CHAPTER 51: THE RITUAL BEGINSWhat was Darius stops being shaped like a man.It happens slowly enough to watch and fast enough that I cannot look away. The convulsion in the circle becomes something else — bones reorganizing under skin that was never built to hold what is filling it, shadow pouring out from the edges of him like ink finding water. His face is the last thing to go. For one terrible second I see Darius's actual eyes, frightened and human and entirely his own, looking out at me from inside the thing consuming him.Then even that is gone.What stands in the circle now is roughly the size and shape of a wolf, if a wolf were built from absence instead of flesh. Its outline shifts at the edges — not quite solid, not quite shadow, something the eye refuses to fully resolve."Now," Kael says.The pack moves.Ronan goes left with two wolves. Three more flank right. I have seen Kael's people fight before — at the marshes, at the cell, at the estate gates — but I have never seen
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