Page 232 of A Kingdom of Wild and Power
Wren was strong.
She would endure.
She had to.
Kage felt the familiar pull of the curse tightening around him, drawing inward like a coiling chain. The sensation contracted sharply, preparing to drag him back into the mortal world.
A heartbeat later, he reappeared in the vast main hall of Velunthar.
Chaos greeted him.
Bodies rushed past in every direction, boots striking stone as soldiers hurried across the hall. Voices shouted orders that echoed off the towering walls, each command colliding with the next in a storm of urgency and confusion.
The calm he had carried with him from the Underworld vanished in an instant.
He had returned expecting answers. Instead, he had stepped into pure chaos.
‘There you are,’ Willow Hawthorne said.
Kage glanced over his shoulder. His expression remained carefully neutral as he took in the sight of the princess clad in armour.
Willow was striking to behold; her white hair bright against her dark skin, her presence both regal and fierce.
The image stirred an unexpected memory.
For a brief moment, Kage was no longer standing in a war-torn hall. Instead, he found himself remembering another time entirely—when he had travelled with his siblings to a drakonian castle to witness Mal marry the Fire Prince. He had seen Flora Hawthorne there, walking through the castle gardens with her sisters.
He had not truly spoken with them. But he remembered the sound of their laughter drifting through the sunlit paths, the way they moved freely through the gardens as though the world itself could never turn cruel.
Careless. Bright. Untouched by war.
Kage wished, fleetingly, that he could step back into that moment.
How quickly everything had changed.
How violently their world had twisted into something unrecognisable.
How long ago had that day been?
A year? A year and a half?
Perhaps two.
And now here he stood, facing Willow Hawthorne dressed not in silks beneath summer sunlight like her sisters had, but in armour.
‘We must prepare for war, Kage Blackburn,’ Willow said.
It was still strange to remember that this young girl—barely fifteen in appearance—was no child at all. Beneath that youthful face lived a goddess in hiding, one of the most powerful beings in existence.
‘Where is Bryn?’ Kage asked, his gaze sweeping the hall where valkyrians and Fae hurried about, readying weapons and armour.
‘Who?’ Willow was busy fastening a sword to her hip. ‘Oh, the wolverian prince?’
‘King,’ Kage corrected.
Willow shrugged as though the distinction meant little to her.
‘He left.’
