Chapter 5 The Bond That Wasn't

Kael didn't summon me that morning.

No shadow in the doorway. No folded note. No messenger with unreadable eyes.

Just silence. And a low, humming pull beneath my skin like something inside me had started vibrating in a language I didn't understand.

I didn't eat. Couldn't.

Not when the word Unclaimed still flickered behind my eyelids every time I blinked.

Not when the knock from the wall repeated itself in my dreams, even now, wide awake.

I left the quarters mid-morning.

Stormveil's outer wing felt... different.

Not just colder emptier. Wolves passed with their heads down. Doors were locked. Fires unlit. As though something had pressed down on the entire territory and no one could speak of it.

The shrine near the garden had been redressed as

Candles. Bones. Ash arranged in the shape of the crescent.

Someone was making offerings.

Not to the moon.

To something older.

I didn't dare ask who.

I found Rowen at the training field, alone. Blade in hand, shirt discarded, body slick with sweat. He moved like someone trying to outrun his own blood.

He saw me.

Didn't stop.

"You dream again?" he asked between strikes.

"Yes."

"Same wolves?"

"Yes."

"Did they speak?"

I hesitated.

He lowered his sword. "What did they say?"

"That I belong to no one."

He nodded once, as if confirming something he'd already known.

"Come," he said.

"Where?"

He didn't answer.

We walked through the eastern cliffs in silence. Past the storm marker stones. Past the warded line that shimmered faintly beneath the grass.

He didn't slow until we reached the edge of a ravine, where an altar of smooth obsidian jutted from the rock like a blade.

"What is this?" I asked.

"A boundary," Rowen said. "Between what we remember and what we bury."

I didn't understand.

Until he placed his palm on the altar and whispered a word I'd never heard before.

The stone shimmered.

Then split.

And inside beneath glasslay an old cloth.

Black. Torn. Stained in a dried red so deep it looked like rust.

My pendant began to hum.

"Is this" I began, reaching.

But Rowen stopped me.

"This belonged to the last girl the wolves dreamed of."

I went still.

"She died?"

"No. She disappeared. The night before her twenty-first Naming."

Iswallowed. "And you think I'mwhat? Her reincarnation?"

"No," he said slowly. "I think you're worse."

I stepped back.

Rowen didn't stop me.

But he didn't look afraid.

He looked ready.

That night, I stared at my reflection until the fire burned low.

My eyes looked darker.

My skin too still.

Like I was holding something in.

Something that wasn't mine.

Something that had been waiting.

I went to bed without undressing.

The pendant stayed on.

I woke at midnight.

The room was shaking.

Not an earthquake.

A pulse.

Low. Deep. Rhythmic.

I sat up fast.

The walls were litpale silver lines snaking from the stone, swirling into crescents and runes I didn't recognize.

My skin was burning.

I ran to the mirror.

And I saw it.

Not just the bond mark on my back.

A second mark.

Just beneath it.

Fainter.

Older.

The same symbol from the stone.

Three crescents, interlocked.

Moonbound.

I barely had time to reach the door before someone knocked.

Twice.

Then silence.

I opened it fast.

But no one was there.

Just a whisper on the wind:

"Lyra Caelwyn does not exist."

At dawn, Kael stood waiting for me in the courtyard.

"Come with me," he said.

He didn't wait for me to answer.

I followed him through the lower tunnels, into the catacombs beneath the territory.

The walls here pulsed.

The air was heavy with damp moss and old blood.

He stopped in front of a door carved with the same three-moon symbol that now lived on my back.

"This was sealed the day you were born," he said.

"You don't even know me."

"I know what they erased to protect you."

He placed his hand on the door.

It opened.

And insidea cradle.

Empty.

Beside it: a single cloth.

With my name embroidered in silver thread.

Lyra.

The original.

The one no one remembered.

The one I'd never been told about.

I turned to Kael.

"What am I?"

He didnt answer.

But the look in his eyes said everything:

He did not choose me.

He recognized me.

Later, in the privacy of my quarters, I stared at the cradle cloth, twisting the edge between my fingers.

The wolves in my dreams were no longer wolves

They were men.

And I was beginning to see their faces.

Kael.

Rowen.

Cian.

Each of them pulling toward something in me I hadn't givenand couldn't take back.

This wasn't a bond.

This was a reckoning.

And somewhere deep beneath Stormveil,

something stirred awake.

CLIFFHANGER

I didn't sleep that night.

Not after seeing the cradle. Not after hearing my name whispered by a door that should've stayed sealed.

I stood in front of the mirror, back bare, studying the two marks.

The rejection scar pulsed oncefaint.

The Moonbound mark glowed.

And for the first time, I saw a third shadow forming beneath them both. A mark not written in blood, but in choice.

Then I heard it.

Not a knock. Not a voice.

A howl.

Low. Possessive. Familiar.

It wasn't Kael.

It wasntt Rowen.

It was Cian.

Calling me across territory lines.

Demanding something he no longer had a right to touch.

And the worst part?

The part that made my chest ache?

Somewhere deep inside mee

I wanted to answer.

Epilogue Teaser

The Choosing Grounds burned under the first blood moon in twenty years.

Three Alphas stood at the edge of the altar each one with a claim. Each one willing to break the rules to take her.

But the girl in silver didn't kneel.

She didn't offer herself.

She reached into the flame and pulled something out.

Not a bond.

Not a vow.

A name no one had spoken in over two decades.

And when she said it aloud, wolves across five territories fell silent.

Because the one thing the moon feared wasn't power.

It was memory.

And she had both.