Ultraviolet Lantern Corps Novels & Stories

## Chapter 101 – Lanterns Over the Three Packs The second year after the web broke, we decided to try something that would have been unthinkable before: It's a night where three packs lit the sky together on purpose. Not for war. Not for signaling positions. For memory. For choice. For the sheer, stubborn fact of still being here. *** The date was set half a moon before—the same night in all territories under the Pact. Messages went out in formal dispatches and hand‑written notes. Lantern makers in Mooncrest, Nightveil, and Bloodthorn worked overtime, cursing cheerfully as they burned fingers and smudged paint.

The lantern glow flickered across the rocks, stretching the silhouettes of the entranced participants. Their murmured breaths were almost rhythmic—soft, eerie, unaware. Arin whispered, “They’re too deep in the trance. If the conductor snaps—” Kael cut in quietly, “Then we make sure it doesn’t snap. We force a controlled collapse.” Her nod was small but resolute. I skirted the coil’s exterior. Up close, its surface looked like metal and bone fused together—smooth where the energy pulsed, rough where the structure had been repaired. It was larger than anything we’d encountered. And angrier.

No thank you, once was enough. Arbitrary, I lifted my tongue as the pill-warden whipped a small UV light from his pocket to shine into the back of my throat. Talk about excessive. “Dude, seriously, a UV light," I said with my mouth open. "Isn’t that like over the top? Whatever happened to a regular flashlight,” That earned me scowled from the big man over my shoulder and I guess a lecture. I stared at Legolas but his face remained impassive, it was trippy even creepy how this guy’s facial expression never changed.