Page 17 of A Sunwoven Ascent

Kaldrek frowned, the whispers still needling at the edges of his mind. He shoved them aside and focused on getting Alaric back under shelter. The man could not be left out here with darkness prowling all around them.

“Get back inside,” he ordered. “This storm is cruel enough, and you took a hard blow today.” Kaldrek had seen the way Thorne brought Alaric down during training that morning, and it was likely the reason he now stood here wandering like a sleepwalker.

“Storm?” Alaric whispered. “A storm,” he repeated, quieter now, as though testing the words against some thought only he could hear. Kaldrek watched as he slowly tipped his head back toward the sky, then lowered his gaze to his own fingers, studying them. “It’s me. Kaldrek, can you hear—?”

Alaric jolted, his body locking stiff. He cleared his throat, blinked hard, then turned and walked back toward the cottages with an odd, unnatural steadiness, as though his body had decided on its own to return to bed and left him no choice but to follow.

Kaldrek watched him go, one brow lifting. The man needed rest, that much was plain. Yet something about the interaction felt off.

After a moment, Kaldrek forced his attention back to the night. The darkness had retreated, thinned now to little more than a whisper, but he meant to track it all the same. He would not allow shadows to take root in their lives. Stripping off his clothes, he shifted and resumed circling the perimeter on four paws.

***

Cillian had barely slept for weeks, and last night had been no exception. The wind and hail hammering the rickety windows wasn’t the kind of symphony that lulled anyone to sleep—least of all someone who’d been recently kidnapped and dragged through blood-soaked nightmares.

The exhaustion had settled deep into his bones today. He had skipped training once more, despite Evelyne’s soft attempts to coax him outside. It was not that he lacked the strength to fight. He simply could not bear the thought of becoming a weapon again. For now, the cottage and its quiet felt like the safest place he could be. Evelyne had brought him breakfast herself, pausing in the doorway with worry plain in her eyes. He had given her the truth of it: a roof above him and a bed beneath him felt more like home than anything he had known in a very long time, and he wanted to hold on to that a little longer. She had answered with a small, understanding smile before padding back outside to join the others.

But exhaustion was not the only thing wearing on him. He could not shake the memory of Alaric’s face from that morning, nor the meager few words they had shared before dawn. Alaric had barely spoken at all. In all their weeks of travel, Cillian had never seen him so vacant, so painfully absent from himself. Whatever had been preying on the man’s soul had finally taken hold.

Cillian had not endured Vaelora’s horrors in the same way Alaric had, yet he knew all too well what it meant to be split open by something monstrous. In some ways, his own ordeal may have been worse, though the thought left a bitter taste in his mouth. Pain was not meant to be measured against another’s. Trauma was no contest.

Still, something in Alaric’s stare had stayed with him. The emptiness of it. The slow, dull weight in his voice. He had seen that look on Alaric more than once now, that numb, distant vacancy. Cillian knew it because he had worn it himself.

His stomach twisted.

He lurched up from the narrow bed, heart pounding, his eyes flying to the setting sun beyond the window. He had sat with these thoughts all damn day. How had he not seen it sooner? He should have known. He should have known.

There was no room left for guilt now. He needed to find Evelyne.

Chapter 10

The full moon had already risen, pale and ghostlike against a sky washed in rose and gold. Evelyne tipped her head back to take it in, a quiet thrill passing through her. For once, she was not the girl left standing at the edge of the clearing, watching the wolves disappear into the dark. Today, she had shifted with them. Truly shifted. And if her efforts had been marked more by enthusiasm than grace, at least she had managed not to trip over her own paws.

She had not hunted, not properly. That required skill and instinct she had not yet claimed as her own. Instead, she ran at Kaldrek’s flank beneath the late-afternoon light, letting her newly sharpened sight follow the shapes weaving through the trees, her keen ears catching every rustle and crack of the forest. When the pack split off to bring down the stag, she stayed back and watched the way they moved: silent, certain, lethal. She had a strong suspicion that charging in with all the elegance of a drunken goose would not have been well received.

Unsurprisingly, what Evelyne loved most was the running. The ground striking beneath her paws, the cool air burning through her lungs, the forest rushing past in a blur of shadow and light all made her feel, if not entirely natural, then closer to it than ever before. In that form, Kaldrek’s approval reached her more clearly too, his steadiness sinking deep beneath her skin until it anchored her. She could sense faint currents of his mind reaching toward the rest of the pack, though whatever passed between them remained beyond her grasp, no more than the murmur of distant voices.

She had watched him and Holden track their prey with effortless focus, muscles shifting beneath fur and later beneath inked skin when they changed back. Power clung to Kaldrek even in stillness; in motion, it was nearly blinding. Day by day, she was learning what it meant to feel at home in her own skin, or fur, as the case might be, though she had not yet found the quiet confidence the others wore so easily. Still, compared to the young lady who once fainted at the sight of blood, this version of Evelyne, racing through the woods with a wolf pack, felt like a rather extraordinary improvement.

They had been out most of the day, ever since she’d dropped breakfast at Cillian’s door. He’d declined training as he always did, politely refusing any activity that hinted at claws, fangs, or general wolfishness. But he had looked… settled. The cottage roof over his head, the proper bed, the four walls between him and the wild: these things had softened the tightness around his eyes. If he preferred solitude, she would not drag him from it. Cillian had always been that way—more likely to make friends with his own thoughts than with other people.

Now the sun was setting, sliding in ribbons of gold and amber behind the pines as shadows stretched long over the clearing. Packs from each of the cottages and surrounding camps began to drift toward the central space, laughter and voices rolling through the air as preparations for the moon ritual began. Someone already had a cask of ale open; the smell of roasted meat drifted on the breeze.

“The males are positively glowing,” Evelyne murmured, watching a group of young wolves jostle each other near the fire. “One might think the moon hangs in the sky solely to sanction their drinking.”

She linked arms with Heidara as they turned back toward the cottages to ready themselves. The warmth of Heidara’s hand through her sleeve was comforting amid the vast, strange world she’d stepped into.

“I pray Beau keeps his distance tonight,” Heidara said, voice dry as old parchment. “The last thing I need is a drunk wolf chasing my tail. No pun intended.” She cast Evelyne a sidelong glance.

Evelyne huffed a soft laugh. “Yes, well, beauty does tend to invite a certain… cacophony of attention. You cannot blame a moth for flinging itself at the nearest flame.” She arched a brow. “Even if the flame, in this case, would very much like to douse him with cold water.”

Heidara’s lips twitched. “If only I could catch the eye of the one I truly wanted,” she said, so soft the wind nearly stole the words.

That caught Evelyne’s full attention. She turned and truly looked at her friend then, taking in the tightness at the corners of Heidara’s mouth and the way she kept her gaze fixed firmly ahead, as though looking anywhere else might betray too much.

“He will come back to himself,” Evelyne said gently, with just enough certainty to make it sound like truth rather than comfort. “This is not who he truly is. Men in pain are notoriously poor at being themselves. It is one of their more exhausting flaws.”

“Patience has never been my strength,” Heidara sighed.