Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 86: The In-between

~LYRA’S POV~

It was past midnight when we gathered in the strategy room.

Eren had the journal. I had the cloak still around my shoulders because nobody had suggested I go change and I hadn’t thought to. Ryland was there when we came in, I didn’t ask how he knew to be there, but this was Ryland, who had a particular sensitivity to when something had happened that required him to be present, and he’d clearly felt it.

He looked at me when I walked in. His eyes moved over my face and then he went to the side table and poured water into a cup and set it next to where I’d sat down.

I put my hands flat on the table. Grounding myself against the surface, the specific physical present of cool wood under my palms.

"It wasn’t a hallucination," I said. First thing. Before any of them could say anything, before any framework could be offered that I’d have to push back against. "I know what I saw. I know what I smelled. My hand passed through him but he was there, he turned directly to me when I said his name, he took a step toward me. That’s not grief constructing something. That’s something that actually happened."

"No one said it was," Ryland said. Quiet and even. He sat down across from me.

I looked at him. At the particular steadiness he was offering, not challenging what I’d said, not asking me to justify it, just present. I nodded once and let it go.

Eren sat at the head of the table and opened the journal.

"The in-between," he said, "is not death. It’s not the other side, not the final state. It’s a liminal space, a bridge that exists between the physical world and the supernatural realm." He turned to a page dense with notes in his precise handwriting. "Souls that suffer traumatic deaths while mid-bond, especially bond deaths that occur in the presence of significant dark magic, Selara’s dark magic was saturating that entire field, can become caught in it. Not gone. Not present. Suspended." frёeweɓηovel.coɱ

The room was quiet for a moment.

"He’s conscious?" I asked.

"Almost certainly," Eren said. He said it without hedging, which meant he believed it. "The in-between responds to emotional frequency, to thought, to the specific quality of connection between people. When you were thinking of him strongly enough, and he was thinking of you at the same time, the frequency aligned. He was able to manifest. That’s why you could see him, why he could appear at the treeline, why he turned directly to you when you spoke."

Ryland was frowning at the open journal. "But she couldn’t touch him."

"Because he has no physical anchor," Eren said. "He can appear. He can project a presence. He cannot interact with anything physical, he can’t be touched, can’t make physical contact, can’t move through the world the way something with a body in it moves." He paused. "Think about the battle."

I looked at him.

"Think about Selara," Eren said. "We all saw her. Spoke to her. She was there, she was solid, she was terrifying, she was absolutely real to every one of us standing in that field. She threw a dark spear through Kael’s chest."

His voice didn’t change.

"But I never felt her presence through the bond lines. Not the way I should have felt something of that power. She was the most powerful supernatural entity I’d encountered in my lifetime, and her presence through the mystical channels was... wrong. Too light. Too surface-level."

The room went quiet in a way that had weight to it.

I sat up.

"She was projecting," I said.

"She was projecting," Eren confirmed. "A supernatural entity of her age and her specific skill set can project a form, a physical-seeming presence that reads as real to every sense available to the people experiencing it. But it’s projection. She was never actually standing on that battlefield."

He paused. "Which means..."

"She’s still in the in-between," I said. The pieces arrived in the right order, rapid and clean. "She’s been there this whole time. That’s where she was contained when we fought her. That’s where Kael is now."

I looked at Eren.

"When the dark spear hit him, she cast it from inside the in-between and pushed it through into the physical world. That’s how she reached the battlefield without actually being present on it."

Eren nodded once. "That’s my conclusion."

I looked at Ryland. He was looking at the table with the expression he had when he was processing something that had implications he needed to sit with.

"So Selara is still alive," he said.

The word alive sat in the room like something that had been dropped from a height. Nobody moved for a moment.

"Where is she now?" said a voice from the doorway.

Cade. He’d come in silently, still half in armor from the evening patrol, and he was looking at Eren with the focused quality of someone who had heard enough from the doorway to understand the shape of the conversation and had a specific operational question about it.

Everyone turned to look at him. Then, after a moment, looked at each other.

Selara. Still in the in-between. Contained there after the battle, trapped by the Moonborn light that had dissolved her projection, but not destroyed. The thing we’d believed we’d ended was not ended. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm

I felt the cold of that move through me. Then something else moved through me after it, not dismissal, not denial, but the particular quality of someone who had spent the last year learning to sort what needed to be addressed immediately from what needed to be addressed well.

I straightened.

"Selara is a problem," I said. "A real one, and one we’ll deal with properly. But she’s contained in the in-between and she’s been there for eight months and she hasn’t been able to project anything significant since the battle. That’s not nothing." I held the table’s attention. "Right now... right now, the question I’m asking is how do we get Kael back."

Ryland looked at me. Something in his expression did a very small thing that I recognised and didn’t comment on.

Cade moved to a chair and sat down.

Eren hadn’t looked up from the journal.

"Eren," I said.

He turned to the last page of his research notes, the final section, which I could see from across the table was different from the rest, written in a different hand pressure, the kind of writing that came when someone was documenting something they’d arrived at and hadn’t been sure they wanted to arrive at.

"There is a way," he said. He was still looking at the page. "The in-between can be interacted with. A soul can be pulled from it into the physical world, fully returned, physical anchor restored. It has been done before, documented twice in the pre-archive records."

He paused. "But it requires an exchange."

"What kind of exchange,"

He looked up then. His eyes moved to me, then briefly to Ryland, then back to me.

"You want to alter the fundamental boundary between the physical world and what lies beyond it," he said.

"You want to remove a soul from a liminal state and restore it to full physical presence. The Moonborn power can reach that far. But the cost structure of that kind of alteration doesn’t work the way other costs work."

He set his hand flat on the final page of the journal.

"A soul must be offered in return. Something of equal weight. The Goddess maintains the balance of what exists between the living world and what comes after it, and she doesn’t adjust that balance without an equivalent exchange."

The room was very quiet.

"The Goddess doesn’t do anything for free," Eren said.