Chapter 23 23
RONAN'S POV
"Listen up!" I shouted and it echoed throughout the fortress yard where warriors from all four corners had gathered. "The wards are compromised. We got bad guys coming in from all sides. Wherever they breach, I want defensive positions set up. Vampires, you will take the eastern wall; they are going to need your speed. Fae, west of approach path use magic to bottleneck the enemy. Demons, south entrance, let them wish their shoes were never there. My pack, that we are the main gate.”
Draven materialized next to me, his face troubled. "You've done well organizing them. They're listening to you."
"Desperate times," I muttered. "Where's Aria?"
“With Kael, getting ready for the Trial of Fang. She persevered, even as the city was under siege.”
My wolf snarled at that. “She should be protected, not there putting herself at risk.
“You underestimate her strength,” Draven said. “Neither of us suspect she’ll stick around while people die instead of her.”
I knew he was right, but that made me feel even more motherly and fierce. "If anything happens to her..."
“It’s not going to,” Draven stated as a fact. "Because we're all going to die before we do."
In the eastern wing, Kael had grown an enchanted forest on the fortress grounds and there I found Aria. The room couldn’t have existed, violating all laws of physics but fae magic made the impossible mundane.
She was in her fighting attire, dark hair tied back, the Luminous Blade and Shadow Fang both hanging from a belt she was wearing. I could see the terror underneath, but she looked strong and resolute.
“You don’t have to do this now,” I called after her. "The trial can wait."
"No Aria, it can't," came the reply and I could hear the tinge of a tremor in her voice despite her obvious strength. “Well, we need to decide what to do about the ultimatum of the Herald by dawn. That leaves me maybe eight hours. In the trial space, time goes by differently. I can do that and be out of here before we have to meet them.”
"And if something goes wrong?"
"Isn't that what mates do? Protect each other?"
The word mate fall from her lips had my wolf prancing with pride even as the human side of me wanted to lock her in a safe room somewhere.
"The Trial of Fang is a measure of primal instinct," I said as she walked with me towards the entrance to the enchanted forest. “Who among them would have the courage to accept their inner beast, trust their gut versus their head. You will be haunted by phantom stalkers, evaluated on challenges in which thinking will get you killed and feeling — just might keep you alive.”
“So it’s all in my honor, not as if I’m even part of the beast creature races or anything then,” Aria sniffed sarcastically.
“You have more beast than you suspect,” I told her. "I've seen it. When you battled in that cave, when you faced down the vampire army. That's primal courage, survival instinct. All this trial is going to do is make you believe in it.”
We arrived at the forest entrance, a glowing wall of green. Past that was just fronds of old trees and shifting shadows hunting.
“I’m going to be looking,” I said. "Tracking you in wolf shape. I still can’t meddle unless you’re in real danger of death, but I’ll be there.”
"Thanks," Aria replied and then did the unexpected of standing on her tip toes and kissing my cheek. "For everything."
And then she crossed that line and vanished into the forest.
I changed form, changing into my wolf shape and followed her through a different entryway to watch without being seen. The enchanted forest smelled real, felt real — but I knew that beneath it all the magic lay, raw and pulsating. Time was already out of joint, minutes expanding into hours.
As Aria tiptoed through woods, I saw her, at first very measured. She was overthinking it, scrutinizing every rustle of leaves and snap of twigs. The first achilles crouched to smite was a shadow demon that moved in sinuous liquid darkness.So she tried to play this like a tactician.
It nearly killed her.
I was about to move in and stop her when she darted sideways at the very last moment, pure reflex bailing her out where wisdom had failed. She was learning.
For what felt like days, but was almost certainly only hours in real time, I watched her change. She also quit trying to out-think the threats and began to experience them instead. Her movements were freer, less contrived. She had started to rely on the prickling sensation along her neck, the hard feeling in her gut, to recognize when something wasn’t right before she could articulate it.
She was the hunter, not the hunted.
The ultimate test, in the form of an alpha predator: something big and awful thought to represent pure primal threat. Aria fought off the creature unarmed, as he had lost his weapons during the trial. She was dirt-covered, bloodied, and exhausted, but her eyes blazed.
She didn't think. She didn't plan. She moved just looking for terrain and instinct and willpower. For a moment she opened her eyes, and when the beast finally fell beneath one of the traps she’d set up on instinct, there was some kind of instinctual awareness within the trial space that read what happened.
The Feral Heart materialized, an amulet of black wood and bone that throbbed with primal essence. She picked it up, and I could feel the power coursing through her as she gained added strength and speed and senses to rival supernaturals.
She stood there in the clearing, spattered with evidence of the fight, and smiled broadly. Never had she seemed so beautiful to me, so perfect, and so wholly and entirely mine.
And as the trial wrapped up and we stepped back into real time, less than three hours had gone by. Aria was tired, and also elated, still coming down off the high of having survived and won the battle.
