All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 381 - Chapter 390

Point of View: Rhen"Now you have finally woken me the whole way."Four words, and every torch on that hillside guttered at once, dropping us into a darkness thick enough to taste, and I understood, still shaking from whatever the basin below had done to me, that I was no longer watching the beginning of something. I was watching the middle of it, and I had arrived far too late to stop it from becoming whatever it was about to become.Kieran's hand was still fisted in the back of my cloak, holding me half a step from the fissure's edge, his fingers so tight I would find the marks of them on my skin the next morning. I felt Wren beside me, her voice breaking on the last syllable of whatever broken litany she had been trying to hold together, the words dissolving into something closer to a prayer than a spell. The crack in the earth had not closed. It had simply, for one terrible breath, stopped widening, and none of us dared move, dared even breathe too loudly, until we understood why

Point of View: Rhen"Torvald wants a full council session before dawn, and half the riders behind us are already saying the word contained like they believe it."Elara said it to no one in particular as she strode past me toward the perimeter line, her cloak snapping behind her in the wind, and something about her exhausted certainty frightened me more than the fissure had, because Elara did not waste words on fear she did not intend to act on.The hillside had gone quiet in the specific, unnatural way that follows disaster rather than the way that follows peace, a silence with edges to it, sharp enough to cut anyone who leaned too close. I sat with Kieran near the fire, watching Elara move between riders with a steadiness none of the rest of us had left in us, checking wounds, murmuring instructions, holding the whole shaken company together through sheer force of will. I understood, watching her, that she had already started fighting a battle the rest of us had not even recognized a

Point of View: Rhen"There's something in the old archive I never told you, and I think I have run out of good reasons to keep it from you any longer."Wren's words reached me and Kieran before we had even finished climbing back up the hillside, breathless and grim, and something in her voice made my stomach drop before she said another word, before I even reached the fire and saw the look on her face fully lit by the flames.Dorian and Sable were already gathered near what was left of the fire when we arrived, both of them watching Wren with the specific dread of people who have already guessed the shape of bad news and are only waiting to have it confirmed, bracing themselves the way you brace for a blow you cannot avoid. I sat down close to Kieran, bracing myself without quite knowing yet what I was bracing against, my whole body still humming with the aftershock of everything the hillside had taken from us tonight."Tell us," Dorian said, quieter than I expected, his voice steadie

Point of View: Rhen"You woke something older than every founding record this council has ever kept, and you expect us to believe it happened by accident of your own leadership."Torvald's voice filled the chamber before the dawn light had fully settled through the high windows, sharp and deliberate, aimed to land before any of us had fully found our footing after a night with almost no sleep in it. I felt every eye in the room shift toward me and Kieran before Elara had even risen to answer him, dozens of council members weighing us in the space of a single held breath.Elara stood before he could press the advantage further, her voice pitched to carry without shouting, steady in a way that made half the murmuring in the room quiet on its own. "No one is suggesting it happened by accident," she said. "It happened because Corvin Thane ignored three separate warnings and attempted a forbidden rite on a bound and unwilling child, in defiance of every law this body has spent four years b

Point of View: Rhen"Something is wrong with Dorian, and I felt it before Sable ever came to wake us."I sat bolt upright in the dark of our tent, my heart pounding for no reason I could immediately name, the cloth walls around us still and grey in the last hour before dawn, Kieran already stirring beside me at the sound of my voice, his hand finding my shoulder in the dark before he was even fully awake.It was not a vision, not exactly, nothing as clear as the pull I remembered from my own childhood before my abilities first surfaced, before I understood what those strange half-dreams meant. It was smaller than that, a cold thread tugging somewhere behind my ribs, faint but unmistakable, and I understood with a dread I could not fully explain that whatever Dorian was carrying tonight, some part of the bloodline in me had just felt it move, felt it stir the way you feel a door open somewhere else in a house you thought was empty."Rhen." Kieran's hand found mine in the dark, steadyin