Chapter Eight
Tales

3 years ago.

Jungkook’s POV

I raced through the night to reach her. The woman I’d never met. The woman I felt as if she was part of me, feeling every heartbreak and every joy. But it wasn’t those things that made me race to reach her in time.

I’d woken from a deep sleep the day before, feeling as if I’d been stabbed through the chest. Her fear and panic were tangible, arcing through the bond that the distance couldn’t quite contain. I couldn’t reach her, couldn’t see her, and didn’t even know her name, for that matter. But I felt her.

Just out of reach. Just beyond my grasp for a century. She’d lived four lives and died four deaths. Each of them is short. Each and every time she entered the Fade, awaiting reincarnation into a new body, her soul cut off from mine, leaving me with a chasm in my existence, a half of my very being simply gone.

I’d suffered through all of them, knowing that in time she would return to me. In time I would feel whole again at last. But this death that lingered at the horizon of her consciousness would be her last. It would be the true death that stripped her from me forever, the one that sent me spiraling into madness. For a century, I’d endured. I’d lived through the suffering and the pain that came with my useless, eternal life of servitude—all my failed attempts to break through the Lycan curse ending in nothing but blinding pain.

Waiting for the promise of her. For the other half of my soul that I was owed, that I loved without ever having set eyes on it.

Waiting to be whole.

The forest passed me by in a blur of white, the frozen tundra and snow-capped peaks of Lethe fading from view as I made for the boundary along. The Goddess Artemis wouldn’t be pleased to discover I’d pursued my mate without a word. She would punish me for my insolence and disrespect in doing so, but still, I pushed through the brutal cold to help me, should I manage to find a way through the mist.

When my father sacrificed me to the Goddess, I was to be of service to her.

The alternative was unthinkable.

My mother, Nalla would die.

My siblings wouldn’t be born.

This was my mate’s last life. If she were taken from me again. I’d have no choice but to follow her into death. To let the true death claim me in the hopes that I could be with her in the Fade and that Gods wouldn’t be so cruel to separate for eternity after four lives spent apart.

A life without the other half of me was unlivable. I would descend further into the madness that I was only able to keep at bay for the sake of her and our future together.

If that hope should be gone, so would I be.

The mist of white shimmered at the edge of the boundary as I finally reached the Northwestern corner of Rafa’s Terrain—where King Jongin ruled, and since his kind was favored by the Goddess Artemis, this was her territory.

The mist pulsed. Pain thrummed through me, scalding the flesh to keep me from crossing. My palm was red as I pulled it back, the skin charred from my flesh. It healed over as I watched, quickly knitting itself back together.

I pressed my hand against the mist once again, focusing on my mate through the searing heat attempting to blind me to her presence. She felt closer than ever, the strength of her emotions striking me in the chest.

I could practically hear her voice in my head, her walls lowered in her moments of fear.

I’m coming.

The thought came unbidden to my mind, coursing up the marks laid upon my arms with the shimmering golden light of fate. Even with the mist separating us, she reached out to me in her desperation. Even not knowing I existed, her soul knew to reach out her hand.

My mate’s fear suddenly faded, calm resignation settling inside her as I jolted back. She knew, without a doubt, that she’d been marked for death. No matter what had led her to that moment, she knew what was to come. She’d welcomed it as if it was her own ready to step into the Fade and allow the Gods their chance to judge her for the lives she’d lived.

I felt her, just beyond the mist. Her life beat in and out of existence as the fates tried to wrap her in their final embrace. Being this close and not able to reach her was as cruel as any of the punishments the curse I’ve lived through.

Desperation flooded through me. I would not lose my mate having never laid eyes upon her face. Without ever seeing myself in her gaze, and knowing her as intimately as she knew me.

I would not continue in this miserable existence, never knowing the paradise of her arms.

