The morning mist hung low over the white marble cliff, thick and damp enough to stick to my eyelashes.
I walked onto the training grounds rubbing my aching shoulders, expecting to sit in the stone circle again.
I expected more hours of closing my eyes, breathing in the scent of wild moss, and trying to pull the slippery threads of the Sacred Veil into my core.
Instead, Vance was waiting for me.
He stood in the center of the cracked courtyard, the gray dawn light catching the heavy scars on his forearms.
At his feet lay two heavy, notched wooden practice swords.
Corin stood a few paces back, his hands tucked into the long sleeves of his robes, his expression unusually grim.
“Where is the stone circle?” I asked, stopping at the edge of the courtyard.
“Hiding is no longer enough, Aria,” Corin said, his quiet voice cutting through the morning chill.
“The veil will mask your scent from a distance, but if a tracker stumbles upon your physical path, magic alone will not keep a blade out of your ribs.
You must survive long enough to protect yourself.
And them.” My hand instinctively dropped to my stomach.
“Corin, I’m pregnant.
And before I came here, the closest I ever got to a weapon was a kitchen knife to slice bread.
I don’t know how to fight.” “The Alchemist’s hounds won’t care about your condition, Princess,” Vance said bluntly.
He didn’t look at my stomach; his hard silver eyes stayed locked onto mine.
He kicked one of the wooden swords toward me.
It skittered across the stone, stopping right at my boots.
“Pick it up.” I hesitated, then reached down and lifted the wood.
It was far heavier than I expected, the rough ash biting into the palms of my uncalloused hands.
“We aren’t teaching you to conquer an army,” Vance said, picking up his own practice blade with a casual, terrifying ease.
“We are teaching you to stay alive.
First lesson: balance, footwork, and awareness.
If you can’t stand your ground, you’re already dead.” What followed wasn’t a heroic training montage; it was a brutal, humiliating exercise in gravity.
Vance didn’t strike to hurt, but he didn’t hold back either.
He moved like a wall of solid iron, his wooden blade tapping against my ankles, my hips, my wrists.
Every time I tried to swing, my center of gravity shifted precariously, and I ended up flat on my back, the cold marble rattling my teeth.
Thud.
“Too slow,” Vance muttered, standing over me.
“Your weight is on your heels.
A rogue would have taken your head by now.” I pushed myself up, my palms burning from the stone.
From the edges of the courtyard, I could see the villagers watching.
The old men, the women, the children who looked at me like a savior just yesterday.
Now, they were watching their ‘queen’ fumble in the dirt like a clumsy pup.
The heat of humiliation rushed into my cheeks, hotter than any magic.
By the third hour, my breath came in ragged, burning gasps.
I sat on a low stone step during a brief respite, nursing a dark bruise forming on my forearm.
Vance stood a few feet away, wiping down his wooden blade with a piece of cloth, his expression as unreadable as the mountain rock.
“Why did you stay?” I asked suddenly, the question slipping out before I could stop it.
Vance paused, his hand freezing over the wooden hilt.
“After Astravia fell,” I continued, looking up at him through my tangled hair.
“You could have joined another pack.
You’re a powerful warrior, Vance.
You could have been a Beta, maybe even an Alpha of a smaller territory.
Why live in hiding for twenty-three years for a dead kingdom?” For a long moment, the only sound was the wind howling through the marble pillars.
Then, Vance slowly lowered the cloth.
When he looked at me, the cold, unyielding mask didn’t break, but the shadows in his silver eyes deepened into something raw and agonized.
“Twenty-three years ago, I was part of the inner palace guard,” Vance said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly register.
“When the fires started, my duty was to secure the eastern tower.
I thought the Alphas were the only threat.
I didn’t know about the Alchemist’s shadows until it was too late.” He turned his gaze toward the southern peaks, his jaw tight.
“I watched the throne room burn, Aria.
I watched Queen Seraphina—your mother—fight until her silver light was choked out by black smoke.
I was trapped behind a wall of fallen timber.
I could hear her, but I couldn’t reach her.” His knuckles turned white against the wooden sword.
“I swore an oath to her bloodline.
I failed her once.
I will live in the dirt for a century before I fail her bloodline again.” It was the first time I saw the bleeding wound beneath the soldier’s armor.
He wasn’t hard because he was cruel; he was hard because he was haunted.
Vance turned back to me, the vulnerability vanishing instantly as he raised his blade.
“Stand up.
Again.” This time, I didn’t complain about my bruised ribs.
I stood up.
When Vance lunged at me during the next drill, something shifted.
Instead of trying to meet his brutal strength with my own weak grip, I remembered my years in the Blackfang kitchens—dodging the heavy-handed swings of the head cook, slipping past angry enforcers in narrow corridors.
I stopped trying to block.
As his wooden blade came down in a sweeping arc, I dropped low, shifting my weight entirely to my toes, and let my instincts take over.
I spun out of his reach, the wooden blade whistling past my ear, missing me by an inch.
Vance’s momentum carried him a step forward, his stance breaking for a split second.
A collective gasp, followed by a sudden burst of cheers, erupted from the villagers on the sidelines.
I stood a few feet away, gasping for air, my heart hammering against my ribs, but my wooden sword was still up.
Vance slowly turned around.
A tiny, almost imperceptible nod of approval flitted across his stern face.
“Speed,” he said simply.
“Use what you have, not what you think you should have.” As I lowered the blade, a strange sensation bloomed deep within my womb.
The fierce twin stirred, pulsing with a sudden, wild excitement that ran through my veins like liquid adrenaline.
It loved the conflict.
