All Chapters of THE LUNA HE THREW AWAY: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

170 Chapters

Chapter 101 Three-line Activation

"The network producing it means the network can un-produce it," I said."Yes," Fen said. "The Greymoor Sovereign in 1387 believed so. They documented the conditions under which the three lines were fully active and what happened to the entity under those conditions." He held out the third journal. "They called it dissolution. Not retreat. Dissolution."I took the journal.The old script was dense and required translation I didn't have the language for, but Cass was already reaching for it, already reading, her lips moving slightly through the old language with the focused speed of someone doing real-time translation of significant material."How long," I said to Fen. "Under three active lines. How long until dissolution.""The 1387 account documents a period of sustained three-line activity over approximately eighteen months," he said. "The entity reduced progressively. At the end of the documented period, the Greymoor Sovereign notes an absence. He paused. "The entry ends there. We d

Chapter 102 The Letter That Knew My Name

Cass translated it in forty minutes.Nobody spoke while she worked. The room held the specific silence of people who understood that rushing to translate a six-hundred-year-old document addressed to a specific living person would be a category error. Jax refilled cups. Kael stood at the window. Fen sat with the stillness of someone who had spent weeks with this material, had already done his waiting, and was now simply present.Sera read ahead in the journals, her finger moving along lines of old script with the practiced ease of someone who had been reading this language for ninety-seven years. Her face was controlled, which meant the journals were telling her things she was processing carefully.Oren sat beside me. He didn't say anything. He had been beside me or nearby for most of the significant moments of the last months and had developed a quality of presence that I found useful in the specific way of a thing that didn't require acknowledgment. He was there. It was enough.Cass

Chapter 103 Ready

"A single coordinated act," I said.Cass nodded. She kept reading. "She describes it. Three Sovereigns, all active, all connected to the covenant network simultaneously. All three refused the entity at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously." She looked up. "She writes that she calculated this based on the mathematics of the covenant's resonance. The way the three primary anchors produce a combined frequency greater than the sum of their individual frequencies." She paused. "She calls it a chord. She writes: three Sovereigns refusing simultaneously inside a full network is a chord the entity cannot survive. It is not woven to withstand the frequency. It will dissolve not over months but in the time it takes the chord to sound."Jax said, very carefully: "So instead of eighteen months of passive maintenance, you could dissolve it in one moment.""In theory," Cass said."What's the catch," he said. Because Jax always found the catch.Cass read further. Her face did the thing it

Chapter 104 The Waiting

The runners reached Naya in eighteen hours and my mother in twenty-two.Jax had used the Omega network's human infrastructure, the actual people who moved between territories carrying things that needed to arrive without leaving a covenant footprint. Not wolves, mostly. Humans and low-ranked pack members who had been doing this work for years under the radar of everyone who thought the people who served food and cleaned halls weren't also maintaining the territory's most functional communication system.The messages were simple. No covenant language, no old script, nothing that could be read as Sovereign activity if the entity was monitoring unusual network movement. Just: come to Thornridge. Bring nothing you can't carry. Tell no one the reason.Naya arrived first, which surprised nobody who had spent time with her. She had been in Ashveil territory but she moved through country the way the Old Growth had trained her, fast and with minimal trace, and she arrived at Thornridge's easte

Chapter 105 The Waiting (Two)

On the fifth day of waiting, Emmet came to find me.He knocked on the door of the east wing room with the specific knock of someone who has been told that knocking is appropriate and has been trying to do it correctly. Fourteen years old, the hopeful-eyed boy from the courtyard, slightly taller than the last time I'd seen him up close."Silas said I could come," he said."Come in," I said.He came in with the careful posture of someone navigating a space that carries significance, looking at the room and the documents on the desk and the Greymoor letter that I'd been reading again and the person sitting behind the desk who had, to his understanding, done things that mattered.He sat down when I indicated the chair. He didn't fidget. He had the stillness of a person who had learned early that stillness was how you survived rooms where adults were deciding things about you.I knew that stillness. I had built myself around it for twenty-two years."Jax says you want to learn tracking," I

