Chapter 139: The Calling
The sky did not break again, because their world had already exploded into dust and realisation of what was to come.
It held steady above them, bruised, ash-streaked, and humming with the memory of what had passed. But beneath that silence, the land trembled with an unknown force.
Ash drifted like snowfall. The air stank of scorched stone, old magic and blood. Every breath carried the taste of exhaustion, every heartbeat felt borrowed. Strangely, the birds' songs were muted, no wind stirred and even time itself seemed to hold its breath.
This was the aftermath of unmaking.
Isla stood at the edge of what remained of the old throne room, barefoot on the broken dais where power had poured through her like lightning. Behind her, the Gate pulsed softly, no longer a wound, but not healed either. It simply breathed.
Her friends, her new found family, stood in the ruins with her. Silence had taken over. They all stood there, wounded and changed.
Brienne’s hands were scraped, her braid tangled, her eyes still raw from weeping and fury. But her arms had not left Isla’s side since she found her.
Leo stood with a sling across his shoulder, watching the horizon like a man expecting it to crack apart again. He said nothing, but his closeness to Alaine was telling, they stood in sync, shoulder to shoulder, breathing each other in without words.
Alaine had one hand over Isla’s stomach, gently checking the baby with her empathic senses. Her other hand rested over Leo’s. She hadn’t even realized she had reached for him until he held her back.
Marcus paced like a lion, the warrior in him on edge. But every time his eyes strayed to Damian, something like fatherhood, like pride, flickered there. He hadn’t said it aloud, he didn’t need to. He had had to keep so much from him. It hadn’t been his wish but it was forced upon him when the real effects of their blood had shown their true colours when it managed to tame him the way it did. He had been weak. Just like his own son, blood of his blood. Sadly, it had been a pattern in their family. A dark secret kept quiet. But, oh God, he was so grateful to have stepped back into the light.
Rohen stood tall, but his shoulders bore the tension of someone sensing death on the wind. Lucia pressed a hand to his, steadying him, her presence a lighthouse in a world turned storm.
Vincent… Vincent watched it all. Apart, but not gone. He lingered near Brienne, never close enough to touch her, but never looking at anyone else. Not once and not anymore. He had come to the realisation in a painful fashion that his thirst for power had made him hurt the one person in this earth that was made for him. The fight he had to battle inside was voracious and exhausting. The voices. The reckoning force that whispered. He hadn’t won yet and that was worrisome and dangerous.
Even Damian, solid and grounded, had lines of worry etched deep into his jaw. His hand never left Isla’s, but his eyes kept drifting to the Gate, to the shadows, to the distance beyond it because he knew what was coming.
He had felt it in the old blood that still sang under his skin, the kind of war that doesn’t leave survivors, only ruins. The thought of Isla, his beloved mate, the key to everything, the woman he had chosen before fate even gave him her name, being lost to that?
It terrified him. But not as an Alpha neither as a warrior. But as a man. He would burn the world before letting her fall.
Lucia’s voice broke the silence. “It’s still open.”
“It won’t close,” Isla said. “It’s waiting.”
“For what?” Brienne asked.
“For the rest of us,” Isla whispered. “For the ones who still breathe. For the ones who still remember.”
Vincent’s voice came rough, certain. “If we don’t gather every soul willing to fight, we’ll fall.”
“They’ll come for us before we’re ready,” Rohen added. “Before the moon returns to alignment. Before the child is born.”
“They know the Gate has opened,” Damian said. “They’ll strike while we’re fractured.”
Alaine tensed. “Then we need to get back. We need the Fortress.”
Brienne nodded, eyes flicking around them. “We’re too exposed here. No wards. No protections. If they find us…”
“They will,” Leo said grimly.
“We’re not enough,” Isla murmured. “Not just wolves, not just old blood. We need the others.”
Lucia looked up, sharp. “You mean… the Forgotten?”
Isla nodded. “The Seers hidden in exile. The earth-callers. The blood-born. The last wind-walkers. Even the vampire-born, the daylight-bound. The old covens that scattered. All of them. Every House, every root and every forgotten oath. If they don’t stand with us…”
“We die,” Marcus finished grimly.
Damian stepped forward. “Then we move. Tonight.”
Rohen tilted his head. “The Fortress still holds, barely. It’ll give us time.”
“Time is blood now,” Vincent muttered.
Isla stepped into the center of the ruin and dropped to her knees. She placed her hand on the scorched stone, the same one her first mother had once touched, the same one where the child within her stirred now.
“Come home.”
The Gate trembled.
Far away, the drums began. They weren’t loud nor close. But they were becoming more real as each breathe was taken.
The lost were listening…
The Flameborn.
The Echo-Walkers.
The rogue Seers in the eastern hills.
The shapeshifters who once guarded forested altars.
The daylight-bound, vampire-blooded warriors sworn to truth and others, long thought gone.
Isla rose. “We return to the Fortress. We gather. We prepare.”
Brienne’s voice cracked. “Will they come?”
“They have to,” Isla said. “Because if they don’t… the world ends and this time, it won’t rise again.”