Chapter 56. Thorne’s End

The smoke still clung to her shoulders, thin filaments coiling like pale ghosts against her skin. It wasn’t the searing, acrid blast of a firestorm, nor the dense, choking ash that drifts from a conflagration still raging—it was older, more intimate: the hush of secrets finally exhaled, weightless yet insistent. Aeryn felt it settle in every pore—no scent, no grit, only the burden of history. She stepped into the clearing that had once peered out from ramparts, echoed with council debate, and swallowed those who died within its walls. Now the forest pressed close on all sides, its trunks gnarled into watchful sentinels, not as subjects to a queen or devotees to a goddess but as keepers of a reckoning—the judgment of a girl who would not kneel.

Around her, the Pact gathered in ragged clusters of breath, blood, and awe. Faces lifted toward the sky, where the last sliver of moon hung pale and thinned, drained of its crimson rebuke but still bright with accusation. The citadel had