All Chapters of Blood of the forgotten moon: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

77 Chapters

Chapter 51: The Night Before

“Maren’s condition is stable,” Hazel said. “She’ll hold through tomorrow.” “You’re certain,” I said. “I’ve been checking her every two hours since she arrived.” She looked at me steadily. “She’ll hold, Riven. She has been holding for twenty-three years. She can hold one more day.” I nodded. Made a note on the logistics sheet in front of me even though I didn’t need to write it down. I had memorized everything on the logistics sheet two hours ago. I was writing things down because the act of writing gave the evening somewhere to put itself. “Go to sleep,” Hazel said. “I will,” I said. She looked at me with the specific expression she reserved for statements she did not believe. Then she left. I did not sleep. I had known I wouldn’t. Some nights announced themselves that way early, carrying a particular quality that made the idea of sleep theoretical rather than practical. This was one of those nights. I worked instead. The preserve logistics first, which I had already revie

Chapter 52: The Full Moon Rises

“It’s time,” Hazel said from the doorway. I looked up from the window where I had been watching the last of the light leave the sky. The sun was gone. The forest at the preserve’s edge had gone dark in the specific way it went dark at dusk, the trees becoming shapes rather than things, the land settling into the particular quality of late evening that felt different from ordinary night. Different tonight than any evening I had stood at this window. The land was awake in a way it had been building toward for five weeks. I could feel it through the floor under my feet, through the walls of the estate, through the anchor bond and through my own awareness that had been fully open all day, not because I was working at keeping it open but because closing it required effort and I had stopped making that effort sometime around dawn. “I know,” I said. I turned from the window. We moved through the estate in the specific quiet of something that had been prepared for. Hazel first. Then

Chapter 53: The Anchor Holds

The seal broke, and I felt it everywhere at once. Not through my ears. Not through my eyes. Through the anchor bond, which went from warm and steady to something that had no adequate descriptor in any language I currently had access to. White. Hot. The specific sensation of something enormous moving through a channel that was built to hold it but had never been tested at this scale before. I did not move. I had made a decision in a garden with a fountain running between us, and I had not reconsidered it once since that moment, and I was not reconsidering it now. I planted my feet on the ground, and I breathed, and I held. The light came first. Not the gold of the sigil, which had been blazing since she stepped into the clearing. Something larger. Something that had been contained for twenty years and was now simply present, all of it, simultaneously, filling the clearing the way a held breath filled a chest when it was finally released. The trees at the clearing’s edge lit from

Chapter 54: After the Clearing

After the Clearing The ground came up to meet me. Not falling. Sitting. My legs made the decision before I did, and I went down next to the stone with my back against its warm surface and my hands in my lap and the clearing settling around me like something that had just exhaled after holding itself for a very long time. I understood the feeling completely. The power was everywhere. That was the thing I had not been prepared for, not fully, even with Hazel’s careful instruction and Maren’s mechanics and everything I had understood intellectually about what twenty years of accumulation releasing all at once would feel like. I had understood it the way you understood something you had never experienced. Which was to say I had not understood it at all. It was everywhere. Not outside me. In me. Through me. The distinction between where I ended and where the power began was gone entirely, and what was there instead was simply presence, total and unmanaged, every layer of awareness I

Chapter 55: The Council’s Scouts

“How many,” I said into the channel. “Six confirmed,” Oryn said. “Moving fast. They’ll reach the tree line in under ten minutes.” I was already on my feet. “Hazel.” She was beside me before I finished saying her name, the specific quickness of someone who had been waiting for exactly this kind of moment for forty years and had not lost a step of her readiness in all that time. “Take her through the secondary path. Now.” Sable was standing. Steady on her feet despite everything that had just moved through her, the power fully present and visible in the way she held herself, upright and oriented and entirely herself. “I’m not running,” she said. “You’re not running,” I said. “You’re getting clear of an unauthorized incursion into my territory while I handle it through the appropriate channels.” I held her gaze. “There’s a difference, and you know it.” She looked at me for one more second. Then she nodded. “Find me when it’s handled,” she said. “I will.” Hazel took her arm, a

