Chapter 10. The Blood and the Shrine

Selene didn’t stop walking.

Behind her, the trees whispered, their voices still carrying the echo of the violence she had left behind. Her cloak clung to her shoulders, damp with mist and blood, heavy with the aftermath of the clearing. The enforcer’s cries had long since faded into the dark. He would not follow her—not tonight, not after what she had become beneath the ancient boughs.

She had spilled blood on sacred ground.

And yet the forest had not turned against her.

If anything, the air felt different now—opened, receptive, as though the land itself had been waiting for her to cross a line she had never been meant to obey. The rules that bound others had loosened around her steps. Somewhere ahead, beyond the veils of mist and memory, lay the path her mother had once wal