.“Names,” he said softly. “They use them like contracts.”“Then we choose carefully,” Kaelira murmured.They took ten paces toward the gate before the snow moved.Figures unfolded from whiteness with the quiet of owls—sentinels in armor without seam or

The light closed over them like water—no sensation of falling, only of being rewritten.One heartbeat Kaelira’s boots still touched ice; the next, there was no floor, no ceiling—only reflection. Every inch of space shimmered with what could have been mirrors or windows or living eyes. The world had been peeled open from the inside, and they stood in its skin.Zevran steadied her with a hand at her back. “We’re through.”“Through what?” she asked.“The hinge,” he said softly. “Where law and hunger stop pretending they’re different things.”A low hum surrounded them, the sound of an ocean made entirely of breath. Shapes flickered in the mirrors—Kaelira as a child, laughing beside a woman with hair like firelight; Zevran in armor too large for his shoulders, kneeling before a throne carved from bone; Serane’s reflection moving in slow circles behind them, watching, amused.“She’s in here,” Kaelira said. “She’s always in here.”

Snow fell wrong that morning.Each flake glowed faintly as it landed, burning away before it could melt—embers pretending to be winter. Kaelira watched them fade across her glove and thought: the world is trying to understand me.They’d left the Winter Court two days ago, traveling north toward the Dominion’s ruins. The Regent had offered them an escort, which Zevran declined with diplomatic steel. “Winter prefers watching to acting,” he’d said. “Let them keep their habits.”Now, the three of them—Kaelira, Zevran, and Taren—followed a ravine carved through old ice. The boy walked ahead, balancing on frozen rocks, humming under his breath. Every few minutes, he glanced at Kaelira’s hands as if making sure she still glowed.She did. Always faintly now. Her skin shimmered with the same molten pattern as the heart’s surface—shifting lines that pulsed when she breathed too deeply.“Still hurts?” Zevran asked behind her.“No,” sh

The forest still smelled of iron and rain.Kaelira could feel the pulse of the earth beneath her palms, the ancient rhythm that had once guided her kind long before walls or crowns or curses. Her breath came out sharp, visible in the cold air, but she didn’t dare move yet. Zevran stood only a few feet away, half-lit by the dying firelight. The glow danced against his cheekbones, catching the streak of blood on his jaw like war paint.Neither of them spoke.Every heartbeat felt like a question. Every inhale was an answer neither was ready to give.When Zevran finally moved, it wasn’t toward her. He crouched beside the fire, feeding it a piece of broken branch, his expression unreadable. The shadows clung to him like a second skin—one that looked far too familiar.“You shouldn’t have followed me,” he said quietly, not looking up. His voice carried the kind of calm that came just before a storm. “You don’t know what’s hunting us now.”

The sound came first—not the growl, not the scrape of claws against stone—but the silence between them.It was the kind of silence that split the air open, made the forest itself hold its breath.Kaelira felt it in her bones, in the low thrum beneath her skin that had begun ever since the moon’s last rise.Her wolf pressed against the surface of her thoughts, restless, watchful, whispering one word over and over.Mine.But that wasn’t what this was about. Not tonight.The circle of wolves moved inward, the glow of the ritual fire painting them in amber and shadow. Ardan stood at its heart, every inch of him coiled and ready, his bare chest streaked with earth and the sigil of the old ways drawn across his collarbone. Zevran faced him—taller, quieter, but far more dangerous for it. His silence was the kind that spoke of calculation. Control. The kind that could unravel into something feral with a single breath.Kaelira co