Chapter 56: What Sable Reads

“I felt them before Oryn’s channel came through,” I said.Riven stood in the doorway of the library, still carrying the cold of the forest on him, and looked at me with the particular attention he gave to information that mattered.“Tell me,” he said.He sat down across from me. Not at his desk. In his chair, the one that had become his over the past five weeks, close enough that I didn’t need to raise my voice.I told him.I had felt them at the boundary before they crossed it.That was the thing I needed him to understand first, because it told him something significant about the shape of what we were dealing with. My awareness, fully open now in a way it had never been before tonight, extended further than I had tested in training. Further than Hazel’s sessions had prepared me to expect.I had felt six distinct signatures approaching the eastern border while I was still sitting against the stone with the power settling through my body.“I read them the way I read the rogue wolves d

Chapter 57: The Morning After the Awakening

“Everyone is here,” Oryn said, standing at my shoulder in the main hall. “Forty-three. Full pack assembly.” “Good,” I said. I looked out at them. Every single wolf in Sovereign North had assembled without being formally summoned, which told me something about what last night had felt like from the inside of the pack bond rather than from the position I’d been holding it from. They had woken at the same moment, every one of them, regardless of where they were or what they had been doing. None of them had needed to be told this morning that something significant had happened. They were standing here to find out what. “Last night,” I said, “the territory experienced a significant power event.” I kept my voice even. Steady. The specific register I used when I needed information received without an attached alarm. “You felt it through the pack bond. All of you woke at the same moment regardless of distance from the source. I’m not going to pretend that didn’t happen or that it wasn

Chaper 58: Sable’s First Full Day

“You look different,” Desi said, setting the tea down in front of me. “Good different. Like someone took the volume down on something that’s been too loud for a long time.” “That’s accurate,” I said. She looked at me for a moment longer than she usually did, her empathic reading clearly picking up something she didn’t have words for either, and then she smiled and went back to the kitchen. I sat with my tea and looked around the dining hall and understood, fully for the first time, what it meant that nothing was the same anymore. The estate was vivid in a way it had never been. Not visually. The light through the windows was the same morning light it had always been, the same stone walls, the same furniture that had been here since before I arrived. The vividness was underneath all of that, a quality of presence I had been straining to access for five weeks and now simply had, the way you simply had hearing once you stopped covering your ears. I could feel the kitchen staff’s m

Chapter 59: The Seventy-Two Hours

“Sixty hours remaining,” Oryn said, setting the updated timeline on my desk. “If we’re treating the deadline as literal.”“We are,” I said. “Not because I’m planning to comply. Because whoever sent it is operating on a schedule, and a schedule tells us something about their constraints.”I picked up the communication device.I had three calls to make before midday, and none of them were going to involve asking anyone’s permission.The first call went to the Northern Reach.Alpha Tessaly answered within two rings, which told me she had been expecting to hear from me since the energy signature from last night had registered on instruments across three territories.“Riven,” she said. “I assume this isn’t a courtesy call.”“It isn’t,” I said. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m informing you of the situation so you have it directly rather than through whatever version filters through Council channels in the next day.”I told her. Not everything; some details belonged to Sable to share or wi

Chapter 60: She Practices

“I’m going to be in the east garden,” I told Desi. “Alone. If anyone asks.”“Should I be worried?” she asked.“No,” I said. “I’m going to test some things.”She looked at me for a moment with that empathic reading of hers, decided I meant what I said, and went back to whatever she’d been doing.I went outside.The garden was quiet in the way of early afternoon, the light flat and even, the fountain dry but faintly damp at its base the way it had been since the first night it ran for me. I sat on the low stone bench near the herb beds, and I let myself settle into the specific stillness that preceded directed work.Not Hazel’s session structure. No one watching, no one guiding. Just me and the power that was fully present now and the careful, methodical curiosity that had carried me through six years of learning pack remedies from my mother’s notes and now carried me into this entirely different kind of learning.I started small.The garden first. I extended my awareness to the herb be

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