บททั้งหมดของ The Luna's Deception : บทที่ 61 - บทที่ 66

His eyes were not his anymore.That was the thing that hit me hardest standing on that road with the purple mist swirling around our feet and his words still hanging in the air between us. The eyes looking back at me were Kieran's eyes in shape and colour but what was moving behind them was not Kieran. It was the mist working through the remnants of his curse, finding the paranoia that the curse had always fed and pulling it up from the place he had spent years learning to keep it buried."Kieran," I said. Steady. Calm. The voice I had used in the cave with Bella's brother. "Look at me. Really look."He looked at me.And something in his face changed in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up.He was not seeing me.I could tell the exact moment it happened. His eyes moved across my face and did not find what they were looking for and found something else instead. Something the mist had placed there. His jaw tightened and his shoulders dropped into a different kind of readiness an

The mist was thicker away from the road.It pressed against my shins with a weight that had nothing to do with water and everything to do with intention. I kept the Blood-Bind thread pushed outward as I walked, using it as a sensor rather than a weapon, feeling through the purple dark for the point of highest density. The source would be the densest point. That was how all dark craft worked. The further from the source the thinner it became.The whispering followed me.Not the voices it had used on the column. These were quieter and more personal, staying just below the threshold where I could clearly separate planted thoughts from my own. Morvanna and Kaelen had built this working with patience and they knew a Sovereign would come looking for the source.I kept walking anyway.The graveyard appeared through the mist without warning.Old stone markers half buried in earth. Tall grass growing between them undisturbed for what looked like decades. The kind of place the living had stoppe

We marched for an hour before the plain came into view.The road narrowed between the last stretch of tree line and then opened suddenly and completely the way roads open when they reach a place that was built to be seen. Wide flat ground stretching ahead of us in the grey morning light, the grass grey-green and undisturbed, the kind of stillness that belongs to places that have absorbed a great deal of what people do to each other and have stopped being surprised by any of it.The Neutral Plain.I had never stood on it before. I had heard it described in the Frost Peaks sessions as the traditional meeting ground of Wolfs Crest, the place where packs came when they needed to speak to each other without the weight of home territory pressing on the conversation. Older than any agreement made on it. Older than the packs themselves.We came onto it from the east.Alexei's column had been moving parallel to ours through the tree line and both groups arrived at the plain's edge at the same