Night in the borderlands kept its breath shallow and cautious. The group learned to hold their own — half asleep, half alert — so that each little sound felt amplified: a twig snapping too close, the sigh of wind along the roots, a distant cry that might be nothing or might be the first note of the next battle.
Owain did not sleep. He sat with Kanah propped against his chest, watching her breathe. He'd trained himself to read breaths; he tracked the tiny changes in her lungs, the way her fingers relaxed and then tightened, the rhythm that meant she'd slipped into a light, exhausted half-sleep. He counted them like a prayer.
When the first flare came, it arrived like a bell tolling in the dark.
It started small — a sensation loose at the edge of his skin, like heat rising off a road. Then it hit, behind his sternum and up into his jaw: a surge of something ancient and territorial, older than language. It was not merely protecting. It was proclamation: this is mine, back away.
Owain's muscles coiled around her. The world shrank to the hardness at the base of his throat and the soft curve of her neck. He felt the land lean toward him; the trees shifted as if expecting his command. It was intoxicating and terrifying in equal measures.
He stood up without meaning to, lifting Kanah with the easy strength of a man born to bear weight. The sigil on his forearm pulsed hot as if it was alive and responding to him, answering the primal rhythm taking hold.
"Owain?" Kanah's voice floated, dreamy with sleep. "What—?"
"I—" He swallowed. The sound in his chest was a raw animal thing. "Stay here. Don't move."
She blinked, confused but obedient. The Queen listened.
Helion, who had been pretending to sleep and failing magnificently, sat forward on one elbow. "You're definitely a glow-stick now, by the way."
Yllas had already moved without noise, blade loose in his hand, silhouette smeared against the cool trees. Gerrin called low, "Bonds react to threat. He's sensing something."
Owain ignored the banter. He felt the flare push at the edges of his mind — images like snapshots: a rival's scent, a plain in which pack-lines were carved, the memory of a night when he drove an intruder out with nothing but a scream. He felt its pull to mark territory, to answer any claim on Kanah with violence. It wanted a simple law: hers, mine, forever.
He didn't want it to answer. He wanted it to be still.
He had promised her; that promise was a hot anchor in the tide of instinct. He closed his teeth hard enough to hurt his jaw and reached for that anchor like a drowning man reaching for land. He breathed her name as if it would steady him. Kana. Kana. Kana.
The flare pushed harder. The ground at his boots trembled minutely, and the hairs along his arms rose. The trees bent away as if to clear him a space. The instinct wanted to roar and claim and make every shadow know its place. It wanted blood for boundary.
Owain fought it with everything he had.
Not with steel. Not with force. Not with pride. He fought with the slow, unglamorous weapon he had practiced since the throne: repetition.
He spoke to it — a steady, ridiculous list of things that belonged to him that did not mean violence. "She is mine. I cook. She hates mushrooms. We prefer the left side of the bed. She never lets me touch her coffee. We say please. We laugh badly at the wrong times. She cries at sunsets sometimes. She hums when she thinks no one hears. She is mine."
The first time he did this there had been a laughable relief and then the memory of claws. Tonight, the list lengthened and his voice took on a cadence that pulled the instincts away from their teeth. The primal need softened into a patient, stubborn protectiveness — the kind that carried wood, that sat up through fevers, that refused to leave in the rain. He chose to be the latter.
Kanah felt the change like a tide turning beneath her ribs. She blinked harder awake; the sleep-fuzz cleared. Her fingers tightened on his shirt like a vow. "Owain?"
"I'm here." He kissed her hair. "I'm not going anywhere."
His words were small and human. They did what the crown could not: they gave the beast a detail it could hold without devouring him. The flare simmered down until it was only a hum — a steady awareness he carried comfortably like a cloak, not shrapnel.
They breathed out together.
By dawn, the group had a plan: move toward a small fortified village two days south, somewhere beyond the Beast King's immediate reach but close enough that the throne's politics still mattered. Travel was slow. Kanah insisted on walking. Owain insisted on carrying the pack. It was a polite war of wills that had nothing to do with crowns.
Around midday, Yllas paused and put a hand to his throat.
"They watched us last night," he said, low and careful. "Not just beasts. Eyes in the dark, small signals passed between branches. They organized."
"We knew they would," Gerrin said. He squinted at the horizon where the land fell away. "After the throne awoke, echoes of its power ripple outward. Creatures formed from the spill. The Throne Wraiths. They'll be the least of our problems."
Helion yawned theatrically. "Which of course means something bigger is preparing, and we get to be the appetizer."
It was during that afternoon's slow march that Yllas finally said what no one wanted: "That man the other night — the one who claimed to have brought Kanah here. He wasn't merely a Lost Architect. He is an Architect in exile — unsworn, unbound. Those who remember him whisper he never took sides. They called him a bridge-walker; he could make doors that led to other worlds and close them, rewrite where a soul belonged."
Owain's fingers tightened on the pack strap until the leather creaked. "So he had the right and the arrogance to move her home and back again."
"He did something like that," Gerrin admitted. "But the why and the how remain a puzzle. The throne chose her — the Beast King designed a test — now you, Wolf King, are marked. That man… watches the seams. He can stitch them."
Kanah's steps slowed. She felt hollow in a new place — not empty, but sensitive, like a scab. "He said I wasn't human — that I was born here. That he stole me back then and put me in another life."
The group fell silent. Even the trees listened.
"You were stolen how long ago?" Yllas asked gently.
Kanah thought of a memory the Architect had described: a small, warm house that never really fit the shape of her. A man's voice she had thought was fatherly, a face that smelled of whiskey and old coins, the hush of bargaining words. "I… I don't know. I remember a childhood, but there are holes. I remember being small, crying at night but feeling watched. It was like… I had the feeling I didn't fit."
