MARKED FOR PRETEND - Chapter 51: Chapter 51

The sky above Kaelvarin had never looked real.
But now, it looked broken.
Veins of black light carved through the silver mist, twisting and branching like cracks in glass. The air buzzed with power too much of it, all at once. The ground pulsed beneath Chelsea’s bare feet, and even the trees seemed to lean away from her.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
Kaden stood beside her, jaw tense, golden eyes scanning the treetops. “You woke something up.”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore.”
The light above flickered again and this time, it hummed.
Low. Dissonant.
Like a scream caught between dimensions.
⸻
Chelsea stepped back instinctively.
But her mark burned.
And then… Nyra spoke.
You feel it, don’t you? The realm remembering your blood. Our blood.
Chelsea staggered. The voice wasn’t like thoughts. It was like thunder inside her bones.
This place was never meant to hold us, Nyra growled. You opened the lock. Now it wants to swallow you whole.
“Kaden—” Chelsea gasped. “She’s speaking. Nyra. She’s—”
He caught her arm, steadying her “Good,” he murmured. “Let her.”
“She’s angry.”
“She should be.”
Chelsea blinked. “She says… Kaelvarin isn’t breaking because I’m here. It’s breaking because it remembers me. It remembers us.”
⸻
The wind shifted.
Then a tree split right down the middle cracking with golden fire.
From within its hollow, light bled out.
But it wasn’t warm.
It pulsed like a heartbeat. Like something trying to be born.
“We need to leave,” Kaden said suddenly, voice sharp. “Now.”
Chelsea turned to him. “But what if we’re meant to see this through? What if I’m the one who caused it and”
Kael, Kaden’s wolf, rose in his voice:
“This place has no future, Chelsea. It only has memories ,and if you stay in memory too long, you forget who you are.”
The moment Kael’s voice echoed, Chelsea felt Nyra stir again not with fear, but recognition.
“So you finally speak, Wolf of Ash.”
“Do you think she belongs to you?”
Kael growled deep within Kaden’s frame. The energy around him crackled, his shadow elongating unnaturally behind him.
Chelsea felt torn between them her wolf and his. Hers, newly born and burning. His, old and guarded.
“We are not each other’s masters,” she whispered aloud.
“We walk beside.”
The light from the broken tree surged and a figure began forming inside it.
⸻
Not human, neither was it a wolf.
Something in between. Cloaked in bone white robes, with no face only a hollow crown of antlers where a head should be.
Chelsea gasped.
Nyra screamed.
“That is not of us,” her wolf snarled. “That is what was locked here before Kaelvarin was sealed. It felt your blood and followed it out.”
The ground split beneath the figure.
And Chelsea knew:
If they didn’t leave now, this realm would use her as a vessel.
A gate.
A weapon.
⸻
“Kaden—GO!”
He grabbed her waist.
And together, they ran toward the last shimmer of gold that marked the path out.
The realm howled behind them.
And the creature in the tree did not follow.
It simply watched.
⸻
As the gold light swallowed them, Chelsea felt her wolf whisper one last thing:
That thing has no name.
Because names give power.
And some things were never meant to be remembered.