All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 271 - Chapter 280

Point of View: Kieran Ashveil"Kieran, the cliff seal is not simply weakening anymore, it is groaning, actually groaning, like stone under pressure it was never built to hold, and I have never heard anything like it in my entire life."Ysolde's report reached me before dawn, her voice still ragged from the run, and I was at the cliff site within the hour, Rhen close beside me, both of us staring up at the ancient rock face where a faint, deep vibration ran through the ground itself, low enough to feel in my chest rather than hear clearly with my ears, a sound that seemed to live somewhere beneath sound."How long," I asked Ilsevet, who stood at the base of the cliff with an expression I had rarely seen on that ancient, weathered face, something close to open alarm, a crack in the composure it had maintained through everything else."Hours, not days," Ilsevet said. "I was wrong about the timeline. Corin has been working faster than I calculated, weakening the third seal deliberately to

Point of View: Kieran Ashveil"Rhen, if tomorrow does not go the way any of us are hoping, I need you to know something before the door opens, because I am done letting fear decide which words stay unspoken."I found her alone at the edge of the quarry that night, the same place where she had closed her very first binding, the stones still holding some faint memory of that night in the way they seemed to gather shadow more thickly than the ground around them, and I stood there for a moment before she turned, my rawness clearly visible even in the low light."Tell me," she said quietly, moving closer."I did not fall in love with you because the pull decided it for me," I said. "I want you to know that clearly, before tomorrow. The pull opened a door, Rhen, but I am the one who chose to walk through it, every single day since, on purpose, fully aware of exactly what it would cost either of us."She let tears rise unhidden, and I felt something in my own chest loosen at the sight, grate

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Rhen, stay with me, whatever it is showing you, stay with me, because I am not losing you to a memory that is not even yours."Kieran's voice reached me from somewhere far away, muffled the way sound gets muffled underwater, and I understood distantly that something was happening on the cliff behind me, shouting, the ring of silver against claw, but none of it felt as real as the darkness pouring out of the crack in front of me, vast and old and impossibly sad. It moved the way water moves at the bottom of a well, slow and patient, and every instinct I owned told me that something enormous had been waiting inside it for far longer than a hundred years, something that had learned, in all that waiting, exactly how to make its patience feel like an offer rather than a threat.I had not meant to go this deep. One moment I was standing at the edge of the wound, holding the working steady the way Ilsevet had taught me, my palms burning faintly with the effort

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Rhen, do not tell Kieran I am struggling, not yet, because he already carries enough fear watching you disappear into that crack without adding mine on top of it."I found Dorian alone at the edge of the training yard that evening, still gripping the hilt of his blade long after the fight had ended, his knuckles white in a way that told me the fear had not left him even after the actual danger had passed, and I understood the look on his face better than perhaps anyone else in the camp could. The last of the daylight was fading behind the training yard's fence posts, turning everything the color of old bronze, and somewhere behind him I could hear the ordinary evening sounds of camp continuing on, oblivious to the quiet reckoning happening at its edge."You are allowed to be afraid," I said, sitting down beside him without asking permission first. "Dorian, I have been terrified since the day I closed my first binding, and I still am, every single time. I

Point of View: Rhen Thornwolf"Rhen, tell me the name of the woman who taught you to bandage a wound before you ever set foot inside Ashveil territory, and tell me honestly if you cannot."Sable's question, asked gently over breakfast the morning after her own confession by the fire, landed harder than she likely meant it to, because I opened my mouth to answer instantly, the way I always could, and found nothing waiting there at all. Only a warm, formless sense that the memory existed somewhere just out of reach, like a word sitting on the very tip of my tongue that refused to arrive no matter how long I waited for it. The rest of the camp went on eating and talking around us, oblivious to the small, quiet catastrophe unfolding at our end of the table."I cannot," I admitted, and the words tasted like failure in my mouth. "Sable, I cannot remember her name.""That was your mother," she said carefully, watching my face for a reaction I did not know how to give her. "Rhen, she taught y