All Chapters of Bound by the Cursed Moon: Chapter 391 - Chapter 400

Point of View: Rhen"If you tell me this bond could unmake him instead of saving him, I need to hear it now, not after we have already begun."I heard Sable say it to Wren, her hand still resting on Dorian's back, feeling for the tremor in him that he was trying so hard to hide from the rest of us, the fire between us burned down to orange coals and the sky above finally giving up its last stubborn stars to morning. My own knees ached from the cold grass, and beneath that ache sat something colder still, the memory of a thread that had pulled me out of sleep an hour before anyone had come to wake me.Wren did not answer right away. She had a stack of brittle pages spread across her knees, borrowed from the deepest chest in the archive tent, the kind of pages nobody touched without gloves and good reason. Her eyes moved over the old script like she was translating something that fought back, her lips shaping words that made no sound, her brow furrowed in the particular way it always fu

Point of View: Rhen"If this goes wrong, I need every one of you to remember that it was my idea, not hers, not his. Mine."Kieran said it standing at the top of the ridge with the wind pulling at all of us, the sun still not quite risen but close enough that the grass had turned silver instead of grey, each blade beaded with cold dew that soaked through our boots without any of us seeming to care in the least. I understood what he meant by it, more than a confession, a promise that whatever blame the morning handed out, he intended to carry the heaviest share of it, the way he had carried every hard decision since the night I first understood what loving him would actually ask of me.I did not let him finish being noble about it. "We all chose this the moment we walked out of camp," I said, my voice firm despite the exhaustion still pulling at the edges of me. "You do not get to carry it alone either. That is the entire point of what we are about to do."Wren had already begun markin

Point of View: Rhen"You already tried to take Dorian tonight. You are not leaving this ridge with anyone else instead."I said it into the roaring dark with my whole body shaking, the tether between the five of us stretched so thin I could feel it humming behind my teeth, because somewhere in the chaos of Wren's sealed rite the thing beneath the hillside had stopped testing Dorian and turned, with sudden and terrible interest, toward me, a cold attention settling over my skin like a hand pressed flat against my chest.It did not speak the way it had spoken to him. It simply pulled, the way I imagined a riptide might pull, patient and enormous and utterly indifferent to whether I understood what was happening to me, as though I were nothing more than a stone it had decided, on a whim, to drag out to sea."Rhen." Kieran's voice, close, frightened in a way I had rarely heard from him, cracking at the edges despite how hard he was clearly fighting to keep it level. "Stay with me. Whateve

Point of View: Rhen"I keep waiting for something else to go wrong, and the waiting is almost worse than if it actually did."Sable said it to Dorian two mornings later, both of them sitting on the low wall outside the healer's tent where he had finally agreed to be looked over properly, and Kieran and I found them there, the camp around us moving with an ordinary rhythm that felt almost unbearable after everything the ridge had asked of us, children chasing each other between the tents, someone hauling water up from the stream, the whole world carrying on as though nothing at all had nearly ended two nights before.Dorian laughed at whatever Sable had said, a real laugh, quiet but real, the first one I had heard from him since before any of this started, and the sound of it loosened something tight in my own chest that I had not even realized was still clenched. "That sounds like something I would say.""You did say it," Sable told him. "The morning after Ashveil. I remember because

Point of View: Rhen"I used to think peace would feel like nothing happening. I did not expect it to feel this loud."I said it to Kieran that evening, both of us sitting on the same low wall where I had first told him I loved him, the camp settling into its ordinary night sounds around us, laughter drifting from the cook fires, someone tuning a battered old fiddle badly and not caring who heard, the smell of woodsmoke and roasting root vegetables thick and comforting on the evening air.He smiled, the tired, easy smile that only ever came out fully once real danger had actually passed, the kind of smile I had learned to treasure precisely because it was so rare. "Loud how?""Loud like all of this," I said, gesturing at the fires, the voices, the whole living breathing camp around us, the ordinary chaos of a community simply going on with its evening. "Four years ago I would have given anything just to stand in a crowd like this and not be afraid of what I was. Now I get to stand in i