Semua Bab AURORA- The Last Phoenix : Bab 31 - Bab 39

I gave him three days before I cornered him about it, which I considered a personal record for patience I hadn't known I possessed.I found him alone at dusk, away from camp, sitting on a flat rock near the tree line with his sleeves pushed up, and his hands turned palm-up in his lap like he was studying them for answers they weren't giving him. He didn't hear me approach, or he did and chose not to acknowledge it, which, with Cillian, was equally possible."Hey," I said, a little too loud on purpose.He startled, hands closing fast, like I'd caught him doing something he shouldn't have been doing. "Hey yourself.""What are you looking at?""Nothing." Too fast again. He was honestly terrible at lying, for someone so good at everything else.I sat down on the rock beside him without being invited, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched, and waited. Patience wasn't naturally in my toolkit, but I'd learned in these last weeks that Cillian gave things up faster in silence than he

We found a village two days later, and nothing in twenty-five years of May town had prepared me for what it looked like when a person like Calum decided to make an example of somewhere.It had been a small, close-knit village, from what remained of it. Low stone houses were scattered along a single road, the kind of place that probably hadn't seen anything worse than bad weather in a generation.When we walked into the village, half the roofs had caved in, black with old fire, and the road itself was scarred with battle damage. It didn’t look like an accident happened in such a place; it felt more like a punishment, a warning to anyone who passed the area, and that made my stomach turn."Calum's forces," Orion said quietly, surveying the wreckage with his face set in stone. "Word must have reached him that this village was sheltering people who'd spoken against the committee. He doesn't send warnings. He sends this.""There's no one here," Lysandra said, voice small, wings drawn tight

Nyxara’s POVI had learned a very long time ago that patience was the only weapon no one ever thought to guard against.As I walked the palace corridors slowly after leaving Calum, I replayed the whole scenario with him. He's slipping. He's scared, and I made it worse with the mention of the golden wolf. And that was the crack I've been looking for.I found my chambers empty, just as I preferred them, and settled into the high-backed chair by the window with a goblet of something dark and unhurried, turning the evening's conversation over from every angle I could think to examine it.A Phoenix and a Golden Wolf bonding, I thought, that was something that hasn’t been seen in history and I know this because I have access to a lot of history books and I had turned all of them inside out.That absence was not an accident, I was almost certain of it now. Something that significant did not simply escape every record in every kingdom by chance. Someone had made very sure it stayed unknown -

"Tell me about it," Cillian said the next evening, when the ache from the night before had softened into something more like nostalgia than grief. "The shop. All of it. Not just the sad parts, I want to know the good ones."So I did.I told him about the antique shop two doors down from Vale's Curiosities, run by a man named Mr. Aldric who smelled perpetually of pipe smoke and never seemed to actually sell anything, content instead to simply guard his collection of oddities like a dragon that had misplaced its taste for gold. I told him about the hours I used to spend there on slow afternoons, cataloguing his stock in exchange for whatever spare change he could part with, surrounded by things too strange and specific to have ever belonged to anyone ordinary."There was this one piece," I said, warming to the memory despite myself. "A silver-backed mirror, tarnished almost black at the edges. Mr. Aldric always said it was cursed, but he said that about half his inventory, so I never th