It loved the adrenaline of the near-miss.
But the moment I closed my eyes to steady my breathing, invoking a tiny thread of the Sacred Veil to hide my spiked scent, the calm twin responded, a soothing wave of peace washing over my frazzled nerves.
Corin walked over, his sharp eyes moving from my face to my stomach.
He had clearly noticed the rapid fluctuation of my aura.
“The children are participating in your growth, Aria,” Corin murmured, his eyes wide with a strange mix of awe and concern.
“The fierce one stirs with the weapon; the calm one settles with the veil.
They possess entirely different gifts.
As they grow, they will not just inherit your legacy—they will divide it.” Far beyond the safety of the misty valley, the grand pack house of Blackfang felt like a pressure cooker.
Alpha Kael sat in his study, a stack of territorial trade agreements lying untouched on his desk.
He hadn’t signed a single paper in three days.
Every minor report from the border scouts irritated him, and his enforcers had started walking on eggshells around him, terrified of the unpredictable, violent aura radiating from their Alpha.
The heavy oak door opened, and Camille slipped into the room, carrying a tray with wine.
She set it down, her eyes scanning his tense posture before she walked behind his chair, resting her hands on his rigid shoulders.
“You’re still dwelling on the rogue maid,” Camille said softly, her voice dripping with a carefully manufactured sweetness.
“Kael, the scouts searched the base of the mountains.
The wilderness is unforgiving.
If she hasn’t returned to the rogue camps, she’s likely…
gone.” Kael’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek.
“She is a rogue traitress who stole from this pack,” he muttered, his voice dangerously low.
“Of course,” Camille agreed smoothly, leaning down until her lips brushed his ear.
“But sometimes I wonder…
what if she survived?
What if she found shelter with the mountain outcasts?
If she did, she poses a threat to our pack merger.
Don’t you think we should send a larger execution squad to the deeper passes?
Just to be certain?” She watched his face intently, her eyes sharp, fishing for any sign of hidden knowledge.
Kael slammed his palm down on the desk, the heavy mahogany cracking beneath his strength.
“I said the matter is closed, Camille!” he growled, his voice vibrating with full Alpha authority.
“She is nothing to this pack anymore.” Camille stepped back, her eyes narrowing slightly as she took in his wild, defensive reaction.
He didn’t care, yet his anger was tearing his own study apart.
She smiled tightly, bowing her head.
“Of course, Alpha.
Forgive me.” But that night, Kael’s wolf refused to let him sleep.
The moment his eyes closed, the nightmare tore through his mind.
He wasn’t in his bedroom.
He was standing at the base of a jagged, black mountain under a bleeding sky.
High above him, at the very edge of a sheer cliff, stood Aria.
Her hair was flying wildly in the storm, her tears long dried.
In her hands, she held two brilliant, blinding silver lights that illuminated the entire sky, cutting through the darkness like twin stars.
Kael ran toward the cliff, his chest burning with that horrific, agonizing ache, screaming her name, but she never looked back.
Before he could reach her, the cliff crumbled, and she fell into the abyss.
Kael snapped awake with a roar, his claws tearing through the silk sheets of his bed.
He sat up in the dark, his chest heaving, his skin slick with sweat, his heart hammering a single, frantic rhythm into his ribs.
He was furious, confused, and utterly terrified.
Because the dream didn’t feel like a nightmare.
It felt like a countdown.
Deep within the jagged, freezing ridges of the Whispering Mountains, the storm had completely died, leaving an eerie, suffocating silence over the snow-covered peaks.
The three hooded trackers moved like ghosts through the rocky pass, their tattered black robes scraping against the frozen ground.
They stopped at a high ridge overlooking a deep, mist-filled chasm.
The lead tracker dropped to his knees, pressing his bare, black-veined palm against a jagged stone.
Below the surface, the ancient runes of Astravia were humming, vibrating against his skin.
But it wasn’t just the stone that caught his attention.
He tilted his head, his nostrils flaring beneath his dark hood as he caught a microscopic, fleeting fluctuation in the air—a tiny tear in the mountain’s ancient veil that had occurred earlier that afternoon.
The second tracker stepped up, his hollow eyes fixed on the leader.
“Do you feel it?
The silver resonance is stronger here.” “It is not just stronger,” the lead tracker whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of dark delight and sheer awe.
“The frequency…
it is fractured.” He closed his eyes, digging his claws into the frozen dirt as he peeled back the layers of spiritual scent drifting through the mist.
“There isn’t just one royal signature hiding in these mountains,” the leader murmured, his corrupted silver eyes snapping open, gleaming with a sick, hungry light in the dark.
“There are three.” The second tracker gasped.
“Three?
The Queen had no other children.” “The Princess is not alone,” the leader laughed, a dry, rattling sound that died in the cold air.
“She carries the next generation.
Two unborn heirs.
The silver bloodline is multiplying.” The lead tracker slowly reached into the folds of his tattered black robes, pulling out a small, cracked obsidian mirror.
He pressed his thumb against the glass until his black blood smeared across the surface.
The glass flared with a sickening, purple glow, and a distant, ancient voice echoed directly from the dark stone—cold, ancient, and dripping with absolute malice.
“Speak.” The lead tracker pressed his forehead against the freezing ground.
“Master…” the tracker whispered into the glass.
“The Princess has been found.
She is hiding in the southern valley.
And she carries heirs.” A heavy, suffocating silence stretched over the mountaintop.
Then, the Dark Alchemist’s cold, scraping voice echoed back through the obsidian mirror: “Bring me the children alive.
Kill the rest.” [END OF CHAPTER 21]