I guided her to a secluded clearing of the fort where magic had conjured up overhead a fake moon, bright and full and perfect. She fell to the grass, and I returned to my human form, lying down next to her.
I didn’t even make jokes about how I was naked, for once. “It seemed too significant, too raw.”
“I could hear it when I was fighting in there,” I whispered. “To see you learn how to trust yourself, your inner beast, even though you’re only human … it was amazing.”
"I did," Aria held, even as Gaze went to the fake moon. That moment when I stopped pondering and only knew. When instinct kicked in and everything made sense. Always like that for you? Being a lycan?"
"Every day," I confirmed. “Being present, trusting your wolf, knowing without needing to know how you know.”
We sat there for a moment, just in silence, just breathing, just being. And then there I was, finding myself saying the words I’d held back.
"Among lycans there's the idea of true mates," I said. “We believe that somewhere in the world, across all time, there is one soul whose existence was meant for yours. Your “soul mate.” The one other person in the world you’re supposed to find and connect with on that deep, meaningful, spiritual level forever.”
Aria shifted till she was facing me, her hazel eyes twinkling from the moonlight.
“My wolf recognized you the second you came back,” I went on. “From the moment I first saw you, before any mark came upon you, before any prophecy passed your lips. My wolf saw you and she knew without a doubt that you were our mate. Our mate, our Luna, our everything.”
“Ronan,” she began, but I raised a hand.
"Let me finish. Please." I took a breath. “The man in me fights that. Because love, for lycans, is both devotion and ownership. We don't share well. We are territorial and jealous, possessive. Every time one of the others touches you, looks at you, makes you smile— my wolf wants to challenge them to a fight for your honor.”
I looked at her directly. “I’ve been resisting that urge for almost two years. Battling the pull of wanting to steal you from him, to make you mine and only mine. And I won’t give up on it because I know you need all four of us, because the curse and prophecy they depend on this sharing. But it's killing me, Aria. So slowly, so gradually breaking my heart.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked softly.
"For the simple reason that I need your permission," I replied. "Not to mark you. Not to claim you exclusively. Just to hope. To believe that perhaps, possibly, on the other side of this when all is said and done — after the Fifth King has fallen and we prevail at last — maybe there would be a time for what we seem to have now, something solid and enduring. Where I’m free to love you, no holds barred, no matter that I have to share you with three others.”
It looked like Aria's eyes were shining with unshed tears. She hesitated for a moment, then opened her mouth to reply and I leaned forward eagerly as she spoke.
The fortress shook violently.
The huge shockwave seemingly caused the ground itself to wave similarly to if it were water and we both stumbled. I leapt into action, my wolf self shielding Aria as the castle's wall started breaking apart.
Sirens were blaring and my warriors’ panic as well as resolve was transmitted through the pack links. The wards had fallen completely. The enemy was here.
I moved back, getting Aria on her feet. We dashed to the main courtyard where everyone would soon be congregating. The sky above us was getting darker, and reality itself felt like it would rip around the edges.
I saw them when we arrived in the courtyard. Thousands of beings made from shadow spilling through rifts between worlds and writhing in their monstrosity. Fulim the possessed warriors of all four lands, their eyes darkened with corruption, side by side with the shadow beasts. And here was the army we’d been preparing to encounter.
But worse still was at their head.
A silhouette surrounded by darkness so deep, it felt as though the touch of light was devoured around them, leaving a hole in reality wherever they stood. This wasn’t the Fifth King, not exactly. This was something different, something old and hollow and not right.
The Herald.
Its voice reverberated on the field of battle, not perceived by ears but stamped directly into our skulls. “The blood moon will rise tomorrow at the dusk. My king grows impatient. Hand over the goddess and all he has taken, or we will kill you and every loved one you have ever known. Morning." If you decide to do it, then you have until the morning."
"Never" I snarled, my wolf coming to the forefront, ready to attack.
The Herald’s laughter was the noise of planets dying. "A demonstration, then. To show you we are serious."
It lifted one hand, and I sensed something immense and awful switch on over all four realms at once. I felt it, through the pack bonds, through the mate bond, through every connection I had.
People dying. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. A tenth of the population of every realm, just eaten by shadow as their lives were extinguished in mere heartbeats like candles in a storm.
Entire villages gone. Families erased. Warriors I’d known for decades, gone in a flash.
Aria screamed, and in her bonds with all four realms, she felt it. I dropped my arm around her as she sagged from the weight of her legs and wept for people she had never met but whose deaths felt like personal losses.
"You have till dawn," repeated the Herald. "Choose wisely, little goddess. Your surrender for their survival. Isolate yourselves and by tomorrow evening the Kingdom will be void of all except for those who serve my King."
And then it disappeared, absconding with the majority of its army and leaving behind just what was necessary to continue laying siege and for us to remember that at any moment they could strike.