Taehyung, my best friend, raced up to me in his wolf form, his gaze heavy on my face and the anguish he must have seen there. He knew as well as I did that my mind would not survive the final loss of her. If I lost the other half of my soul, without the promise of her return or of one day standing a chance at being wrapped in my arms, there would be nothing left within me worth saving.

My mate’s calm rolled through me, a deeper peace than she’d ever known flowing through the bond to strike me in the chest like the sizzling burn of an iron sword. Her peace coiled around my heart like snakes waiting to devour what was left until nothing remained but the ashes of the male I had once been.

Taehyung shifted to his human form. “It was a mistake coming here. The Goddess knows. This is her energy, she’s preventing you from crossing.” He said, placing his hand on my shoulder. My body jolted, shocked out of the trance I’d gone into while I considered a life without my mate.

I stepped forward. My breath huffed out of my mouth, brushing against the magic of the mist. It seemed to reach toward me as if it could feel me and my intent. As if it could feel that I would allow nothing to stop me from claiming her.

I lifted my hands at my sides, raising them as shadows twirled around them, inky darkness spreading from my fingertips. Since I was part God, death waited for me, coming when I summoned it.

There was death in the Autumn when the leaves fell from the trees.

There was death in the cold frost of Winter.

There was death in the blazing heat of the Summer, burning all the plants to a crisp until only desert sand remained.

There was even death in the Spring when new animal life was born only to perish in the first moments after that initial breath.

The magic of death itself flowed through me, the memories of the dead rushing in my veins. I my shadowed hands into the mist itself, pushing through the burning of my hands as the skin melted off my bones all over again.

The press of a blade touched my throat, even though there was no dagger to be found. I knew the wetness that dripped down my throat was that of my mate, that it was her blood that had been drawn as death called her name.

“Jungkook!” Taehyung protested, yanking back on my shoulder.

I pierced him with a glare, turning my attention back to the mist and the spot where my hands slowly sank into the curtain. They slipped inside the fabric of it, my wrists jutting out as my bones throbbed with molten heat. As they burned and blackened inside the boundary.

A roar burst from my chest as I turned my face to the sky, the shadows of the night welcoming me as they wrapped me in their embrace. Inky black vines spread from my finger bones, arcing through the shimmering white mist and consuming it with darkness.

My mate’s fear re the other side, her calm retreating to give way to terror. She could see what I was doing to the mist; she could sense me coming for her.

I could feel her essence in the mist as if she had touched it herself in the moments where she waited for her death to take her to the Fade between lives. It was the closest I’d ever come to feeling her, to having her hands upon my skin, and something in that contentment chased back the worst of the blinding pain, offering me a tiny piece of sanctuary within it.

Darkness descended over me, the sun in the sky wrapped in black tendrils of shadow as I shouted through the pain consuming my body.

A growl rumbled up my throat, letting loose to a roar as I pushed everything I had into my hands and the magic of the Artemis’s mist. Into my attempt to dismantle the mist from the inside out.

, that hurt.

I’d burn myself to a crisp before I reached her; I pushed one last time, throwing everything I had left in me into the dead in the mist.

The Mist shuddered, shrinking in on itself as my hands came free from the magic binding it together. It the air from my lungs as it did, blowing it back out as the Mist hardened and cracked before me. Shards of glass exploded across the icy tundra, throwing me backward off my feet until I landed in the deep snow behind me. Taehyung lay sprawled out beside me.

I forced myself to sit up, staring at where the mist between realms touched.

Everything had changed.

Artemis’s boundary swirled, kissing the snow as the world shuddered.

The bond hit me square in the chest and etched my mate’s skin with a mark identical to mine, her face flooding my mind instantly. She was safe for the moment; though fear still rushed through her, it wasn’t the same as when facing her impending death.

I needed to find her, to calm her from the raging storm of confusion and fear that consumed her.

I knew her. All the little pieces of who she was and who she could become. I might not have known her history or the life she’d lived to get here, but I knew all the broken pieces that were reassembled to create her in the present.

