Chapter 73: Leo and Ethan

Azura’s POV

Nobody moved at first.

We all just stood there looking at the two men by the door. The room had gone completely quiet after my words landed, and nobody had picked them up yet. They just sat in the air between all of us like something fragile that nobody wanted to be the first to touch.

Leo and Ethan.

I looked at them. Really looked. Trying to find something in their faces that matched the boys I remembered. The small hands. Leo’s laugh. Ethan’s quietness. Anything.

There was nothing there. Just two large, still bodies with empty eyes standing in front of the only door out of this room.

Torin’s voice broke the silence.

"Don’t tell me we went through all that for these two grown-ass men?" he said, laughing, hoping that I would say it’s a joke.

But nothing came

"Remember when you guys said you saw footprints of a child and a grown man in a particular track?" Liona said, looking at Torin.

"Are you saying that one of them owned it?" Torin looked at Liona and me.

And we both nodded.

"Hah! This is crazy." He commented

"So what do we do now?" Silas asked, looking at the two men in front of us.

"There is only one option," Rhydor replied not looking at anyone in particular. Just the two figures blocking the exit. "We fight them. We move them away from that door. But we do not kill them."

Silas looked at him. "They are not going to make that easy."

"I know." He looked at Silas directly. "Get Azura and Liona out. That is your job. Get them through the door the moment it opens."

Silas nodded once.

The warriors moved first.

I watched them go in with the kind of confidence that came from years of training and surviving. Three of them. Experienced fighters who had handled rogues and Borne and things that moved in cursed forests without flinching.

But Leo and Ethan put them on the floor in seconds.

Not even close. The warriors barely landed a hit before they were thrown, slammed, and tossed aside like they weighed nothing. One hit the far wall and did not get up immediately. Another caught a hit to his chest that sent him sliding across the floor. The third managed to stay standing for a moment longer before Ethan grabbed him by the arm and threw him sideways with one hand.

Three warriors. Just like that.

And Leo and Ethan were already standing straight again, barely breathing harder than before.

The room felt different after that. The kind of quiet that comes when everyone realizes the rules just changed.

Then Rhydor moved. Torin beside him. Axel on the other side.

This round was different.

They were stronger, faster, and they had seen what the boys could do now. They did not come in with confidence. They came in with calculation.

I watched them move in. Different this time. They had seen what the boys could do. No confidence now. Just calculation

Rhydor hit Leo with the kind of force that would have dropped most people and Leo stumbled, actually stumbled, for the first time.

Axel caught Ethan around the middle and drove him sideways, away from the door. Torin moved between them like water, no wasted movement, no extra effort.

They were not winning. But they were moving them.

"Now," Silas said.

He grabbed Liona’s arm and moved. I ran behind them, through the gap that Rhydor and Torin and Axel had carved open for exactly this moment, and the three of us were through the door before it closed again.

The other side of the door was a corridor.

Long. Stone. Torches burning in brackets along the walls, casting light that flickered and moved like it was alive. The ceiling above us disappeared into shadow. The floor beneath us was cold and solid and real.

It was not a cabin.

It had never been a cabin.

"Keep moving," Silas said.

We moved.

The staircases were the kind that wound in wide spirals, the kind where you looked down the center and could not see the bottom and your stomach did something unpleasant about that.

We went down one and found a room. Went through the room and found another corridor. Went through that and found a door that opened into another staircase going in a direction that made no sense.

This place was enormous. Deliberately confusing. Like something that had been built specifically to keep people inside it.

We kept moving until we found a door that felt different. Heavier. Older. The kind that opened onto outside air.

Silas pushed it.

The cold hit us immediately. The grey Wraithfen sky above. The silver trees in the distance. The ground beneath our feet real and solid and not made of stone.

I stepped outside and turned around.

It was a castle.

Not large by the standards of things I had heard about in stories, but real. Stone walls. A single tower. Windows that looked out over the ground around it with the particular blankness of windows that had been watching this forest for a very long time.

And around it, pressed up against the base of the walls on one side, was a garden.

Small, neat rows of plants in dark soil. Herbs and vegetables and a few things I did not recognize. Growing quietly at the base of a castle wall as if they had always been there.

I looked at the garden and then at the castle and then at the garden again.

There was no cabin.

No small simple building with clean walls and a mended roof and a chimney sending thin smoke into the grey sky. Just the castle, and the garden that had belonged to someone’s story about a husband and a son, pressed against the stone like a lie trying to remember what the truth had felt like.

I stood there for a moment and tried to decide if anything she had told us was real.

Then the wall above us exploded.

I heard it before I saw it. A crack and then a sound like the world coming apart, and then I looked up and the upper section of the castle wall was breaking open from the inside, stone falling outward in chunks, and two figures came through it in a mess of dust and force.