Gerrin folded his hands. "Birthlines can be covered and remade. There are histories the Beastworld keeps about humans who disappeared. If you were born here and taken, you might carry a resonance — something that draws attention. The throne noticed that pattern and reacted."
Owain's voice, when he answered, was rough with protective edge. "Then we find him. We find whoever took you, and we make them answer. No one steals a life and walks away."
Helion laughed, a thin, humorless sound. "We are small, personal gods in a messy world, aren't we? Find the thief. Fix the seam. Save the girl."
They kept walking.
That night, the instincts flared again — sharper, not from Owain first this time, but in the air. Kanah, who had been reading a frayed map by firelight, went still as a deer. The hair on the back of her neck rose. She could feel a presence — not the same as the Architect's — something like someone tightening a noose around a territory and watching for the right moment to drop it.
Owain rose like a blade. He moved with the lethal silence of someone born to move fast, set, and strike; his hands reached for the two short knives at his belt without sound.
A sound like silk tearing came from the treeline, and out of it stepped not one enemy, but three.
They were bigger than Throne Wraiths and more organized. Their armor was gathered darkness stitched with thin threads of stolen throne-gold. Their helmets were smooth and animal-shaped, one crowned like a stag, one like a hound, one like a hawk. They moved in formation; the lead figure lifted a gloved hand and spoke in a voice that sounded like wind through bone.
"You who wear the newly crowned marks — step away from the Queen."
Owain had his knives out. He stepped forward on reflex.
Kanah did not move.
She felt the world tilt like a clock. The instinct in Owain answered the hound-shaped figure's command with pure, white hot fury. He wanted to rip the leader limb from limb — not because the man threatened him but because the man dared to speak to her.
He lunged.
Before he closed half the distance, Kanah was another kind of force.
She stood. The sigil on her chest warmed, and something inside her — not anger exactly, more an absolute refusal — rose up like a sun. It answered the leader's demand with a different word entirely.
"No."
It was not rude, not petty. It was a law of her own making. The air answered. The threads of throne-gold in the warriors' armor flickered, then hummed and dimmed. The blades they pointed at her refused to steady, as if the world itself could not find purchase for their intent.
The leader's face was hidden behind the stag-helmet, but his shoulders tightened. "You will kneel," he said.
Kanah lifted her chin. "I will not."
Owain, recovering from his lunge, sank to a crouch near her. The flare that had roared through him hours earlier sat now like a disciplined guard — closer to steady heat than wildfire. He did not touch the invaders. He spread himself between them and Kanah, stance wide and ready, but his hands were not on his knives. He met the leader's eyes through the helm and said, steady and low, "Leave her. You aren't asking for war. Walk away."
The leader's hand twitched. Behind the stag-helmet, gold glittered like frost. "You alone decide the Queen's fate? How quaint. The Throne has creditors."
At the word "creditors" the sound of a hundred small things moving in the woods rose like rain. The three warriors backed away as dozens of smaller figures, pale and blade-tipped, slipped from the trees and flanked them. The situation tightened — a net closing.
Owain's body hummed. He could feel the push on his mind: if he struck, it might set off the net. If he held, they might encircle them and take Kanah by force.
Kanah's voice cut through everything, small and clear. "No one takes me."
It was not a plea. It was a declaration. The golden pulse at her chest answered like a bell. The smaller figures faltered as if their will had to reassert itself against something heavier.
The leader took a step forward, blade whispering out of a scabbard. "Then fight."
Owain's eyes were the color of two suns. He moved like a predator but smaller, more precise. He struck not for slaughter but to disable — two quick cuts, a sweep of his arm to topple a charging flank. His motions were heartbreakingly efficient, beautiful in the way someone fights to preserve rather than to destroy. Kanah moved with him, not because she had to but because she chose to. She called a small flare of her own — a glow at her fingertips that blinded one of their attackers long enough for Helion to take him down.
The battle was brief and messy. Blood stained the moss and the edges of the invaders' armor became dull with the strange light seeping from the Queen. When the last of the blades fell to the earth, the leader remained standing, though he was breathing hard.
He spat onto the ground. "You will pay for this."
Kanah stepped up, her chest heaving, eyes harder than bone. "We'll see who pays."
The leader's form shimmered. For a second the stag-helmet blurred like a face behind glass, and Kanah thought she glimpsed someone familiar — the curve of jaw she'd seen in a picture in a childhood book that had meant nothing then and everything now. She shook her head and the image went.
They retreated, wounded but not dead, disappearing into the night.
When the adrenaline dropped, Owain sagged into the moss and let Kanah climb into his lap. She curled against his chest like a child and let the world fold around them. He traced patterns into her hair absently.
Gerrin whispered into the dark to the rest of the camp, "They were organized. That was no random hunt. Someone is coordinating. The Throne's collapse like a beacon draws opportunists and old debts alike."
Yllas's voice, a rumble in the canopy, came: "And the Architect watches."
Kanah's fingers tightened around Owain's collar. "He knows where I am."
"He did more than know," Gerrin said. "He placed you into the human world once. He might be the only one who can move you again."
Owain's jaw clicked. "Then we find him before he makes the choice for us."
Kanah lifted her head. Her voice was steady though small. "We find him. And when we do—no more running."
Owain's hands found her face and held it as if it were fragile glass. "No more running."
Beyond the trees, something shifted like a curtain, and for the briefest second Kanah thought she saw the Architect — an angled silhouette, hands folded, watching the group move away like a parent watching a child walk across a street. The figure did not move; only the eyes gleamed, patient and unreadable.
And the chapter ends with the world tightening around them — a coil waiting to spring. The Architect's posture said he had choices to make, and this time, neither of them would be taken without asking.