Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 106: Spiritual Archive

~LYRA’S POV~

"Selara is not a witch," Eren said.

He said it the way he said things that required the listener to stop and recalibrate before he continued, directly, without preamble, giving the information the space it needed to land before he built on it.

I looked at him across the archive table.

"She was never a witch," he said. "The historical classification, the way the records describe her, the way everyone has been treating her for the duration of this, it’s wrong. Or rather, it’s a surface description of something much more specific."

He opened the journal to the section he’d been marking for two weeks. "Three centuries ago, there was a Moonborn. The last Moonborn before you. Her existence is what caused the Silverhand to be created, the pack raid, the destroyed town, the twin sisters and their gift to their brothers. All of it."

"I know that," I said. "Eren told me, you told me." I paused. "That was Selara."

"That was Selara," he confirmed. "But here’s what the founding records didn’t tell me, because they were written by people who didn’t have access to the Moonveil spiritual archive. The archive has a restricted section, three indexes deep, under access controls that haven’t been opened in sixty years." He looked at me. "When Selara was exiled and stripped of the Goddess’s blessing, the Moonborn essence didn’t simply disappear from her. Divine nature doesn’t dissolve when it’s stripped. It fractures."

The archive was very quiet.

"Part of the Moonborn essence was absorbed back into the divine lineage," he said. "The part that the Goddess had given and could reclaim. It was carried forward, generation to generation, through the bloodline, dormant for centuries, waiting for the conditions that would allow it to fully express again." He held my gaze. "That part was reborn in you."

I sat with that for a moment.

"The other part," I said.

"The other part stayed with Selara," he said. "The part of the Moonborn essence that was already hers, that was too integrated with her specific person to be recalled. It couldn’t be retrieved by the Goddess. It couldn’t be simply dissolved or neutralised."

He paused. "It stayed. And over three centuries it aged with her. Changed with her. Took on everything she became after the exile."

"Twisted," I said.

"Yes," he said.

I looked at the table. At the documentation spread across it. At the specific shape of what he’d just told me and what it meant when you followed it from the beginning to the end.

"We’re the same lineage," I said.

"The same original soul, essentially," he said. "Split across three centuries. The Moonborn divine imprint, the specific supernatural signature that is unique to the Moonborn and that manifests differently in each person who carries it, yours and hers are the same. Not similar. The same. Because you are, in the deepest possible sense, the same origin point."

I was silent for a very long time.

The same origin. The same divine imprint. I thought about the vision Eren had described weeks ago, the face looking down at Lyra on her knees, identical to mine, something at the periphery he couldn’t name. I thought about what Kael had said in the clearing. She came to me in your form.

Not a trick. Not an illusion she’d constructed for persuasion purposes.

Her own face.

"She wants to take my power," I said. "To complete herself."

"Yes," Eren said. "The part of the Moonborn essence that was recalled and reborn in you, that’s what she doesn’t have. What she lost when the Goddess stripped her three centuries ago. She’s been surviving on the fractured portion this whole time. Growing it, shaping it, learning to use it. But she’s not complete. She can’t be complete until she has what’s currently living in you."

"And if she succeeds."

"She becomes a complete Moonborn again," he said. "With the full divine imprint restored, and three centuries of darkness layered over the divine light. Everything she’s accumulated across three hundred years of being what she became, all of that, in a body with the full Moonborn power behind it." He closed the journal carefully. "It would be catastrophic. Not just for the packs. For everything."

I stared at the table.

At the specific weight of what I was holding.

"She was in the battle," I said. "She wasn’t physically present, projection, but she threw a dark spear that killed Kael. She’s already more powerful than anything we’ve faced." I looked at Eren. "And you’re telling me she’s incomplete."

"Yes," he said. "That’s our window."

"Our window."

"She can’t take the Moonborn essence from you through the in-between directly," he said. "The physical dimension is still a barrier, she can project, she can communicate, she can try to manipulate what passes through the boundary, but she can’t reach through and take something from a living Moonborn who hasn’t given consent. She needs to either get you into the in-between, or get out of it." He looked at me. "Which is why Kael matters to her. He’s her most direct access to a channel that goes both ways."

"She’s trying to use him to pull herself through."

"Or to pull you in," he said. "Or to contaminate what comes back through Tyran’s exchange with enough of her influence to give her a foothold."

I sat with the full picture.

The Huntsmen outside the walls, running on three-day military cycles. Kael suspended in the in-between with a six-week window. Tyran in a bed somewhere with days left in his natural timeline. The Dark Alpha contained but present. The Shadowfang council that had voted against us. The packs unified but fragile. The Silverhand twins still at large.

And Selara, incomplete, three centuries old, patient, waiting in the space between worlds with my face and my missing half and a plan that had been developing for months.

"How do we use the window?" I asked.

He was quiet for a moment. The honest pause.

"I don’t know yet," he said.

I stood up. Walked to the window of the archive. The moon was visible through the glass, the same moon I’d been standing under in the Silver Forest clearing a few hours ago, the same moon that was overhead in the in-between whenever the in-between had something like a moon.

"Then we figure it out," I said. "While we bring Kael back through the exchange. While we hold off the Huntsmen. While we manage whatever the Dark Alpha is currently doing in the basement." I turned around. "Is there anything else I should know?"

He hesitated.

I noticed it immediately. In eight months of knowing Eren, I had never seen him hesitate before an answer when the hesitation wasn’t deliberate and communicative. This wasn’t deliberate. This was a person who had been holding something and was now deciding whether the moment had arrived.

"Eren," I said.

He met my eyes.

"The vision I had," he said. "The one in the corridor, the night I found the Silverhand document. The night my hands shook." He held my gaze steadily. "I told you there was something at the periphery of it that I couldn’t name. Something that refused to resolve into language."

"Yes," I said.

"I’ve been working on it for weeks," he said. " I understand now what that was. The thing at the periphery, I’ve been closer to naming it recently." He paused. The specific pause of someone giving someone else the space to brace for what they’re about to receive. "In the vision," he said, "the person with your face was looking down at you."

I held very still.

"You were kneeling," he said.

The archive room was very quiet.

I looked at him across the table.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately. Which was its own answer.

I stood at the window with the moon outside and the weight of everything that was happening and everything that was coming and the specific particular sensation of someone who has just been told something they don’t have enough information to interpret yet and understands that getting that information is urgent.

"Figure it out," I said. "Whatever it means. Figure it out."

"I’m working on it," he said.

"Work faster," I said.