Anchored Novels & Stories

Two thousand. I stood at the edge, my eyes closed, my deep sight locked onto the falling anchor. Three thousand feet. Four thousand. The heat down there was absolute. But the anchor didn't melt. Cord's tempering and my frequency had locked its atomic structure. It was a piece of the earth, returning to the earth. Five thousand feet. The chain snapped taut. THOOM. The anchor hit the liquid mantle. It didn't sink and melt. It plunged into the raw, superheated magma and instantly anchored itself into the semi-solid bedrock of the tectonic plate beneath the liquid sea.

I was still in the Between, still suspended—but I was no longer entirely adrift. I focused on Caelan. I imagined his chest rising and falling in time with mine. I felt the weight of his life pressing against my mind, and I allowed it to guide me, to show me where my fear must become control. A flicker of understanding sparked: anchoring was not domination. It was presence. It was alignment. It was letting the Moon, the bond, and my grief coexist in a single, directed pulse.

“There's a word you used in a statement last week that people haven’t stopped talking about. You called her your anchor. Tell me what that means.” Something shifted in Caelum’s jaw. “I grew up in a world where everything is negotiable,” he said. “Loyalty, affection, even family. You learn to hold things loosely because anything can be used against you.” He looked at Arwen, and his voice went softer. “She’s the first thing in my life that feels completely solid. ” His thumb moved slow across her knuckles. “An anchor isn’t someone who holds you down. It’s someone who keeps you from drifting somewhere you can’t return from.”

The outer ring had moved again, slow and certain, continuing its rotation toward whatever point it was tracking. “That,” he said, “is what I cannot determine from the fragment. The text establishes the Anchor exists. That it is native to the Realm in a way that nothing else is—not introduced by the coursework, not a side effect of it, but something that was present before the wound and remained after. It adapted.” He paused. “And it gives one further detail.” I waited. “The Anchor,” he said, “responds to the Realm's state. When the realm is disturbed, it becomes more active. When the Realm is healing—as it appears to be doing since the working—it should, in theory, become quieter.”

And the thing on the other side stepped closer to the edge of comprehension. Recognizing her fully now. As all iterations aligned at once— Seren remembered enough to finally understand why Kairos had said: *You are the anchor of your own iterations.* Because anchors don’t just hold things in place. Sometimes— They hold things in captivity.

What will be a real pain in the ass for me is to cut the link with the pack. When I joined my uncle's pack, he, as the alpha, performed the acceptance ritual, and I joined the pack physically and mentally. I drank his blood and became a River Ask Pack member. When I get to my dad's house, I'll have to perform another ritual, which will sever all my connections with the River Ash Pack. That is my biggest sorrow.

“What is happening to them?” She closed her eyes. For a moment, she seemed to be listening to something far beyond the walls. “They are being forgotten.” My blood went cold. Koa's voice broke through my communicator. “Alejandro, we've got a major problem.” “Talk to me.” “The third anchor is destabilizing.” “How badly?” “Bad enough that the other five are compensating.” I looked at the six roads. “Why?” “I don't know. We haven't touched anything.” Mara whispered, “You don't have to.”

ZURI POV "Please stand as we move to the next round. Vaals, Glortinon, blue. Peulo, Kea, red. Earth, Cok, yellow. Frole, Hassin, orange. Makskin, Bronkark, Shikaz, green. Please take your seats your second course will be gund bread," the male announcer says with his amplified voice and we stand up.

The bond between us was warm and deep and permanent, the anchor that did not shift regardless of what moved above it. "Tell me what the archive account actually says," he said. "Not what Elder Marc summarized. The full account." "You have read it." "Tell me again. I want to hear it from you." So I told him that as well. The wolf dispersed. It did not die. It dispersed briefly through the current, spread thin across the full breadth of what the First Power reached. Then the anchor pulled. The mate bond, running at permanent depth, pulled the dispersed wolf back toward itself the way a current pulls toward its source. It did so slowly. Not all at once. But it did so wholly, in the case of the

And why did I feel so scared of him? “Alpha Sight?” He nods, then he raises his hand and elongates his nails. “It’s when an Alpha embeds their claws at the base of someone’s skull to view their memories. Like I said, Cezar wasn’t innocent of anything.” I look at his black claws and watch as they go back to normal before I peer up at Nero again. “Did… Did Cezar do something to me? Is that why you don’t want to tell me?” A pained expression crosses his face, and my heart drops. I don’t want to think about it… in fact, I don’t want to know what that man did to me. If it was something that still stuck with me after all this time, then I am better off not knowing.