🌕 Moonblood: The Curse of Arodan
Chapter Twenty-Three: 23
The Veil collapsed like a mirror dropped from the heavens.
Cracks of silver lightning spread across the sky of memory. Every whisper turned into a scream. The names—Arilyn, Kaelen, Syrien—no longer whispered from the locket, they roared, as if fighting to stay alive.
Draven and Callen reached for each other.
Their hands almost touched.
Then—
The world split.
✧ Draven
He landed hard.
Not in the city. Not in the mountains.
But in a forest, thick with silver-leaved trees that shivered without wind. The sky above was a swirl of red moonlight and dusk shadows. Everything here felt ancient—older than Arodan, older than the bloodlines.
Draven gasped, trying to rise. The locket still burned on his chest. But the blade was gone.
"No," he whispered, searching the moss and roots.
A shadow shifted behind a tree.
Draven turned quickly—but it wasn't the Monster.
It was a child.
Pale. Watching him. Her eyes silver, just like his.
"You brought the crack with you," she said quietly.
"What?"
"You broke the Veil. Now the Ancients will wake."
Then she vanished into the trees.
✧ Callen
He woke in fire.
Not flame—but pain. The kind that burns in your bones.
He was surrounded by black stone walls and faint, red torchlight. Above him, a sky of molten clouds boiled. He knew this place by name, even if he had never seen it:
The Hollow Depths.
A prison beneath Arodan. Sealed for centuries.
Callen tried to stand, but his legs failed.
From the shadows, a voice spoke.
"You carry his blood."
A woman stepped forward.
Cloaked in deep blue, her eyes hidden by a veil. A crescent tattoo burned on her throat.
One of the Moonblood Sisters.
"They sent me here to find you," she said. "Now you must decide—will you carry the crown of Kaelen, or will you leave it to burn?"
Callen's heart pounded.
He didn't know where Draven was.
But he did know that the kingdom was breaking.
And only one of them would return with the blade.
✧ Elira
Elira ran through the ruins of Skarvale.
Soldiers chased her through smoke and broken stone. The Queen had begun her ritual, and blood magic cracked the sky above like lightning made of screams.
Elira clutched a page torn from the Book of Moons. It showed the next step in the prophecy—the one even the Sisterhood had tried to erase:
When the Veil breaks, the names shall scatter.
One shall fall to shadow.
One shall rise by flame.
But the third… the third shall return the fire to the moon.
She didn't know what it meant.
But she knew one thing:
She had to find Draven before the Queen did.
✧ The Queen
In the high tower of Arodan, the Queen stood before a pool of black glass.
The sacrifice was complete.
The Monster no longer hunted.
It waited.
And from the shadows, something older stirred—a being even the Queen feared.
She touched the broken locket fragment in her palm and smiled.
"They thought there were only three names," she whispered.
Then, she spoke a fourth.
"Mireya."
The pool boiled.
And something woke in the dark.