All Chapters of The Red Luna: The Queen of the Flames: Chapter 41 - Chapter 44

THANEThe council session had been running for two hours when Varyn asked speak. We had covered the wall reinforcements, the deployment of Aveline's southern fighters, the patrol schedule, the rationing of supplies for an extended siege. Good work. Necessary work. The kind of work that leaves a man feeling like a fortress is a manageable problem if you break it into small enough pieces.Then Varyn cleared his throat.I set down my cup. †††††††††††††††††††††††††He spoke the way he always spoke. Measured, warm, the voice of a man who had thought carefully about something and was delivering it reluctantly because duty required it. He said he had been thinking about the scout report. About the mass beyond the waystones and what was drawing it toward Ravenshallow specifically."These entities," he said, "are not moving blindly. They moved against the Northern Clan with purpose. They destroyed it because of what it represented. A unifying force. A Luna's power that cou

ROWENAThe bell did not ring in the pattern I had learned. I had grown used to the fortress's rhythms over the months I had lived inside its walls, the morning bell and the water carry and the evening meal, each sound carrying its own ordinary weight. This was not that. This was three strikes, fast and uneven, followed by a silence that lasted too long and then the same three strikes again, and every acolyte in the Sanctuary went still at the same moment, the way animals go still before weather they cannot yet see.Eldra was already moving."They are at the wall," she said. "Sooner than we thought."I went to the high window in the eastern corridor, the one that looked toward the mountain pass, and what I saw there, in the distance, had no clean edges.It did not come like an army. It came like weather that had decided to be deliberate. A darkness moved against the night sky, lower than cloud, thicker than smoke, and where it touched the outer wall the stone did not simply break. It