Time went strange for a second. The way it sometimes did when something was happening too fast and your brain refused to let it.

Ethan was in the air.

Standing position. Feet below him. Like he had simply decided to exist there for a moment above the falling stone.

And below him, falling backward, was Axel.

They hit the ground together. Axel on his back, hard, and Ethan landing on his chest with an impact I felt in my feet. For one second neither of them moved.

Then Axel grabbed Ethan by the front of his shirt and the whole thing started again.

Torin came through the broken wall a second later, landing clean and already moving toward Ethan. The fight continued without pausing, just relocating. Outside now. Open ground. More room to move and more room to get hurt.

Through the broken wall above, I could hear the sounds of Rhydor and the warriors still inside with Leo.

Silas looked at the gap in the wall, looked at us, and made a decision.

"Stay here," he said. And went back in.

Liona moved closer to me.

We stood together at what felt like a safe distance and watched.

It was not going well.

Torin and Axel were good. I knew that. I had watched Torin fight before, had seen the way he moved when he stopped pretending to be relaxed, all that easy charm dropping away and leaving something sharp and focused underneath. Axel was steady and strong and did not make mistakes easily.

But Ethan was not working within any limits.

He was not holding back. He was not calculating. He just kept coming, absorbing hits that should have slowed him down, moving with a speed that did not match the size of the body he was in. And Torin and Axel could not match it completely because they were holding back. Every hit they landed was controlled. Every move designed to stop without destroying.

Ethan had no such problem.

Through the broken walls that did not survive the fight, Leo, Rhydor, and the warriors spilled outside, too. All of them on the open ground now. The castle behind them looked worse than it had five minutes ago.

The ground around us became the whole world. Fighting, movement, and noise on all sides.

I watched it happen and felt my legs stop working properly.

Not from fear. Not from the Wraithfen. From something else entirely.

I did not realize I had gone down until I felt the cold ground under my knees.

I was kneeling.

My hands were in the grass, and I was kneeling and watching those two large bodies move through the people, trying to stop them, and I kept seeing it underneath. Kept seeing Leo’s laugh. Ethan’s quiet face. The way they had followed other boys around the orphanage. Eight years old and ten years old and whatever had been done to them had taken all of that and left this behind.

What had she done to them?

What kind of thing did this to children?

Liona crouched beside me without saying anything. She put her hand on my back and just stayed there.

"Corvin," I said quietly. "And his brother. What happened?"

She was quiet for a moment.

"Corvin just walked into the fog," she said. "During the Borne attack, without any good explanation." Her voice was careful. Steady. "His brother went after him."

"And the brother?"

Another pause. Longer this time.

"He got bitten. During the fight. One of the Borne got him before we could stop it." She stopped. "He separated himself. He didn’t want to be put down by his own people, when he turns."

I looked at the ground between my hands.

And just hoped they are ok.

I looked back at the war in front of me.

I did not know I was going to speak until the words were already out.

"Leo. Ethan." Barely above a whisper. Not to anyone. Not even to them. Just out into the air because the alternative was keeping it inside and I could not do that anymore. "Please come back to us."

My eyes burned.

I let them.

I thought about Amanda calling me Mama when she thought nobody was listening. I thought about the boys playing with other children.

What happened to them? What made them this?

Just as the thought crossed my mind, something happened that made my blood run cold.

Everything stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. Completely and instantly, the way a candle goes out.

The birds. The wind in the silver trees. The sounds of the fight.

All of it.

Gone.

I looked up.

Every person on that ground was frozen mid-motion. Rhydor with his arm pulled back mid-swing. Axel, with both hands on Ethan’s shoulders, pushing forward. Torin with one foot off the ground mid-step. All of them locked exactly where they were, like someone had reached into the moment and held it still.

The silence pressed against my ears.

I knew this.

I had seen this before.

At the stream, when the world went quiet in a way that had nothing peaceful about it. And then the portal that brought in this chaos.

My whole body went cold.

I looked around fast, scanning the treeline, looking for movement, looking for the shimmer in the air that meant something was coming through from somewhere else. I thought about Genevieve. Her golden magic and her voice cutting through the panic, knowing what to do when I had no idea what anything was.

But Genevieve was not here this time around.

I was alone in a frozen world, and I did not know what was coming, and I did not know how to stop it.

Until I saw something move.

Or should I say someone?

Torin.

He was the only one.

He straightened up from his frozen mid-step position and stretched his arms above his head with the slow satisfaction of someone waking up from a comfortable sleep. He rolled his neck. Yawned. An actual full yawn, jaw wide, eyes briefly closed.

Like this was familiar. As if it had happened many times before.

I pressed my lips together and did not move. Did not blink more than necessary. I kept my body exactly where it was and let him believe I was frozen with everyone else.

Just then he started walking toward Leo and Ethan.