Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Fracture of the Houses
While Roric ascended into the belly of the stars, the world he left behind began to unravel in a spectacular display of biological and metaphysical defiance. The sky over the Iron Peaks was no longer a natural canopy of atmosphere and light; it was a bruised, swirling vortex of violet and sickly emerald, crackling with the residual static of the Harvesters' departure and the Grave-Queen's sacrifice. But the real chaos wasn't in the heavens it was in the blood.
The Seed that Ember had scattered by shattering her obsidian form had not simply settled into the earth. It had sown itself into the very marrow of every living Shifter, every blade of teal grass, and every stone of the ancient mountains. It was blooming now, not with the gentle arrival of spring, but with a violent, unpredictable intensity that threatened to tear the social fabric of the Shifter world into unrecognizable shreds.
