All Chapters of Reborn to Rewrite My Fate : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The council arrived forty minutes later, and by the time their vehicles crested the mountain road, Ronan sat bound and silent against the altar's base, Kael had been stripped of his ritual robes and his composure both, and the rest of us simply waited in the cold, exhausted dark, too drained to do much more than lean against each other and breathe.Bryn, the same stern investigator who'd examined the guard's body days earlier, took one look at the scorched clearing, the strange residual shimmer still faintly visible where the vortex had torn open and closed, and went very pale."I don't even want to know," she said, though her eyes lingered a beat too long on me, something calculating and newly wary entering her professional expression."You're going to need to know eventually," I said, too tired to soften the words. "But not tonight."She studied me a moment longer, then nodded slowly, some reluctant understanding passing between us. "Tonight, we focus on getting everyone home safely

Damon called me at three in the morning, and the fear in his voice told me everything before he'd even finished the first sentence."You need to come. Now. Something's wrong with Adrian."I was dressed and in my car within four minutes, gravel spraying beneath my tires as I tore down the dark road toward the Blackthorn estate, Damon's words looping over and over in my head. *Something's wrong.* Not hurt. Not sick. Wrong, like the word itself carried weight he hadn't wanted to name more specifically over the phone.Damon met me at the front door, hair disheveled, eyes wide with a fear I'd never seen on his usually easy features. "He's been talking in his sleep for the last hour," he said, already leading me up the stairs two at a time. "Not normal sleep talking. Different. His voice, it doesn't sound like him."Cold dread settled deep in my stomach as we reached Adrian's bedroom door, and Damon paused, hand hovering over the handle, something reluctant and afraid crossing his expressio

The clearing looked exactly the same as it had in my first life, moonlight pooling silver through the pines, the ground beneath my bare feet cold and familiar in a way that made my chest ache with old, phantom pain."You're sure about this," Elias said, standing close beside me, jaw tight with barely restrained worry. He'd insisted on coming the moment I explained what we were attempting, along with my father, who stood a few feet away, arms crossed, expression carved from careful, controlled fear he wasn't bothering to fully hide anymore."I'm sure," I said, though my own pulse hammered hard enough that the words came out slightly unsteady.Adrian stood across the clearing, pale and tense, Damon beside him with a hand resting firm on his brother's shoulder, ready to catch him if whatever we were about to attempt went wrong in ways none of us could fully predict. Corwin had come too, ancient file clutched against his chest, murmuring quiet, careful instructions about the ritual's prop

The council report reached Elias through official channels two days after my dream, and the moment he read it aloud at our kitchen table, the cold dread I'd been carrying since the Goddess's warning sharpened into something horribly, immediately concrete."Kael Draven," Elias said slowly, setting his phone down like it might bite him, "was found last night near the outskirts of his former territory. Alive. Glowing faintly silver, according to the two guards who found him, and speaking in a language nobody present could identify.""Malachi," I said, the name settling bitter and certain on my tongue. "He's the one wearing Kael now. He has to be.""That's a significant leap," my father said carefully, though the tightness around his eyes suggested he didn't disagree."It's not a leap." I pushed back from the table, pacing, the hollow ache where my own power used to live burning with fresh, horrified clarity. "Kael's bloodline was already entangled in something ancient. He lost everything

I didn't tell anyone what I was doing, not even Adrian, because the Goddess's warning had taught me at least this much: if someone close to me was feeding information outward, the safest test was one only I controlled.I started small. A false detail, dropped carefully into separate conversations with different people, different enough each time that if it resurfaced somewhere it shouldn't, I'd know exactly whose mouth it had traveled through.To Mira, over tea, I mentioned we'd traced Grey's old equipment purchase to a storage facility outside the northern border.To Damon, helping him recoil cable in my father's study, I mentioned the equipment trail actually led toward the coastal territories instead.To Elias, during a quiet walk through the training yard, I said nothing at all, holding that particular thread back entirely, a baseline against which to measure the others.Three days later, Garrick found me in the garden.He'd served my family since before I was born, a steady, quie