Todos los capítulos de King Of Eldoria: Reborn To Be His: Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

Caelian stood alone in a world made of mist.There was no ground he could properly see, only a pale, shifting surface that felt solid beneath his boots one moment and uncertain the next. The fog pressed in from every direction, thick, cool, and faintly luminous, as if it carried its own weak light. It moved in slow currents around his legs and shoulders, never still, never silent. Soft whispers slid through it, too low and layered to understand. Sometimes the sounds resembled words. Sometimes they resembled breathing. Sometimes they resembled nothing human at all.He did not know how he had come to be here.The last clear memory was of falling asleep in Ravyn’s arms, the steady weight of the king’s body curved around his, the quiet safety of the royal chambers. Now there was only this endless pale dark and the constant, murmuring fog. Direction had no meaning. Forward and backward looked the same. When he turned in a slow circle, the view did not change, only more mist, more soft, uni

The morning of departure arrived gray and heavy with mist. Caelian stood in the inner courtyard while the final preparations were made around him. The carriage that would take him toward Valthorne was a solid, dark lacquered vehicle marked with both Eldoria’s wolf and the smaller crest of the royal consort. Six horses stamped and snorted in their traces. Around it, the escort assembled in disciplined silence. Ravyn had said twenty guards. He had sent thirty. They stood in neat ranks, fully armed, faces impassive beneath their helms. Captain Garrick’s second in command, a broad, scarred man named Lieutenant Harlan, would lead them. Every man had been chosen personally. Every one of them had sworn an oath directly to the king that the consort would return unharmed. Ravyn had not been satisfied with numbers alone; he had spent half the previous night reviewing routes, alternate roads, and signal protocols until the candles burned low. Caelian adjusted the edge of his traveling cloak

Caelian’s lungs burned like they had been filled with hot ash.He had no idea how long he had been running. Time had collapsed into the simple, animal need to put distance between himself and the shouts behind him. Branches whipped across his face and tore at his cloak. Roots snagged his boots. The healing burns on his arm screamed every time a low limb caught the half ruined bandage and ripped it further open. Tears of pure exhaustion and terror streaked his dirt stained cheeks, but he did not slow down.At some point the sounds of pursuit faded.He did not trust the quiet. He kept moving until his legs began to fail and the trees thinned into a narrower track that might once have been a road. The sky above the canopy had gone the deep, starless gray of late afternoon turning toward evening. His breath came in ragged, painful pulls. Every part of him shook.That was when he saw her.A woman stood at the side of the track with a woven basket on one hip, as if she had simply been gathe

The great courtroom of Eldoria had not seen a full assembly since the morning after the Year Ball, when the king had cut a duke down in front of the entire nobility and left his body cooling on the stones. Today the hall was full again, but the atmosphere was entirely different. There was no Ravyn on the throne. There was no ring of household troops in the dark green and black of the royal guard. Instead, men in the lighter colors and different cut of Valthorne steel lined the walls and flanked the dais. Their presence alone was an insult that would have been unthinkable a month earlier. Princess Liora sat on the king’s throne as if she had been born to it. She wore deep crimson, the color of old blood and open ambition, and the circlet in her hair caught the light every time she turned her head. Her expression was composed, almost serene, but her eyes moved constantly, measuring who bowed too slowly and who did not bow at all. When she finally raised one hand, the low murmur of con

Pain was the first thing that returned, and it returned without mercy. It bloomed from the back of Caelian’s skull in thick, pulsing waves that radiated down his neck, behind his eyes, and into the roots of his teeth. Every heartbeat felt like a hammer striking the inside of his head. He tried to lift a hand to the source of the agony and discovered he could not move. Rough, coarse rope bit deeply into the skin of his wrists and ankles, binding them so tightly that his fingers had already gone numb and swollen. He was sitting upright, spine forced against the rough bark of a tree. When he dragged his eyes open, the world swam in nauseating circles of green and brown and gray before slowly, reluctantly, resolving into the shape of a small forest clearing. Blood had run freely down the left side of his face. It had dried in sticky, cracking trails from his temple to his jaw and dripped onto the collar of his ruined tunic. The air smelled of damp earth, crushed leaves, crushed moss, an