Chapter 661: Moon Bloods Manifest Gold

River was a goddamn force.

Lucian Moon had always thought she was more than what she showed. More than she realized she was. The portal was one thing. The wedding was another. But this? This was something he had never seen done. This proved it.

He finished the soldier. Moved toward her. Three more augmented warriors stood between his position and hers, and the three became zero in under eight seconds, his jaws and claws converting living obstacles into dead ones with a tempo that had stopped bothering with intervals.

Then he saw General Willow’s magic push forward.

Dark veins formed under River’s eyes, seeping through the collision point of her pink and his black. Her legs were shaking. Her arms were trembling. She was draining faster than her body could sustain, the severing’s cost still collecting interest, and the interest rate was her consciousness.

Atlas yelled over the noise. "Let go, daughter! I have this. Run to cover. Now."

She couldn’t. Through the matebond, Lucian felt why. Her body was locked in the stream, fused to the output, the magic holding her in place with the same force holding Willow. Breaking contact would release the column. Releasing the column would let the dark magic through.

Lucian’s wolf snarled. He was forty yards away. Thirty-five. Thirty. Killing his way toward her with a directness that had stopped pretending to be tactical and had become what it actually was: a wolf running to his mate.

Then her hair began to glow.

White. Luminous. The gold at the tips brightening until the white wasn’t white anymore, it was light, it was a frequency that made every wolf on the field stop and every Fae turn and every instinct in Lucian’s body recognize something older than his species and larger than his comprehension.

The glow spread from her hair to her skin, and the light that filled her was gold, ancient, borrowed, carrying a resonance that his Fae blood knew and his wolf blood feared and his matebond received at a volume that overwhelmed every other signal like a sun overwhelming candles.

"Let go, Father. I have this."

Her voice came from her mouth and was spoken by something older. The resonance of it carried across the field and silenced the combat for a fraction of a second, because every Fae present felt the frequency shift, felt the air change, and every wolf present felt their Alpha’s matebond vibrate with a power that dwarfed anything the thread had ever carried.

Lucian’s wolf went still.

Completely, absolutely still. The stillness of a predator in the presence of something that predated predators. The stillness of an animal whose instincts recognized that the hierarchy had just expanded beyond any scale his biology was built to process.

Atlas released his green magic. The recognition in the king’s face was the recognition of a man whose authority had just been outranked by something that outranked everything.

Then Lucian felt it.

Something wrenched loose inside his chest. Her pink was still surrounding him. But she was pulling something from his core that he didn’t know he had. Something that he had spent years trying to unlock at an academy. Something he had accepted a long time ago he didn’t have because he was a wolf. An energy waking up for the first time, like it had been unlocked and River was the key.

His wolf stumbled for a second.

She was channeling from him, pulling from him in wolf form.

It didn’t hurt. Just a surprise.

River rose off the grass.

Then gold started pouring from her palms with the pink. She was using his magic. His. And clearly she had no idea she was doing it.

Lucian watched from the ground.

Wolf form. Gold eyes. Blood on his muzzle and ash settling on his fur and his mate floating above a battlefield, wrapping light around armies, her white hair blazing, her body glowing gold, and every cell in his body receiving her through two channels that were both screaming the same thing at different frequencies.

She was multitasking at a scale that made his wolf feel small and his soul feel proud and his chest feel like it was going to crack open from the sheer, unbearable privilege of being bonded to this woman.

General Willow rose with her. His dark magic compressed, concentrated, aimed.

The gold and pink pushed forward until it made contact with his palms.

His body went white. Then gray. Then formless.

General Aldren Willow, Commander of the Eastern Fae Alliance, turned to ash in midair.

The wind took him.

Gold and pink surged outward from her body in a sweeping wave that crossed the field in every direction. It found every Fae wielding dark magic and turned them to ash where they stood.

Something impossible. And yet.

Then she fell, landing on her knees. The glow faded from her hair, from her skin, from her hands. Her chest was heaving. She wiped blood from the corner of her mouth.

Atlas was at her side. His hand extended. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet with the steady grip of a king who had just watched his daughter channel a goddess and turn an army to dust and was choosing to process that information later.

She stood. Unsteady. Her legs were shaking. The dark veins under her eyes were still there, faint and lingering.

Lucian shifted from wolf back to man and knelt.

All of his wolves copied immediately, followed by every Fae on that field.

River blinked at the kneeling field. Then blinked again, as if the second blink might produce a different result.

Finnick Shadowclaw, standing invisible at the edge of the clearing, let out a laugh.

The laugh was quiet. Helpless. The laugh of a man watching a woman he knew in a different body, in a different life, in a different name, do the exact thing she always did.

Serena blushed when people bowed. That was something he always found entertaining with her. Most people craved power. Serena seemed to attract it like a magnet and didn’t know what to do with it once she had it.

River had the same bewildered expression on her face. She had turned an army to ash, protected every ally on the field with her heartbeat, and the part that confused her was the kneeling.

Some things, it turned out, even rebirth couldn’t change.

Everyone started to rise. That’s when her knees buckled.

Lucian Moon was already there, catching her before she hit the ground.

Fin recognized that too. She had overextended herself. That’s exactly what happened with Serena when she used too much of her power.

Except Lucian Moon was glowing gold when he caught her. His magic encased her body, like it was trying to refill her.

Fin could feel Lucian’s surprise.

Atlas’s head turned towards Lucian. He did not comment on the gold or the fact that Lucian Moon was holding his daughter who had fainted.

Instead, he gave Lucian a nod worth a thousand words. A nod that meant well done, thank you, and I’m proud of you in the same breath.

The nod hit Lucian harder than any battle. His throat bobbed once.

His chest was full of something that was threatening to become tears if he didn’t strangle it immediately. He returned the nod. Held Atlas’s eyes for exactly one second longer than protocol required. And the extra second said everything the nod couldn’t.