All Chapters of The Last Warden: Chosen by Four : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Second checkpoint. Same signature, Aldric said, and then didn't explain what that meant until they were already moving, boots on gravel, five of them plus two staff members cutting across the dark toward the academy's eastern perimeter faster than Wren had ever run in her life.Nobody had asked if she wanted to come. Rhys had simply said you're safer with us than alone in a dormitory the Sundering already knows the layout of, and that had been the entire conversation.Checkpoint nine sat at the edge of a tree line, a squat stone building with its door hanging off one hinge by the time they reached it, and the first thing Wren registered wasn't the damage.It was quiet. No shouting, no fighting, nothing that suggested a battle had happened here at all. Just wrongness, thick and total, the kind of silence a place makes when something has already finished and left."Clear," Kaelen called from just inside the door, though his voice had gone tight in a way that told her clearly didn't mean

Aldric summoned them again two days later, and this time he didn't wait for all five of them to sit before he started talking."The fabric Mr. Fenwick found at checkpoint nine belongs to a faction the Sundering doesn't publicly associate with." He set the scrap on the desk between them, the black-threaded symbol catching the light in a way that made it look, for just a moment, almost like it was moving. "A splinter group calling themselves the Ashkindred. Formed roughly forty years ago, composed largely of supernaturals who believe the Veil should have fallen already, and that Wardens have spent three centuries delaying something that should be allowed to happen.""Delaying what, exactly?" Lysander's voice had gone very careful, the tone he used when he already suspected an answer he didn't like."A full merging of the two worlds. No Veil, no separation, humans and supernaturals sharing one reality with no barrier managing the difference in power between them." Aldric's expression did

The alarm came at midnight, not the sharp klaxon Wren had half expected from every academy movie she'd never actually seen but a low, resonant tone that seemed to come from the stone itself, vibrating up through the floor of her dormitory room until she was awake and moving before her mind had fully caught up to why.Rhys was at her door before she'd finished pulling on her shoes, already half-dressed, jaw set in a way that told her this wasn't a drill."Someone's inside the wards," he said. "Aldric's mobilizing everyone. Move."The corridor outside was chaos in the particular controlled way Wren was starting to associate with this school, students spilling from doors already half-shifted, eyes gone gold or slit-pupiled or simply too alert for midnight, everyone moving with a purpose she couldn't fully read but understood the shape of well enough to follow.Kaelen met them at the stairwell, Lysander and Kai close behind him, and for a moment the five of them simply fell into formation

Aldric had the training facility searched twice before he'd let any of them leave it, and both times the answer came back the same. No trace. No residue of magic beyond what the circle itself had absorbed over centuries of quiet waiting. Whoever the girl was, she'd vanished as cleanly as she'd arrived, and that fact alone unsettled Aldric more than anything she'd actually said."A teleportation working that clean isn't something an untrained Warden should be capable of,"he said, pacing the length of his office once they'd finally reconvened there, the pre-dawn light starting to creep gray through the shattered window he still hadn't had repaired. "Whatever the Ashkindred taught her, it goes well beyond what any historical record describes a Warden's power being capable of.""Maybe the records are wrong," Kai said. "Maybe nobody's ever had eleven years to actually figure out what a Warden can do, because every other one got killed before they had the chance."The thought sat heavy in t

Aldric hadn't wanted her leaving the grounds at all, not with the Ashkindred's Warden loose somewhere beyond the wards and the Sundering apparently emboldened enough to hit a second checkpoint without warning. But the academy's supply routes still needed running, and when the usual escort came back short two staff members to a sudden fever nobody could quite explain, Rhys volunteered the four of them before Aldric had finished listing his objections."She needs to see what real ground looks like eventually," Rhys said, when Wren asked him why he'd pushed for it. "Training circle magic and open-field magic aren't the same thing. Better she learns the difference somewhere we control the terrain than somewhere we don't."The supply run itself started uneventfully enough, a rattling cart loaded with medical supplies bound for the township two hours past the academy's outer perimeter, Kaelen driving, Lysander scanning the tree line with the particular alertness fae apparently never fully s