Bound by the Moon

Chapter 49

The night clung to them, thick and oppressive. The forest was eerily quiet now, but it was a silence that weighed heavily, laden with the aftermath of the chaos that had unfolded. The ground was still scarred from the cracks that had opened beneath Astrid's feet, jagged fissures that bore witness to the raw power she had unleashed. Above, the moon was a thin, pale crescent, casting long shadows that stretched across the trees, but it was the shadows within her that lingered the longest.

Lucien stood a few feet away from her now, his back to the carnage of the fallen rogues, his eyes locked on Astrid. There was something different in his gaze—no longer just the cool, calculating look of an Alpha surveying a battlefield. This was something deeper, sharper. His eyes were narrowed, but it wasn't in anger. It was confusion. Curiosity. And... something like fear, though he would never admit it.

He had seen power before. He had wielded it himself, time and time again. But this—whatever it was that had surged out of Astrid—this was something else entirely. It was a force he had never felt, never even imagined. It was as if the very fabric of the world had bent around her, as though reality itself had trembled in her presence.

Lucien's chest was still heaving, though the battle had ended minutes ago. His heart raced not from the fight, but from what he had witnessed. His gaze drifted from Astrid to the deep fissures that snaked across the earth like veins, and his mind raced to piece together what he had just seen. The rogues were powerful, but they had been insignificant compared to this. What he had felt in that moment, when Astrid's power had surged, was something primal. Ancient.

"That power..." Lucien's voice finally cut through the suffocating silence, low and rough. There was a tremor in it, barely noticeable, but Astrid heard it. He took a step toward her, his brow furrowed, confusion and wariness mingling in his expression. "Astrid, what was that?"

She looked at him, her breath still coming in short gasps, her heart pounding from the aftermath of the storm that had ripped through her. Her skin tingled, every nerve still alive with the remnants of the energy she had unleashed, but now it had settled, like a beast that had finally found its rest.

"I don't know," she whispered, her voice hoarse, barely audible in the heavy air. "I... I didn't mean for that to happen."

Lucien's gaze flicked back to the earth beneath her feet, where the cracks were slowly closing, the forest attempting to right itself after being torn asunder. "I've felt power before, Astrid," he said, his voice hardening, his tone one of disbelief. "But that... that was something else. Something I've never felt before. It was raw. Unbound. It wasn't just your wolf—it was something darker, something deeper."

His words mirrored the confusion she felt deep inside, and her thoughts were still too tangled to make sense of any of it. She had been teetering on the edge of oblivion, barely able to hold on to the threads of herself as her wolf and shadow had torn at her from within. But then, something had shifted, snapped into place, and everything had changed. The power that had once been in conflict inside her was now one. But it was more than that—it was as if she had become something new, something different.

Her eyes met Lucien's, and for a moment, she couldn't speak. She didn't know how to explain what had happened because she didn't fully understand it herself. All she knew was that she had felt the world bend to her will, and in that moment, she had been terrifyingly close to losing control.

"It wasn't just me," she said finally, her voice trembling with the weight of the truth. "I felt something else inside me, like my wolf and the shadow, they... they became one. I don't know how to describe it, but it felt like something snapped, something that had been holding me back was... gone."