Chapter 106 The Chord

Sera appeared in the chair at 3:17 in the afternoon.I know the time because the clock on the east wing wall, the one Jax had fixed, showed it clearly, and I had been watching it the way you watch things when time is the only variable you can measure. 3:17. November, grey light through the window, the covenant network humming at the frequency it had maintained for three weeks of full integrity.The entity had learned from every previous approach. This one had no preamble. No gradual shift in atmosphere, no slow development of presence. Sera was simply there, the same uncanny completeness as before, the eyes exactly right, the posture exactly right, the hands in the lap with the fingers loose.It had been decided that the deliberate approach gave me too much time to orient.I was already oriented.I stayed in the network. Didn't speak. Let it open."You've been waiting," the thing in Sera's face said."Yes," I said."That's new." It looked at me with an assessment that was very good bu

Chapter 107 Whole

The chord sounded.There is no other way to describe it. Not a sound, not a light, not a dramatic visible event. A frequency. In the covenant, in the floor under my feet, in the walls of the east wing room, in the air that was also the network that was also the thing connecting three Sovereign lines across three territories. A frequency that the network had not produced in six hundred years because it had not had three active lines simultaneously.The entity in Sera's chair stopped being present.Not gradually. Not in stages. The completeness of the constructed image simply ended, the way a held note ends when breath runs out. Sera's face, the lamp catching the texture of constructed skin, the hands in the lap with the fingers loose, gone.The chair was empty.The room was a room.The covenant hummed.Not the humming of the last three weeks, the new integrity, the clean nodes, the resonance of a system running properly. Something different. Quieter. The hum of something that had been

Chapter 108 The Day After The End Of Something

The world didn't announce itself differently.That was the first thing. I had expected some quality of change in the ordinary, some shift in how the morning felt, the air or the light doing something to mark the event. The covenant network was clean in a way it hadn't been in four hundred years, and the thing that had lived at its edges for six decades of Sera's life was gone, and the November morning came through the east wing window doing nothing remarkable.Gray sky. A crow on the training ground fence. The smell of Jax's coffee from two floors down.I lay in the still-dark of early morning and took inventory of the network the way I'd taken inventory every morning since the cleansing. Three lines. Clean nodes. The primary anchors resonate, nothing at the perimeter where the interference had lived.Still nothing.I had checked four times in the night. Each time expecting the entity to have reconstituted at the edges, the retreat Sera had spent sixty-two years feeling restored to it

Chapter 109 Gone

Fen came back two days later.He came back the way he always came back, without announcement, simply present at the gate when I happened to be crossing the courtyard. He had the three journals under his arm and the expression of someone who had been processing something alone and had arrived at a position on it.I walked with him to the east wing."I felt the chord," he said."I know," I said. "The covenant would have registered it across the whole territory.""From wherever I was, yes." He walked in silence for a moment. "It's different. The network. Something's settled.""The entity is gone," I said.He was quiet for longer than usual. Not processing it, I thought. Sitting with it. The entity that had destroyed his pack, that Aldric had used as a political mechanism, whether he'd known what it was or not, the thing that had been at the edges of everything for his entire time in the Old Growth. Gone."Okay," he said finally, one word."Is that all?" I said."What else would there be?

Chapter 110 Rowan And Naya

Rowan Ashveil had been in the kitchen for three hours when Naya decided she was ready to see him.I know because Jax sent periodic updates. He's on his second cup. Still stiff. Then, He asked if I could teach him this bread recipe. I said no. Then, forty minutes later: He's talking to Emmet about tracking. Less stiff. Still waiting.The last message before Naya came down: He looks like someone who practised what he was going to say and now thinks it was the wrong thing to practice.I had been in the east wing reading when the messages came through. I didn't go to the kitchen. This was not my conversation. But I was aware of it the way you're aware of something significant happening in the next room, the quality of the building changing around it.Naya came to find me afterwards.She sat in the chair across from my desk without being invited to, which was characteristic, and looked at her hands for a moment before she spoke."He wants me to come back," she said.I waited."Not the way

...

9 10 11 12 13

...

SCAN CODE TO READ ON APP