Chapter 10. The Blood and the Shrine

Selene didn’t stop walking.

The trees whispered behind her, still echoing with the fight she left behind. Her cloak clung to her shoulders, damp with blood and mist. The enforcer’s cries had faded. He wouldn’t follow. Not tonight. Not after what she’d become in that clearing.

She had broken blood in sacred ground.

And yet the forest had not rejected her.

If anything, the air had changed—opened. As if it, too, was waiting for her to finally step beyond the rules.

Her mother’s path was somewhere ahead.

Alaric had spoken of an ancestral shrine, hidden in the heart of spirit-ground. A place her mother had once guarded. A place of visions. A place the Council feared.

She didn’t know what she’d find.

But her blood was already pulling her forward.