All Chapters of Now, The Alpha Wants Me Back: Chapter 121 - Chapter 129

Draven's POVThe Goddess Circle convened an emergency session to vote on allowing the territorial referendum that could end their existence altogether. The meeting was in the ancient stone circle where the Circle had originally come together when Lyra had made her desperate gamble, which seemed grimly appropriate given what we were now discussing.The fight was fierce and intensely personal from the start. These were not figments of abstract philosophical speculation in comfort. These were life-and-death choices of whether to gamble everything they had come to be.Those who had experienced the brunt of the former Council's tyranny viewed an extension of the vote as a tribute to the basic principles they had stood for. Mira sounded in not a little articulate on denying wolves choice would turn them into precisely what they’d got rid of.“We fought for autonomy,” she said clearly. “For the right of wolves to choose their destiny free from power over them from above. If we take that choi

- Draven's POVI grimaced at the evidence laid out before me, teeth clenched tight enough to ache. Maps, intercepted messages, financial records that told one clear story: manipulation.“He reached out to them six months ago,” said Kade, indicating a message that was dated. “A long time before the Pure Packs Alliance was even called that.”I took up the paper, examining the deliberate lettering. Marcus had already lost a few wolves who doubted divine authority. Wolves whose loved ones had fallen to the Council’s corruption. Wolves who were legitimately and deeply concerned. He hadn't created their doubts. He'd weaponized them.“Clever,” I muttered, hating myself for admiring the strategy as much as that sickened me. "He gave them real research. Genuine historical proof of divine interference. Just left out the consequences."Lyra had been on the other side of me while I read different papers. Her silver eyes darted back and forth rapidly.“He paid for them to organize,” she said softl

Lyra's POV"Lyra!" Draven’s voice called to me from far, far away. In a human real-time world I felt his hands resting on my shoulders, but mentally I was somewhere else. And trapped in a battlefield inside my own mind.Malachai's essence was vast. Ancient. Dominated in a way I could never hope to overcome. He’d been locked away for centuries, but he hadn’t wasted that time; he'd spent it studying, learning, and preparing for precisely this moment.What a super strong ship, he would echo in my mind. "Immortal. Inter-linked to forty three other celestial origins. You’ll do just fine, little Guardian.”I instinctively fought back, trying to nudge him away like I would try to displace any other invader. But fighting Malachai was like attempting to shove the ocean back with my bare hands. For each inch I gained, he surged forward three more.My vision flickered. One moment, watching through my own eyes, Draven’s awful fear-filled face an inch from mine. The next moment piercing into Mala

Draven's POVThrough my connection with Lyra, I felt her terror rise. Sensed the shift in Malachai’s presence in her mind, from smugness to something like concern.“Turn back,” her voice rang out through my head, using Guardian power to project across distance. "Draven, don't go closer. That there thing, it ain’t like the others. It's the Devourer. Cosmic-dweller that craves divine essence.”“Then I’m right where I need to be,” I responded back, with the knowledge that through our connection she would feel it. “Because the seventh site team is directly in its path.Instead of turning away, I approached the manifestation. My wolf howled at me to run, but I controlled it. People needed help. That was what mattered.The team I was summoned to bolster was in disarray when I got there. Three members of the Goddess Circle had already been coordinating efforts to seal a standard Void incursion. Now they were up against something entirely different.The thing they’d been battling, a shapeles

Draven's POVI heard it through the bond, felt it.It was not painful exactly. It was more like watching a flame get devoured by something vast and inky, the light still present but shriveling to nothingness at odds with something that predated its fiery birth by eons. The connection in our bond with Lyra sputtered. Then it fractured. Then it howled without a sound.I was running before my mind caught up with my body.The battlefield between me and her was a mangled scene of fallen wolves and scorched ground and men continuing to perceive that the fight had been anything, until now, other than what none of them knew how to prepare. I shoved through it all. They grabbed my arm, I freed myself with no glance to see who it was. And I did not answer when someone else called my name.I got to her as she seized up.She was standing, and that was the only mercy of any of it. Standing, but barely. Her hands were at her sides, shaking, and her head was tilted back at an angle that seemed wron