She’d been my other half, but now she was my everything.

I stepped from the shadows, emerging onto the sands of the mortal realm. They twined around me, touching and cradling my body as they swept me over the ocean between the mortal realm and the realm of the supernatural.

The bond trailed over my skin, bringing with it a surge of my mate’s feelings. I searched through the mortal realm for any trace of the woman who could bring me completion, feeling certain that she was too far to have remained.

My soul had split as she took part of it with her. Half of it was consumed by the panic coursing through my veins—the fear that I knew logically did not belong to me but was hers. The other half of my very being, whom I had felt as the phantom whisper of a caress along my skin through torturous centuries of waiting.

Terror, as she’d never known, possessed her, driving her forward with every step. I couldn’t see past the blinding fear that overwhelmed the bond, couldn’t use it to track her down and offer her the sanctuary she needed. I spun in place, trying to anchor myself in her reality to get my bearings. All I could glean from her were flashes of trees and her scent lingering in the air surrounding me.

With the ghostly imagery of woods at the sides of my vision, I paused for a moment to search for any sign of her passage. To prepare for what might wait for me when I found my way to the mate who needed my protection.

The cities hadn’t changed for the better in our centuries apart.

The mist bled out from the boundary, clinging to the earth from which the humans had been formed and masking the degradation they lived in. I walked across the stones lining the main street through town, moving away from the gardens where I felt the presence of my mate the strongest.

As a man stepped out of the shadows between buildings, a tang of iron hanging in the air as he barred his canines at me, all I could think was, this was such a waste of time.

“A L-lycan?” The wolf stuttered.

I pinned the man to the side of one of the ramshackle buildings along the main street, my fingers wrapped around his throat.

Most of his pack members had retreated inside, in a panic about the Lycan God coming from the shadows. We rarely interacted with the packs in the mortal realm.

“Where is she?” I growled. The man stuttered, reaching up to grasp at my wrists as if he could ever hope to remove them.

“Who?” His voice wheezed out of his throat, stretching between us as the battle raged on behind me. He fought, too stupid to understand it would take a single moment for me to slaughter them all if I so wished.

“The girl,” I snarled, hating that I couldn’t give a description, but could only speak of my mate in feelings. I could only speak of what existed within her, her very soul, and not the vessel that housed her. This man had likely seen my mate in passing every day. He knew the color of her eyes and the shape of her smile, where I had yet to lay eyes upon such blessings. “She was about to die, but I know she still breathes. I can feel her light. Where?”

Fresh panic raced through the bond now, vibrating down the connection in a tangled mess. It overrode my focus, making it harder for me to pinpoint where she’d gone and how far she’d run in the time it had taken me to sail across the Mist.

At least she still drew breath.

“The Gwon girl?” he asked, glancing toward the swirling marks on my arms. The earth beneath it was scorched, the grass at the edges of the gardens blackened and stained with the magic I’d used to break through—to reach her in my desperation to spare her from death. “The Alpha’s son and his friends took her and her sister.”

Gwon.

I’d felt her on the other side, so close yet so far away. There might have been a deep channel of water between our realms, two halves of the swaying on either side of it, but the magic of the boundary had made it feel as if she existed just beyond. As if I could reach through the curtain and grasp her hand in mine.

“Where has she gone?” I asked, feeling her in the distance. She was too far already, and I wondered for a brief moment if someone had taken her and tried to get as much distance from me as possible.

Fires burned at the end of the main street through town, wooden structures aflame in the midst of the fighting.

I hadn’t realized that I had conjured the dead.

I hadn’t wanted this.

“Enough!” I shouted, calling out to skeletons. As fiercely as the animosity between our peoples had burned, these wolves in the mortal realm hadn’t been alive long enough to remember such things. All we would achieve through this violence was renewing a war cut short centuries before.

“Yes, Konstantin,” one of the skeletons murmured, dropping a dead wolf to the ground.

 I turned my attention back to the human I held pinned t