Moonlit Vows Of Vengeance-Chapter 55: Realm Of Immortals

Athena pov

I walked in silence beside the green-robed man, my feet sore, my breath visible in the odd, shimmering air. Around us, the terrain shifted—crystalline plains giving way to fields of obsidian grass and trees that whispered to each other in tones only the wind understood.

I didn’t speak. Not yet. But I listened.

They talked among themselves, these recruiters—about ley lines, ascension orders, the shifting borders of the realms. I caught phrases like "threads of spirit broken" and "veil-thin crossings." Words that only half made sense. But I was good at putting pieces together.

This world wasn’t like mine. No moons here. No sun, not really. Just a sky that breathed with pale color, brighter in some places, darker in others, like the pulse of something alive.

Eventually, I asked. "What is this place?"

The green-robed man—whose name, I’d learned, was Thalen—glanced sideways at me. freeweɓnovel.cѳm

"You are in the realm of Syvera," he said. "One of the Nine Cradles of Power. A realm suspended between death and divinity. Here, mortals climb toward the divine not through prayer, but through cultivation—mastery of spirit, body, and soul. Each realm serves as a crucible. Syvera is... the harshest."

I chewed on that. "Cultivation," I echoed. "Like planting seeds?"

He almost smiled. "Something like that. But here, the seeds are your soul. And the harvest is power."

"And the others?" I asked. "The other realms?"

"The Cradles are aligned in tiers," Thalen said. "Some are more physical—realms of stone and steel. Others exist almost entirely in thought or memory. No one passes through them all in one lifetime. Only immortals do."

Immortals. My stomach turned.

"Then that means the king probably came from one of the realms," I muttered. "Yes definitely, he must be of one of the realms."

Thalen didn’t answer. Which told me plenty.

Behind us, the molten-gold-eyed woman—Aeryn—spoke softly. "You’re not from here. Your magic is... off-rhythm. Like it echoes from somewhere else. What realm do you come from, Athena?"

I hesitated. It still felt strange, hearing my name spoken in this place.

"I don’t know what my world is called," I said finally. "We just called it the Kingdom. My people...my kind, we are werewolves. Moon-tied magic. I was a guard. A protector. Until... I was lied to. Used."

"Moon-tied," murmured the man with the shifting shadow—his name was Vael. "No wonder your scent is wild."

"Scent?" I frowned.

"You carry divine essence," Thalen said. "Not the kind born here. Something more primal. Something i can’t quite understand."

I wanted to scream. What on earth are you both even talking about?!

Instead, I dug my nails into my palm and kept walking.

They had all these words for things—essence, cultivation, divine blood—but none of it changed what I knew. I wasn’t here by choice. And I wasn’t anyone’s experiment.

"So what now?" I asked. "You’re taking me to some school? Some training ground?"

"No," Thalen said. "We’re taking you to the Grove of Unveiling. A place where all pretenses fall away. You’ll be tested—not for loyalty, but for truth. What you are. What you could be."

"And if I don’t want that?"

He looked at me, serious now.

"You’ve already been seen," he said. "The queen won’t forget you. She’ll come again, in time. And there are worse things than judgment, Athena. There are things in this realm that devour those who don’t choose a path."

I stared out at the forest, its silver bark glowing faintly with inner light.

"This place," I muttered, "feels like it’s alive."

"It is," Aeryn said. "The land remembers everything. And it listens."

A silence fell between us.

Syvera. A realm of cultivation. Nine realms in total. A queen who wielded judgment like a blade. And somewhere beyond that... truths about me I didn’t ask for.

I still didn’t trust them. But I was listening now.

And every piece I learned?

Would be one more blade in my hand.

We continued deeper into the wilds of Syvera.

The trees changed again... less silver now, more black-barked and thorned, rising like skeletal fingers from the soil. Their leaves shimmered like glass in the pale light overhead. The air had gone quiet. Too quiet.

No birds. No insects. Not even the wind.

Thalen slowed.

Aeryn tensed. "Something’s wrong."

I felt it too—like a low, grinding hum in the marrow of my bones. It wasn’t sound. It was pressure. A weight. My breath caught in my throat, and my fingers curled into fists instinctively.

Vael was already drawing sigils in the air with smoke-dark fingers, his voice a murmur beneath the quiet.

"I smell shadow," he said. "Rot-born."

"What are shadow-born?" I asked, heart pounding.

"Not born," Thalen corrected, voice low. "Forged. Cast-off essence from failed immortals. Twisted. Hungry. They’re drawn to power."

He didn’t need to explain the last part.

They were drawn to us.

The orb hit before I could blink.

A shrieking sphere of condensed shadow burst from the canopy howling as it tore through the air like a cannonball of black fire. It hit the ground inches from us, cracking the earth and vomiting a cloud of oily mist.

Then more came.

Ten. Twenty. Maybe more. They fell like hail from the treetops, each one humming with raw hunger, pulsing with malice. They had no eyes, no mouths, but they screamed.

The recruiters didn’t hesitate.

Aeryn raised her hands, and twin arcs of molten gold lanced outward, cutting two orbs from the sky in a flash. They exploded on contact—splashing dark essence that hissed as it touched the trees.

Vael’s shadow left his body—grew into something monstrous behind him, long-limbed and snarling, ripping through a cluster of orbs in a whirling storm of claws.

Thalen simply extended a hand.

A vine of glowing emerald erupted from the ground and impaled three orbs at once—then bloomed into sharp blossoms that drank the spilled corruption like it was dew.

My breath caught.

I had seen powerful people. I had been around power.

But this—this was different.

This was something else. It seemed much more powerful than the king’s.