All Chapters of The Last Warden: Chosen by Four : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Planning the expedition took four days, which felt like both too long and nowhere near enough, depending on which hour of which sleepless night Wren happened to be lying awake in.Aldric refused to send them in blind, which meant four days of scouting reports pulled from academy contacts Wren hadn't known existed, four days of arguments in the war room over routes and timing and how many staff could be spared to accompany them without leaving the academy itself undefended. Wren sat through most of it feeling less like the reason for the mission and more like cargo being carefully routed, until the third day, when she finally said so out loud."I'm not going to just stand in the middle of this the way I did in the office," she said, cutting across a debate between Kaelen and one of the senior staff about perimeter formations. "If I'm going to talk to her, I need to actually be part of planning how we get close enough to do that."The room went quiet for a beat. Aldric, to his credit, d

They left before dawn, six of them total once Kai and Lysander and Kaelen were counted in alongside the small escort of academy staff Aldric had insisted on, though the plan held: Wren and Rhys would go in close, everyone else holding the perimeter until they were needed.The first day of travel passed in tense, watchful silence, the road winding away from anything Wren recognized as academy territory and into country that felt older, wilder, the trees grown close enough overhead that daylight came through in broken pieces rather than any steady glow. Kaelen rode point, scanning the treeline with the sharp, restless energy of someone who hadn't fully forgiven himself for not stopping the Warden girl from vanishing weeks ago.Lysander kept mostly quiet, which unsettled Wren more than his usual chatter would have, though she understood well enough by now that his silences meant he was working something over rather than simply resting.They made camp that first night in a shallow hollow

They hit open ground running, Elara faster than either of them despite eleven years spent mostly confined behind compound walls, and Wren understood within seconds that whatever else the Ashkindred had taken from her, they hadn't skimped on training her body to survive exactly this kind of emergency.Soldiers poured from the surrounding buildings behind them, shouts rising into the thinning mist, and Wren felt the familiar cold spike of adrenaline she'd first learned on the supply road weeks ago, the silver light already gathering at her fingertips before she'd consciously decided to call it."Ridge," Rhys shouted, angling them toward the treeline where the others waited. "Straight line, don't stop for anything."A crossbow bolt whistled past close enough that Wren felt the air of it, and Elara's hand closed hard around her wrist, yanking her sideways a half second before a second bolt would have caught her shoulder instead of empty air."Watch your left," Elara said, breathless, alre

She chose Kai, in the end, not because she trusted him more than the others but because she trusted his particular skill more for exactly this kind of task. Kaelen would have wanted to confront Aldric directly, certain and forceful in the way dragons tended to be. Lysander would have wanted to solve it as a puzzle laid out on a table, methodical and visible. Rhys would have simply said the true thing to Aldric's face and accepted whatever fallout came from it. Kai was the only one of them who knew, instinctively, how to move through a place without anyone noticing he'd been there at all, and Wren needed exactly that kind of quiet if she wanted to find Aldermere before anyone decided to stop her from looking.She found him in the training yard after hours, and told him everything: the archive, the note, the name that meant nothing to her and apparently nothing Aldric had ever chosen to share.He didn't ask why she hadn't gone to the headmaster first. She appreciated that more than she

The consequences of the archive found her before lunch.A staff member Wren didn't recognize intercepted her outside the dining hall, expression carefully neutral in the way that meant trouble dressed as procedure, and informed her that Headmaster Aldric wished to see her immediately regarding a missing staff key card and unauthorized access to restricted archive records.She walked to his office with her stomach in knots, the folded note and map still hidden in her jacket, rehearsing explanations that all sounded worse out loud than they had in her head.Aldric didn't raise his voice when she arrived, which somehow made it worse than if he had."You accessed your mother's file without my knowledge," he said, not a question. "Using a credential that wasn't yours to use.""I did." She saw no version of this where lying improved anything. "I needed to know what actually happened, not the version you decided I was ready to hear."Something flickered across his composed expression, not qu