Chapter 434: The Shape of What Was Never Meant to Move

Chapter 433: The Shape of What Was Never Meant to Move

Some Minutes Before

The council hall had not felt this crowded in a while. And that wasn’t in terms of bodies—this was in terms of tension.

Every breath seemed heavier than it should have been, pressed flat against stone walls.

All the elders were back.

They gathered loosely around the long table in the middle, around the one person who did not acknowledge them as they walked in.

Lysander collapsed into one of the chairs. He was tired, but he needed to understand what was going on.

Brynhild stood beside him, rubbing his arm soothingly.

Caspian took a seat across from them, lowering himself with careful restraint. Daniel joined him moments later, resting his forearm on his knee, posture forward and alert.

It was like there were numerous things happening in the pack, all at the same time.

Mary remained standing.

All eyes were on Eldric, who had not moved at all.

He was hunched over the table. A wide parchment had been spread across the surface.

His hands were flying.

The quill scratched violently against the skin of the page, lines appearing so quickly it was almost impossible to follow what he was forming.

His lips moved constantly. Low and urgent. No one could quite make out what he was saying. It sounded like a strange language, and they had no idea what it was.

His green feather earrings swayed and trembled with every sharp movement of his head.

He did not look up.

He did not register the sound of chairs moving.

He did not react to the door closing behind the last elder.

It was as though the rest of the world had dimmed to something distant and unimportant.

Daniel watched him for a long moment.

Then he turned to Madam Tyler.

"What is going on?" he asked quietly.

Madam Tyler folded her hands together in front of her.

Her expression showed just how unsettled she was by what was happening in front of her.

"A few minutes after the rest of you left," she explained softly, "Eldric suddenly asked me for parchment and a quill."

She glanced toward him again.

"He was... very insistent."

Daniel frowned.

"And?"

"And he has been drawing ever since," she continued. "Muttering to himself. I tried to speak to him. More than once. But he wouldn’t even acknowledge me."

Caspian’s brows pulled together.

"Eldric?" he called out, but there was no response.

He reached toward Eldric across the table.

"Eldric."

Suddenly, the quill stopped.

The movement was so abrupt that its tip tore slightly into the parchment.

Eldric froze.

His entire body went rigid.

Then his eyes widened in shock.

He stared at the parchment as if it had moved on its own.

As if something had been written without him.

His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose.

He lifted one trembling finger and pushed them back into place.

For a heartbeat, no one spoke.

Then—

"Madam Tyler," Eldric spoke up, his voice hoarse. "May I have another parchment?"

Madam Tyler frowned but nodded. Eldric’s hands shook badly and he hissed in pain.

"Are you okay?" Lysander asked him with a frown.

"I will be," Eldric replied through clenched teeth.

Madam Tyler gave him a parchment. Thankfully, there was an extra one.

Eldric swept the first one aside with the flat of his hand.

As though the image beneath it could no longer contain what he needed to see.

He dragged the new parchment into place.

And began again.

This time, he moved faster and harder. The quill cut sharper strokes across the parchment.

His mutterings became more frantic as he did.

Mary stepped closer to the discarded parchment, and she frowned when she saw what was drawn on it.

A cave.

That much was unmistakable.

The jagged edges of stone were rendered with almost obsessive detail.

Shadows clung to the ceiling.

Darkness pooled into narrow cracks along the walls.

In the centre was something large.

A human?

A beast?

Both? She didn’t know.

Its shape was wrong in small, disturbing ways.

Too broad through the shoulders.

The limbs distorted—part human, part something else entirely.

The head lay against the ground.

In front of it stood a woman, facing the headless beast.

She was small by comparison, but drawn with deliberate focus. And she was wearing a flowing gown.

A huge wolf stood in front of her, but the full wolf wasn’t drawn. Both stared at the headless beast.

Mary swallowed.

She really couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing.

She passed the parchment to Caspian. Daniel and Madam Tyler moved their chairs closer to look at what was on the parchment.

The three of them leaned together, eyes tracing the same lines.

"I’m confused," Daniel said with a frown.

"Me too," Madam Tyler and Caspian said at the same time.

"That makes four of us," Mary said, and then took the parchment and passed it to Lysander, who stared at it with a frown on his face.

Lysander studied the parchment carefully, saying everything he noticed to Brynhild so she could get an idea of what it was.

"It’s a cave," he said gently.

"A large one. Rough stone. Narrow at the entrance, wider toward the centre."

He angled the parchment slightly, as if the motion would help him translate what he was seeing into words she could hold.

"There’s a body," he continued slowly. "Of a creature... it’s not quite human. It’s more like a cross between a human and a beast."

He then went into detail, explaining the way the creature looked—its limbs and everything.

"The head is on the floor," he told her.

"So it’s headless."

"Yes," Lysander said to her. "It’s like someone used a sword to remove the head from the body."

"There’s a woman in front of it," Lysander chuckled.

"What?" Brynhild asked him.

"I’m sorry, it’s just that the way the woman is drawn, it kind of reminds me of Sophia. But then this woman is wearing a flowing gown, and there’s this huge wolf in front of her and they are staring directly at the wolf," he told her.

Brynhild paused, taking in Lysander’s words.

Daniel nodded in agreement with Lysander. "Sophia is short, and the woman there is short too. It’s just that the gown..."

"It doesn’t fit what Sophia would wear," Caspian finished for him.

Brynhild paused, then turned towards the direction of Eldric.

"Could this woman be Sophia?" she asked him.

The quill screeched to a halt.

Eldric’s head snapped up.

"Yes," he said with a nod. "It’s Sophia."

Every pair of eyes turned to him in shock.

"Can you explain?" Lysander asked him.