Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 47: The Vision

~LYRA’S POV~

It happened three days after Ashfen, and I wasn’t asleep when it did.

That was the part I couldn’t stop returning to afterward, the fact that it hadn’t come in a dream, hadn’t surfaced during training or a moment of physical stress.

I was awake. I was sitting at my desk with the lamp burning low and a document from Mira’s compiled research in my hands, reading about Selara’s original exile with the specific focus of someone trying to build a complete picture before a deadline they couldn’t precisely identify.

One moment I was holding the page.

The next, I wasn’t anywhere I recognised.

The space was grey and still. Not dark, there was light, but it came from no direction, diffused through everything and originating nowhere, the kind of light that existed in a place that didn’t have a sun. It wasn’t frightening exactly. It was the particular wrongness of a space that operated by different rules than any space I’d been in before.

Selara was there.

I didn’t see her full face, she was partially turned, partially shielded in the grey shadows of the space, but what I could see was not what the records had led me to expect. The records described a monster, something ancient and corrupted, the exiled witch as the texts imagined her to be after three centuries in the in-between.

She looked like a woman.

Tall, composed, with silver-streaked hair and eyes the colour of burnt purple when they caught the directionless light. She held herself the way someone held themselves when they had spent a very long time learning not to show what it cost.

"I wanted to meet you properly," she said. Her voice was unhurried. "Before the end."

I didn’t step back. "This isn’t a meeting. You’re in my head."

"Your head invited me in, the Moonborn power is a door, child. And right now, yours is barely latched."

She moved closer, not threatening, not fast, more the movement of someone who had decided the conversation was going to be a certain kind of conversation and was positioning accordingly. Almost conversational. Almost warm.

"I don’t hate you," she said. "I want you to know that. You didn’t choose this any more than I did."

"You killed eleven people in Ashfen," I said. "Three of them were children."

Something shifted in the air around her. Not guilt, it was too distant for that, too far past the point where guilt was still accessible. More like the expression of someone who had made a calculation and had accepted the cost of it a long time ago.

"Collateral is regrettable," she said. "But I’ve been trying to accomplish what I came to accomplish for a very long time. I learned to move past regret."

"What do you want?"

"What I’ve always wanted," What was taken from me. The Goddess turned her back on me. Cast me out into this."

She gestured at the grey space around her, and for just a moment in the diffused light I saw what was underneath the composed surface, a shadow of something vast and cold and very old, something that had been in the in-between for three centuries and had not come through it unchanged.

"Your power can undo that. It’s the only thing in existence that can."

"You want me to restore you,"

"I want what she gave you," Selara said, and the pleasantness in her voice didn’t shift at all. "The bloodline, the connection, the divine gift. All of it. I don’t intend to ask for it politely."

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I’m coming regardless, And I thought it was only fair to tell you."

She tilted her head slightly.

"The blood moon is close. When it rises, nothing your three Alphas have built will be sufficient to stop what I’m sending."

She paused.

"I’m not suggesting you surrender. I’m telling you to prepare. I want you ready when I arrive. Taking power from someone who’s already broken isn’t satisfying."

The grey space dissolved.

I was back at my desk. The page was in my hand. The lamp was still burning, exactly as I’d left it. I sat there for a long moment looking at the document without seeing it.

My hands were completely steady.

That surprised me, actually. I’d half-expected them to be shaking. Instead I was sitting very still with my hands flat and my breathing even and the particular clarity that came when something had happened that removed all ambiguity about what you needed to do next.

I sat there for a long time before I got up and went to find Ryland.

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I told him everything. Then Eren. Then Kael. I didn’t soften any of it and I didn’t build up to the important parts, I laid it out in the order it happened, plainly, and let the room absorb it without adding anything that wasn’t already in the account.

The room absorbed it in silence.

Kael spoke first. "She’s confident."

"She has three centuries of planning behind her and she’s been watching us scramble for weeks," Eren said, from the window. "She has a right to be confident. That doesn’t make her right."

"How did she look?" Ryland asked, his eyes on me.

I paused.

"She didn’t show her face fully. She was partially shielded. I saw her outline. Silver-streaked hair. Purple eyes. She looked..." I stopped, finding the right word. "Composed. Like someone who had been through something enormous and had built herself around it." freēwebnovel.com

"So we have nothing to identify her by," Kael said.

"Not visually. No." I looked at him. "But she said something specific. She said my power is barely latched."

I paused.

"She’s not wrong. I know she’s not wrong. I can feel how thin it still is in certain conditions."

The room was quiet.

"She came to tell you she’s coming," Ryland said. Not a question.

"She came to confirm it. She wanted me to know it was real, not rumour, not our own speculation. She wanted me to feel the certainty of it."

I thought about her voice, the unhurried, almost warm quality of it.

"I think she also wanted me to see that she believes she’s justified. That this isn’t cruelty for its own sake. She genuinely believes the Goddess took something from her that she was owed."

"It doesn’t matter what she believes," Kael said.

"No," I said. "But it matters that she’s not erratic. She’s not going to make emotional mistakes. She’s going to come in exactly the way she’s planned to come."

"The blood moon," Eren said quietly.

"She said when it rises, nothing we’ve built will be sufficient." I held each of their gazes in turn. "She may be right about that too."

The silence held.

"Then we latch it," Ryland said.

I looked at him.

"Your power," he said. "Whatever it takes to get it fully controlled before the blood moon — we do that. We don’t wait for the timing to close on us. We move before she expects us to be ready." He held my eye steadily.

"Properly this time. Not enough to hold through a training session. Enough to hold through whatever she sends."