Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 61: Aftermath

~LYRA’S POV~

The quiet was the strangest part.

After everything, the hours of fighting, the shockwaves and the cracking ground and the sound of hundreds of bodies moving and striking and falling, the silence that came after Selara dissolved was the loudest thing I’d experienced all night. Not because it was actually loud. Because of what it meant. The absence of something that had been constant for so long that its removal felt like a physical change in pressure.

I was still kneeling. I hadn’t moved. My knees had been on the ground long enough that I’d stopped feeling them.

Around me, at varying distances, the field settled into what came after war. Warriors stood where they’d stopped fighting, weapons at their sides, looking at each other or at the sky or at nothing in particular. Some of them were crying, not dramatically, not in collapse, just the particular quiet tears that came when something enormous was over and the body finally had space to catch up to what it had been carrying. Some of them didn’t seem to know what to do with their hands. They kept moving and resettling, reaching for something, finding nothing that needed reaching for.

The blood moon was fully white overhead. Clean and silver and entirely ordinary, the way the moon looked on any other night, and the light it cast was nothing like the red that had soaked the clearing for hours.

I looked down at Kael’s face.

I’d been looking at it since his eyes closed and I hadn’t been able to stop. It was the particular thing you couldn’t stop doing when you were trying to make the present moment real, looking at the specific details of a face, the exact line of a jaw, the way eyelashes rested against a cheekbone. His jaw, which had been set since the moment I met him and which had barely relaxed even in the garden, was loose now. The tension that lived permanently in his brow, the tension of a man who was always holding something, always managing something, always maintaining some version of the wall... gone. He looked like someone who had put something very heavy down for the first time in a long time.

He looked younger. He looked, for the first time since I’d known him, like someone at rest. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

Ryland came to me first.

I didn’t hear him coming, he moved quietly when he wanted to, always had, and then he was beside me, crouching down, and his hand came to my back. Not pulling me up. Not trying to move me. Just there. The solid warmth of it between my shoulder blades, steady, not going anywhere.

He didn’t say anything.

That was the thing about Ryland. He knew when words were wrong. He knew what the moment needed, which was not words and not action and not any kind of management at all, and he gave the moment exactly what it needed.

I felt Eren somewhere behind me. Not close, not intruding, standing a little further back, present but giving space. His bond was different from Ryland’s. Ryland’s came as warmth and solidity. Eren’s came as a kind of calm awareness, the particular presence of someone who understood what was happening and wasn’t trying to change its shape.

"He’s gone," I said.

I didn’t need anyone to confirm it. I could feel it, the place where the bond had been, the thread that had existed between us from the moment our eyes had met in that grand hall and that had been there through every complicated month since. It wasn’t silence exactly. More like an echo. The shape of something that had been present long enough to leave an impression, now without its source.

"Yes," Ryland said.

I kept looking at Kael’s face.

"He could’ve let it hit me," I said. "He was far enough back. He’d seen the angle. He knew what she was releasing." I had thought about it in the moment, in the fraction of a second between the dark spear leaving Selara’s hand and it hitting him. He’d had time to read the attack. "He could have let it hit me."

"He could have," Eren said quietly from behind me. "He chose not to."

I already knew that. I just needed to hear it said out loud because there was something about having it exist only inside me that felt like it might not be fully real. Having it spoken made it real in a different way. He chose not to. That was what it was. Not instinct, not panic, not the body moving before the mind. Kael. A decision. The most purely Kael thing he had ever done, no announcement, no explanation, just the action and then the consequence and his eyes finding mine at the end.

Even when I was too stupid to say it right.

"He said it right," I said. To nobody in particular. To him, maybe. "At the end. He said it right."

Nobody responded to that. They didn’t need to.

The healer arrived, I was aware of movement at the edge of my peripheral, Mira’s voice low and directing, the sounds of someone coming with the specific purposeful quiet of a person who understood what they were walking into. I heard her kneel on the other side of him. Heard her work, the particular careful movements of someone assessing rather than treating, the sounds of someone who had already understood the situation and was making sure.

The silence stretched.

Then Mira’s hand came to my arm. Not urgent. Just present.

"Lyra," she said. Quietly. Just my name.

I shook my head.

She didn’t argue. She stayed where she was, and she let me have the time I was taking. Other healers had come, I could feel them at the edges, waiting, doing what they could for others on the field while they waited for me to be ready. Nobody pushed. Nobody tried to redirect me. Nobody told me what I needed to do next or how long was appropriate or what came after this.

Ryland’s hand stayed on my back the whole time.

I don’t know how long I stayed there. Long enough for the field to quiet completely. Long enough for the surviving warriors to move into the particular subdued activity of an engagement that had ended, accounting for people, helping the injured, standing in quiet groups and not quite talking. Long enough for the white moonlight to shift, the moon moving slightly west in its arc, the shadows of the trees going at a different angle.

I looked at Kael’s face for the last time in this particular moment.

I pressed my free hand briefly to the side of his face. Held it there.

"I know," I said quietly. "I always knew."

Then I looked at Ryland, who was still crouching beside me with his hand on my back, who had been there the whole time without moving or speaking or asking for anything.

"Okay," I said. My voice came out smaller than I’d expected. "Okay... I’m ready."

He helped me stand. His arm came around me and I let it, and I didn’t look back at the ground behind me because I didn’t need to. What had been there was already inside me and wasn’t going anywhere.

The field was quiet, the moon was white and the war was over.