Semua Bab His Luna Returned—So I Left With His Baby”: Bab 131 - Bab 140

The convoy split didn’t end with smoke.It ended with a broadcast.***They didn’t give Elowen time to sleep.The inner cage slid into a new docking well—different humming under the floor, colder air, the smell of scrubbed stone and antiseptic. The door opened. Hands moved her again.Not rough.Not gentle.Efficient.They unhooked the shackles only long enough to switch her into a new room—smaller than the “protective wing,” more clinical. A reinforced window looked not onto a courtyard but onto a blank shaft where only ward‑light moved.A camera in the corner blinked to life.“Sit,” a medic said. “They want you seated for the recording.”“Of course they do,” she said. “The lighting?”He didn’t rise to the bait.She sat on a bolted chair, back straight, hands folded loosely in her lap. No cuffs.For now.The door hissed.Calista walked in as if she were entering a parlor.She wore a softer dress this time—a pale blue that made her look less like a queen and more like the idea of a mot

Meridian loomed in the distance like a bad idea given architecture.Daire wanted to rip it down with his teeth.***From the Lunaris vantage ridge, Sanctum Meridian looked… clean. A low, sprawling complex of pale stone and reinforced glass ringed with layered wards that shimmered faintly in the night. No towers. There are no obvious weapons. Just neat lines and the hum of something built to make powerful things small.“Pretty,” Rae said, spitting into the dirt. “In the “venomous flower” way.”Lunaris sentries paced the forward lines, eyes on the perimeter, and ears on the distant rumble of tribunal convoys still moving through their own roads. Nightmoor wolves clustered in tense knots behind them—newly re‑oathed after the duel, loyalty not yet settled into habit.Daire stood at the front of the joint camp. Every line of his body strung tight.“Lock down our borders,” he ordered, voice clipped. “No one in or out of Nightmoor without my mark. Anyone with even a whiff of Calista’s coin d

Calista crossed the threshold like she was visiting a friend in recovery.The room registered her differently.So did Elowen.***The guards fanned just inside the door, a half‑circle of grey uniforms and tense shoulders. Behind them, a tribunal clerk with a tablet and the notary Elowen had seen earlier—seal pinned neat at her lapel, pen already in hand as if to catch anything useful.Calista moved between them all, a streak of pale blue and composed purpose, the relic cradled in her hands like a fragile heirloom. Its false Lunaris hum scraped along Elowen’s nerves, wrong notes under the sidelong song of the Cradle wards.“Elowen,” Calista said, stopping a safe distance away. “You look tired.”“You look pleased,” Elowen replied. “We all have our burdens.”Calista’s mouth softened as if in sympathy.“I’m relieved,” she corrected. “Relieved we reached you before this escalated further. Before Lunaris goaded Daire into something, he couldn’t walk back.”“He poisoned a duel ring,” Elowen

The echo of her name still rang in Daire’s throat when he made the decision.No more councils.No more half‑measures.***They regrouped just outside Meridian’s cracked inner ward—a ruined stretch of wall smoking gently, the air thick with the sharp stink of burned sigils and the copper tang of spilled blood. Wolves moved in ragged lines—Lunaris shadows, Nightmoor fighters, rogues Kieran had pointed at the right enemy for once.Elowen was nowhere in the rubble.Her absence pulsed louder than any alarm.Nyra wiped soot from her cheek with the back of her hand, eyes scanning the chaos.“We hit the wrong vein,” Rae said, furious. “They shoved her into the courier lane while we danced out here.”“Not wrong,” Mae said, crouched by a disabled ward node, still panting from the effort of unpicking it mid‑battle. “Just… later than we needed.”Daire stood in the middle of the fractured courtyard, shoulders heaving, curse‑dark veins throbbing under his skin like something alive.“They took her a

The first tug was almost gentle.It lied.***When Crowe said, “We begin the claim,” the silver lattice above the dais brightened in response.Threads of light descended like hair‑fine rain, brushing Elowen’s shoulders, her crown, the vulnerable stretch of skin at her throat. For a half‑beat they felt like cobwebs.Then they sank in.Her crest burned.Power—hers—thrummed in alarm, like a lake realizing someone had just drilled a hole in its bed.The first pull slid over her skin like static.The second went deeper.Heat gathered where the ward‑band encircled her right wrist, then streaked up her arm, across her chest, down into her belly. The runes etched into the dais flared as it drank, reading her as if she were a page.The baby kicked hard at the sudden heat, a panicked jab under her ribs.“It’s all right,” she breathed, though nothing about this was. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”The lattice brightened again.“Initial synchronization,” the medic reported, eyes flicking between he