Chapter 136: The Story Unfolds
They didn’t land. They merged. Light wasn’t light here, it was feeling, scent, echo and sorrow. Isla blinked, but her eyes couldn’t adjust because she no longer had eyes the way she once did. Her senses had bled into something else. She could feel the grass beneath her knees before she saw it. Hear her own heartbeat before she remembered who it belonged to and beside her, always beside her, Damian. But even he was different here. His soul shimmered like silver flame, burning with a protective fury that never dimmed, even when everything else was foreign.
Then the light parted and Isla remembered. Not as a dream and not as a vision. But as the truth.
She stood, no, someone stood with her body, or what it had been in another life. A girl with the same jaw, the same scars at the bend of the brow. Her hands were bloodied. Her wrists bore shackles made of moon-iron.
The First Realm was still whole then, lush and wild and untamed. Moons circled it like guardians. Wolves howled not at the sky but to the spirits that moved between realms freely. They were not hunted. They were holy and then, they came.
They weren’t men nor beasts. But something worse: the Elders. They werent gods nor protectors.
Intruders.
“They stole the skies,” Isla murmured, watching the scene unfold around her like a living tapestry. “And twisted the bond. They made us forget. They built kingdoms on forgetting.”
The woman with her face fought beside others, wolves and non-wolves, beings of breath and bone and breathless power. There was a boy with golden eyes among them, hands raised in flame. Another woman who sang wind into arrows. A man with a voice that could command stone.
She didn’t know their names. But her soul did.
“They were the first Circle,” Damian said quietly, watching with her. “They didn’t rule. They guarded.”
Until betrayal tore them apart. One by one, the vision showed the fall: bonds severed, memory undone, names burned out of time. The Elders created thrones and declared themselves eternal and those who had been the bridge, the Gatekeepers, the Flameborn, the Echo-Walkers, were erased.
Except one.
“She made a deal,” Isla whispered. “The last Gatekeeper. She gave them her bloodline. She sealed the realms to protect the child inside her and they made her watch.”
A great tree with crystal branches stood in the center of a shattered valley. Beneath it, the woman with Isla’s face carved her promise into the stone: “One day, the key will wake and when she does, your end will come on the breath of a forgotten name.”
The scene flickered. The woman screamed because she was torn from her child, her mate and from the realm. She was then sealed behind the Gate.
Damian turned to Isla. “That was your mother.”
“No,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. “That was my first mother. Lucira.”
Then another vision shimmered through, the second life.
A child placed in the arms of a hunter’s wife. Raised in shadows to be kept a secret. Given no knowledge of her blood, only fragments of instinct that would never sleep.
Her memories weren’t broken. They were just buried. Everything rushed forward then.
The fight she witnessed in the forest. Her dire need for Damian. The night she first shifted. The moment she first saw Damian and her friends across a battlefield soaked in red. Her father’s confession. The hunger that lived in her bones. The dreams she never understood. All of it was orchestrated because someone always feared what she would become.
Suddenly the visions collapsed inward, curling around her chest like a vice. The light thickened. Pain stabbed behind her ribs. Isla fell to her knees, gasping. Damian dropped beside her, catching her before she hit the ground.
“Isla, what’s happening?”
She couldn’t speak because the child was stirring.
She wasn't kicking nor simply growing. She was doing much more than that, she was awakening. As if she, too, remembered.
Her skin shimmered gold where Damian touched her. His hand splayed over her stomach, and for a single heartbeat, he felt it. Not just the baby but the immense power. His throat bobbed, but he said nothing because this wasn’t just a child. It was the continuation of a legacy long erased and the convergence of three ancient lines: his, and hers and the werewolf line honouring the moon.
They didn’t have time to understand it all. The vision was breaking apart now, the realm of memory trembling as if something were tearing through from the other side.
“We’re being pulled back,” Damian said, rising to shield her. “Something’s found us.”
“Not something,” Isla said, voice barely above a whisper. “Them.”
The Elders had felt it. They had felt her and they were coming to stop what they should have killed before birth. Even in this form they hated and feared them.
The world collapsed into shadow and they were falling again. This time, toward home.