All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 241 - Chapter 250

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf“You have not slept, Rhen, and do not tell me you have, because I know exactly what your face looks like when you are lying to me about being fine.”I sat curled in the window seat of the small room the border post had given us, staring out at the last of the night sky, the stars fading slowly into a pale, uncertain dawn, and when I turned to look at Kieran, I knew there was no point pretending the exhaustion behind my eyes was anything less than exactly what he thought it was.“I keep thinking about what Marisol said,” I admitted. “Lonely. That is such a strange word for something everyone has spent a hundred years being taught to fear.”Kieran crossed the room and sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and I was grateful for the contact more than I wanted to admit out loud, the warmth of him grounding me against the chill that had settled into my bones somewhere on the ride back. “Ysolde thinks the fragment might have been written by so

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf“Elara, Alaric, you need to hear what Ysolde and Halloway just told us, because everything we assumed about the Hollow may be wrong.”I found them in the war room long past midnight, a ledger spread open between them, the candles burned down low, and something in both their faces told me they had been carrying their own heavy discovery while the rest of us carried ours. Alaric rose immediately at the sound of my voice, and Elara’s eyes stayed fixed on the page in front of her a moment longer before she finally looked up, reluctant, as though putting the page down might make whatever it said more real.“Wrong how,” Alaric asked.“The Hollow was never the enemy,” I said, exhaustion and grim purpose both fighting for space in my voice. “It was the first guardian, sealed away from its own choice a hundred years ago, and whoever is directing Vane does not want it destroyed. They want it weaponized.”Elara’s expression sharpened with the particular focus I had

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf“Beneath my own territory, Ysolde, are you certain, because I have walked every inch of Ashveil land since I was a boy, and I have never once felt anything like what Rhen describes feeling near a door.”Kieran’s voice carried the particular disbelief of a man discovering his own home held secrets he had never once suspected, and I watched Ysolde spread the old survey map across the table, her finger tracing a boundary line so faded it was nearly invisible against the parchment’s yellowed surface, the ink gone the color of weak tea after decades folded away in some forgotten drawer.“Your grandmother’s letter to Rhen gives coordinates that match almost exactly to the old Ashveil cliffs,” Ysolde said, “the ones your family stopped patrolling three generations ago after a rockslide made the paths too dangerous to maintain.”“Nobody has gone near those cliffs in decades,” Kieran said slowly, memory stirring uneasily across his face, some old childhood cautio

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"The door is open, Kieran, and I do not think it opened on its own, I think something walked out of it before we ever arrived here."The words left me before I could soften them, and I watched the color drain slowly from Kieran's face as the whole group went still around us, the cliff wind suddenly feeling colder than it had a moment before. Alaric moved past me toward the cliff face, and I saw his hand tremble as it hovered near the stone, close but not quite touching, as though some old, learned caution still lived in his bones even now."It was sealed with wax and iron the last time anyone in my family came near it," Alaric said quietly. "That was sixty years ago, when my own father brought me here once, only once, and told me never to return.""Did he tell you what was inside," Dorian asked, his voice tight with the particular strain of a man trying very hard not to sound afraid."He told me it was not a what," Alaric said. "He told me it was a who, a

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"You never were meant to do this alone," Ilsevet said again, softer this time, and something in the way its gaze shifted past me made my whole body go cold with understanding before the words even landed.It was not looking at me anymore. It was looking at Dorian, and Dorian had gone very still beside Sable, the way a man goes still when he already suspects what is coming and simply has not found the courage to say it aloud first."You mean he is the second guardian," I said, though I already knew the answer, had known it somewhere quiet since the quarry, since the creature there had called him by the same name it called me."The line was never meant to walk alone," Ilsevet said. "I made that mistake myself, a century ago, and it very nearly cost me everything I was sealing this door to protect. Two guardians, working together, close the same wound that breaks a single guardian apart trying to hold it shut alone."Dorian's hands had curled into fists at h