Chapter 135: Lucira
There was no light on the other side of the Gate.
No heat, no wind and no sound but their breathing, his heavier, steadying hers. Isla’s hand was wrapped in Damian’s, the only anchor she had as everything around them shifted. It wasn’t darkness they stepped into.
It was absence.
The world felt unfinished. As if reality itself hadn’t formed yet. Shapes flickered at the edges of her vision, half-formed things, ancient and monstrous in their slumber, watching but not waking. Magic hung thick in the air, heavy as fog, but raw, untempered. It scraped against her skin like static. She didn’t know if it was hostile or simply waiting to be told what it was.
Damian’s grip on her hand tightened. “Isla… where are we?”
She turned slowly, her boots landing on solid nothing. “I think this is the First Realm. Before ours. Before any kingdom was carved. Before werewolves. Before the Elder Houses. Before the creatures we know of nowadays.”
He looked around, eyes narrowed, every instinct on edge. “Then why are we here?”
She didn’t answer right away. Because something in her already knew.
The air began to pulse again, not with light, but memory. Flickers of something not quite visible shimmered around them: a towering gate made of bone and starlight, a woman with Isla’s eyes kneeling in chains of ice, wolves howling at a sky with no moon.
“Because this is where it began,” Isla said, her voice quiet. “Where I began.”
A soft wind stirred. But it didn’t come from ahead, it came from within. Powerful and omnipresent. Strangely it felt familiar.
Suddenly, the Gate behind them disappeared. Not closed. It just disappeared, as if it had never been.
Damian spun around. “That’s not good.”
“No,” she agreed, but there was no panic in her voice. Only certainty. “It means we’re exactly where they never wanted us to be.”
“Who 's they?”
The wind grew stronger. Whispers rose on its current,old tongues, fractured syllables. Damian drew closer to her, protective, alert. But Isla didn’t move. Her gaze locked ahead, drawn toward a shadow taking shape at the horizon.
It was walking toward them, slowly and silently. It wasn’t a monster nor a beast, but a woman. She wore robes of dark silver, spun like smoke. Her hair was the color of moonless frost. Her face… not unfamiliar.
Isla’s breath caught.
“Lucira,” she whispered.
Damian frowned. “Who?”
But Isla stepped forward.
“My father never really told me who my birth mother was,” she said softly. “Only that she disappeared. Erased. I used to think he meant murdered.”
The woman stopped several paces away. Her eyes were Isla’s. But older and colder, burning with a knowledge Isla hadn’t yet earned.
Lucira spoke, and her voice was layered, one moment soft as snow, the next like stone cracking. “You have opened what we sealed in blood.”
Damian stepped beside Isla. “We didn’t mean to unleash anything.”
“You didn’t unleash,” Lucira replied. “You returned.”
She stepped forward again and raised her hand, not in threat, but invocation. A circle of light bloomed around them, forming symbols in the air. Not runes. Names.
Isla’s entire body hummed.
“What is this place?” she asked. “Why am I tied to it?”
Lucira’s face softened, only slightly. “Because you are the daughter of the Last Gatekeeper and the First.”
Silence fell like ash.
“You carry both ends of the line,” Lucira continued. “The blood that closed the realms, and the one that can open them.”
Isla stared. “I was just a girl. Human at first and then realised I was a wolf... but that was only the beginning, wasn’t it? I never asked for this.”
“No one asks to be born with the key,” Lucira said. “But when the chain breaks… only the key can forge a path.”
Damian’s voice was steady, low. “Why now?”
Lucira looked at him then, for the first time. “Because the Elders have practically gone and the three bloodlines are reigniting. Their time is ending and what comes next is either reckoning… or rebirth.”
She reached out, pressing a hand over Isla’s heart.
“The child you carry will tip the scale.”
Isla flinched.
Damian froze.
“What did you say?” he whispered.
Lucira smiled. Not kindly. But not cruelly. “The bloodline continues. It always was fated.”
Isla took a shaky breath. “So… this is what they feared.”
“Yes,” Lucira said. “You. Your child and the memory of what they buried.”
Behind Lucira, the realm shimmered. Forms appeared, a thousand souls watching from the mist. None of them moved. Not alive. Not ghosts. Echoes of those who came before.
Gatekeepers. Dreamwalkers. Truth-tellers.
Lucira stepped back. “You came here for answers. You will not find all of them. But you will remember and when you do, you will return to your world with the power to decide what future survives.”
The ground trembled beneath their feet. The air thickened with light.
Isla took Damian’s hand again.
Lucira’s voice echoed one final time: “Step through the light, Isla of the Two Bloods. Carrier of the Three Bloods Legacy and Truth. Your war is not yet done.”
Then the realm shattered into white specs of dust and they fell, like what seemed like an eternity. Not downward and not through space but into a deep and ancient memory.