All Chapters of ALCHEMY OF MATES - ALPHA AND LUNA REBORN : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

I lasted six hours before I broke.Drake and I had been training relentlessly, pushing our merged abilities to new limits. But every time I drew on Zack's Alpha dominance through our bond, I felt his exhaustion, his stress, his preparation for a battle that could kill him."I cannot do this," I said, dropping the combat stance. "I cannot train here while he faces a war alone."Drake lowered his hands, rebirth energy flickering out. "Aria—""No. Listen to me." I turned to face him fully. "Zack is going to fight Darius and possibly die because the Coalition wants me. Because my existence threatens their comfortable order. And I am hiding here like a coward while he pays the price for my power.""You are preparing to face a dimensional threat," Drake argued. "That is not cowardice. That is strategy.""It is abandonment." The words tasted like acid. "In our first timeline, Zack abandoned me. Rejected me publicly, chose Selene, let me suffer alone. I swore I would never forgive him for tha

The sanctuary felt different when we returned. Darker somehow, as if the compound itself sensed what was coming."You have six days," Kara said the moment we entered. No greeting, no acknowledgment of our victory against the Coalition. Just cold calculation. "Six days to complete the soul binding, master your merged abilities, and develop tactical approaches for fighting something none of us fully understand.""That is not enough time," Drake said flatly."It is the time you have." Kara led us deeper into the compound, past the normal training areas to a section I had never seen before. The walls here were covered in runes that seemed to shift and writhe, reality bending around them in nauseating ways. "This is the deep chamber. Where we train for the truly impossible."She pushed open massive doors, revealing a space that should not exist. The chamber was vast—easily the size of three football fields—despite the compound's exterior being nowhere near large enough to contain it. The c

The fragment should not exist.Every instinct I possessed screamed that what stood before us violated fundamental laws of reality. It was not invisible or monstrous—it was absence itself. A hole in existence that consumed light, sound, and possibility wherever it moved."That is not a fragment," Drake said through our merged consciousness, his experience across multiple timelines providing context. "That is a scout. A tendril the Devourer sends ahead to mark targets.""Which means the full entity knows exactly where we are now," Zack added grimly. "The Council just rang a dinner bell."Through our bonds, we processed the implications in microseconds. Fighting this tendril would draw the Devourer's full attention. But letting it continue existing meant it would consume the arena, the spectators, and spread from there."No choice then," I said aloud. "We end this now."The tendril moved—not through space but around it, reality bending to accommodate its presence. Where it passed, the ar

The Devourer's choice was not acceptance.It was rage."You dare," its voice shattered across dimensional barriers, "to suggest I surrender my purpose? That I join with finite beings who exist for mere moments against my eternity? You insult me with your arrogance."The attack that followed was beyond anything we had faced. Not just attempts at erasure, but the full weight of an entity that had consumed billions of realities focusing entirely on our destruction.Reality around us did not just break—it inverted. Existence became non-existence. Time flowed backward and forward simultaneously. We experienced our own deaths across seventeen different timelines at once, feeling ourselves unmade in configurations of suffering that would drive mortal minds instantly insane.But we were not mortal anymore. Not entirely.Our merged consciousness held, but barely. Through our three perspectives, we felt our individual identities beginning to fragment under the assault. Zack's Alpha certainty wa

Thirty-one minutes into our individual trials, reality shattered.Not metaphorically. The dimensional barriers Kara had created to separate us literally exploded inward, and we were thrown back into merged consciousness with violent force. Through our reunited perspectives, we immediately understood why.Something else had arrived."Impossible," Kara breathed, her mismatched eyes wide with genuine terror. "The quantum void should be sealed. Nothing can emerge from there without—"Seven figures materialized in the ruined arena, and they were wrong in ways that made the Devourer seem almost natural. They existed in states of quantum superposition—simultaneously solid and incorporeal, present and absent, real and hypothetical. Looking at them directly caused paradoxes in perception."The Architects," the Devourer's voice resonated with something approaching fear. "They should not be able to manifest in stable reality. The laws of physics reject their existence.""Laws are flexible when y