جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 270

Keiran’s POVThe moment Ronan landed, he stopped being a man returned to battle and became Alpha again in full. Nyra changed the emotional balance of the field, but Ronan changed the structure of it. He took what she created and turned it into survival for the rest of us.“Finish the ones she drives down!”His voice cut through the field hard.“Protect the civilians!”He pointed left.“Hold the flank! Stop hitting the scales where they’re strongest!”Then toward us.“Eyes, throats, under the jaw! Use the openings!”The difference was immediate. Not order where there had been none. Better than that. Useful order. The kind only an Alpha who trusts what his mate is doing can impose. He did not waste time trying to protect Nyra from her own power. Did not shout her name in panic or treat her like some unpredictable weapon likely to break friend and foe alike. He fought with her. Around her. Through the openings she created, already understanding that if we wanted to live, we needed to sto

Ronan’s POVI had never seen anything like her. Not even in the meadow. Not even when Seraphina rose for the first time beneath the moon in all that impossible gold and old arrogance and radiance that made the night feel too small to hold her. That had been wonder. Intimacy. Revelation. The sort of thing a man survives by kneeling inwardly before it and thanking whatever old force of fate decided to let him witness it. This was war. And in war, wonder becomes something else. A weapon. A terror. A promise.I hit the ground running while Nyra and Seraphina split the sky wide open above me, and even in the first seconds after I landed, with wings beating overhead and blood already drying on the field and men still dying if you were slow enough to notice, a part of me was in awe. Not passive awe. Not the kind that roots a man to the ground while the world burns around him. The kind that sharpens him. The kind that makes him understand, in the centre of battle, that the old rules are break

Ronan’s POVSmoke hung low over parts of the ground now. Dust too. Broken things burned in small ugly patches where the impacts had scattered lantern flame or caught old dry matter along the outer field. Men coughed. Blood ran. The cries of the wounded made the air feel torn. But through all of it the enemy kept loosening its grip. The Aetherfangs climbed higher and broke wider. The Vaelcryns no longer slammed into our line in solid numbers. They darted, tested, withdrew. As if word had passed among them in some language of panic. There is something here you cannot simply eat.I looked up again and found her. Nyra in the sky, gold against a dirty dawn, larger than any Aetherfang should have been, terrible and impossible and beautiful enough that even now, with blood on my hands and a scream still echoing somewhere right of me, part of me wanted to stop and simply watch. I didn’t. But I wanted to.She came down through the smoke like a blade of light and caught one of the last Aetherfa

Ronan’s POVKeiran reached Astrid before I could decide whether to stop him again. He moved like he had forgotten the field around him. Like the smoke, the corpses, the burned ground, the injured warriors dragging themselves away from the worst of the eastern side, none of it existed anymore. Only Astrid. Only the white-grey wolf lying broken in the mud, fur matted with blood, body shaking like every breath was another battle she had to fight alone.He dropped to his knees beside her. For one second, I saw the old Keiran I knew. Not the one bent under pride and politics. Not the one who had ruined Nyra in silence. Not the one who had lost so much of himself trying to keep a crown he had no right to hold if he could not hold truth with it. Just a man reaching for someone hurt.Astrid tried to lift her head, failed, and made a sound so low it barely carried past the smoke. Keiran’s hands went beneath her with more care than I expected from him in that moment. He didn’t flinch from the b

Ronan’s POVThe Aetherfangs glanced at Nyra, yes, but with irritation and arrogance, not terror. To them she was another obstacle. Strange perhaps. Powerful perhaps. But not something that reached into their bones and dragged out old fear. To the dragon-man, she was.His voice changed when he spoke. It lost some of its command. Not all of it. Men like that did not become soft easily. But something in it cracked.“It can’t be,” he said.Nyra did not move. Neither did I. But through the bond, I felt her confusion sharpen. The dragon-man took half a step forward, then stopped himself as if crossing the distance without permission had suddenly become dangerous.“Do you already serve His Majesty Tobias Viremont?” he asked.The name hit me like a blade turned sideways. Tobias Viremont. I knew the name from Elaine’s journal, from Nyra’s discoveries, from the pieces of a past that had already begun tearing open everything we thought we knew. Tobias, her father. The man tied to House Viremont.