Road To Ruins Book Novels & Stories

"Are you sure you don't want to at least stop the bleeding?" "Don't need to. Isla will handle it." I fought the urge to roll my eyes. The man was beyond stupid. Another long night passed. By the time the SUV finally entered the territory of the Moonridge Pack, the sun was rising. I'd been driving for twenty-four hours straight, and my eyes were bloodshot. But Damien immediately perked up. "Quick, to Isla's clinic." I followed the GPS to the small clinic. It was less a clinic and more a shabby little house. There wasn't even a proper sign out front.

AILANI’S POV. “What the fuck are you doing in here?” I spinned around sharply bumping into a shelf, the wood shaking and threatening to fall over. I closed my eyes prepared for the impact. The sound of old books and the smell of the dust that covered them invaded my senses. A few moments passed after not feeling the impact so I opened my eyes. They widened from what they were witnessing. The wood hanging above our heads had splintered into two sharp ends and one of them pierced Enzo in his right arm, just below his elbow. Blood gushing out from the assaulted area.

Her father had broken her with a single sentence, tossed off in a moment of panic, no forethought in it at all. Luca had broken her methodically, deliberately, exactly the way he did everything else, and there was something almost unbearable about the difference between those two kinds of ruin, one careless, one intentional, without either of them offering her anything resembling comfort in return. She fell asleep eventually, still searching anyway, and found nothing there to comfort her at all.

His obsession deepened. I walked the line between ruin and surrender. How long before the secrets met? How long before the man I meant to destroy realized the ghost in his bed would be the one to bring his empire down? The game had never been more dangerous or more consuming.

The highway in front of us wound through the faded edges of the city, where the buildings had dwindled, one disappearing and the next appearing in short order, before giving in to thick forest and long abandoned property. Beneath centuries of history, behind centuries of distance, the ruins lay a little beyond the treeline, buried a little like a wound the world was unwilling to test. No one spoke as we walked. Not at first. There was too much festering, unvoiced pressure between us, too many unuttered thoughts.

Broken hopes were there on the ground, lives that were once cherished by people were now completely erased. The actual roadway had been scarred and pitted; the crusts of the skin were raised in ordnance like a desert river bed, forlorn. Weeds grew through the cracks of the existence stretching thin, wiry stems miming the surface of scars. What used to be a perfectly paved road was now a bumpy affair of craters and ruts, and every bump could well spell the doom of the carriage’s wheels. To the left, blackened tree trunks of the burned-out forest rose like ghosts toward the gray sky, the pattern of burned branches recalling an ominous painting.

Rayden murmured, his hand still resting against the warm stone pillar, an anomaly in the deadly desert. The aura was faint, nearly lost, but undeniably real, a gentle, persistent pulse of life in an ocean of death. With the wariness of a wolf entering new territory, Rayden stepped through the shattered gate. Before him sprawled the grand ruins of Zha’mar. Wide main roads that might once have been filled with merchants and nobles were now buried beneath golden dunes. Grand sandstone buildings remained only as skeletons, their broken towers reaching toward the sky like slender fingers trying to grasp something long gone.

Jason followed him and glanced back once with an apologetic smile while the cold girl named Alyssa stared at Noah for a bit before taking her leave too. Noah, on the other hand, frowned. He didn't know what the man was talking about. To his knowledge, Ruins were sort of like inheritance grounds where a high level Battlesoul master once lived while they were alive. The things found could be weapons, Elixirs, resources or battle techniques. He didn't think that his three-day absence would cost him some valuable intel.

The silence was punctuated only by our quiet murmurs, our shared yearning for a past we never knew, a future we desperately wished for. Later, amidst the twisted metal and rubble, James stumbled upon a tattered book, its cover mostly torn away, revealing only a few words—'The Chronicles of Atheria'. The title alone conjured images of a world far removed from our own, a place of magic and wonder, of brave knights and epic quests. The pages, brittle with age and decay, contained fragmented stories, glimpses of a civilization that had flourished before the catastrophe. It spoke of vibrant cities, of advanced technology, and of a society that lived in harmony with its environment.

Killian looked once more at his mother’s lifeless face, then at Victor, writhing in agony on the floor. He swallowed, voice barely a breath. “Let’s go.” They moved, quiet, fast, unseen in the chaos. No one stopped them. No one noticed them. Victor was collapsing into madness, and Robert... Robert had frozen. For the first time, the man who built empires with fear looked helpless. Utterly powerless. He stared at Victor, his heir, his pride, now a broken, dangerous ruin of a man, and said nothing. Could say nothing. Only when Killian, Ivy, and Killian Senior disappeared into the storm did Robert finally look down.