Instead of dying, it felt like my body had come alive for the first time since I could remember. Everything inside me screamed for him. The bond screamed to be connected. It was a constant battle between what my heart wanted and what my brain rationalised.

But now wasn't the time for romance. I needed to get away from Everett Valley. And this man was probably going to want me to stay here. Hell, I wanted to stay here. 

Or for him to come along...

"We must discuss this now," Reagan spoke with a voice that sent tingles through all my limbs. 

It felt like little tiny waves of shock tingling all the way to my fingers.

It ripped me out of my thoughts and brought me back to the white marble table that was as wide as my entire kitchen.

I was seated on the long side of the rectangular table, with Kendra to my left. Across from us both sat a man with hair almost as black as night—that curled around the edges—and eyes as vibrant as the golden fields of grain in Everett Valley.

Beside him was Dante, his blue eyes just as intense as his brother's. There were two other guys sitting at the table.

"What issue, exactly, are we talking about here?" I asked.

Apparently, Dante was the only one of them who didn't have any patience. Unfortunately, Reagan did. And by the vibe he was emanating, he was the one in charge.

Bonkers.

"You know perfectly well what's going on, love."

I shuddered at the 'nickname' he'd given me. I hated that it caused my insides to turn into jelly.

"As I've told you before, you don't know what you're up against. Considering we haven't found all of what we've been looking for, here, our presence here is no longer necessary. Still, I know that you know things we don't. Before we leave, this too needs to be discussed. The whole situation," he said, his voice turning back to the authority-laced tone he'd adopted ever since he'd shown up in our neighbourhood. 

It was strange, seeing him like this, compared to how compassionate and soft he'd been in the woods.

He also seemed to be able to switch back between mocking me and being diplomatic within mere seconds.

It was hard to look away from his piercing eyes, but when I did, I saw Dante and Kendra staring at each other with an intensity I could almost touch.

There was a smile in Dante's eyes I had never seen before. Something between the two had happened, I could tell. After the incident at the Iarhus, they must have spoken to each other.

"What have you been looking for?" Kendra asked to my surprise, although her eyes remained focused on her promised.

I kept mine on my hands. I had to look anywhere but at him.

"I'm sure you are aware of the magic flowing within our natural network?"

When Kendra and I both didn't react, Reagan sighed deeply. "This is worse than we thought," he said to his brothers, of which the two on the far ends nodded their heads.

"The council really doesn't teach you anything, do they?" One of the two men asked rhetorically. 

By his looks, he must have been Dante's twin. 

"You need to understand the basics before you can understand much of anything else. The magic that allows you to shift is far wider spread than just within certain humans like yourself. There is magic in every living thing. It flows through the ground like vines, connecting the world together and forming a network that keeps nature balanced. But something is disrupting that magical balance," Dante's twin brother explained.

His soft voice was a nice change to the deep one that turned my senses off and made me think about things I didn't want to have in my head.

While I kept my eyes on the twin, the short-haired one with the face nearly identical to Dante's, I felt his burning gaze on me. All of them looked so similar.

"And we've come here to find out what."

They were human. They couldn't possibly know about all of this.

Could they?

Though in a way... it made sense what he said. I never knew how it worked because nobody did in Everett Valley, but I always knew there was some kind of magic that let us shift into our wolves. But that everything was touched by magic... 

A dark thought crossed my mind.

If they had such extensive knowledge of magic... Could they have anything to do with the attacks?

My heart started to race. Trying to remain calm, I slouched in my chair. "How, then, are humans not able to wield this magic you're talking about?" I scoffed.

The twin's grey eyes turned to mine, a shadow of a smile appearing in his lips. It was difficult not to compare him to his brother. But everything about him was softer than Dante. Other than that they were nearly identical... 

Everything but the eyes.

"Because humans are an exception," he answered vaguely. I wrinkled my forehead and pulled my eyebrows together.

"Meaning?"

The twin looked to Reagan, as if silently asking for his permission to answer my question. They were acting like wolves towards their pack's leader.

I just hoped to all the gods willing to listen that they weren't involved in the attacks. I wasn't sure if I would survive learning that my promised was capable of having me... or my brothers...

I wasn't even capable of finishing that train of thought. Instead, I steered my attention back to the Dante-Twin.

"In the beginning of time, there was a race humans have long forgotten the name of. That race was the physical embodiment of magic. Humans envied them, wanted to be like them. Humans wanted all the power they could get. So they forged an alliance in pursuit of their trust. After centuries of friendship, they gained the trust they needed to find out ways to channel magic. Humans created immortals to aid them in their quest to vanquish the race that gave them their power. They were hungry for more so they saw nothing but blood, anger, and war. And it was a war they got. It sent the whole race into h—" he cleared his throat, as if he was going to say something that he wasn't allowed to say, "—into extinction. They disappeared from the face of the earth while humans took Espheros for themselves, creating the communities you know and the cities on the other side of the Denhid Forest."

"When humans used the darkest side of the magic they stole to turn their own into immortal monsters, the balance was disrupted. Many parts of Espheros are withering away, dying, because the magical energy in those places is gone. And the longer we let the hole grow, the quicker the magic drains away, the sooner Espheros will be turned into one dark pile of ash in which humans and immortals fight an eternal battle for power."

It took me several moments to swallow the lump in my throat. What he had explained seemed more surreal than any dream I could come up with. Immortals had always been dark. They lived in darkness.

But the immortals I knew weren't... evil, were they?

There was still one big part of the story that didn't add up.

"Then how did we come into existence, according to your history?" Kendra asked, causing my mouth to drop. I stared at her, tearing my eyes open.

She flicked her gaze over to me and said, "Please, Dante already knew. Chances are pretty high that the rest of them know we're shifters too," Kendra said, looking at me from the corner of her eye, but keeping her head straight.

Recovering from the initial shock of Kendra so unfalteringly revealing our deepest secret towards outsiders, I decided not to say anything. Probably was best I kept my mouth shut.

Again, the twin glanced over to Reagan to seek his approval.

"The race that your kind has no name for created you shifters. There were two battlefronts. The old ones were on one side and on the opposite, they fought humans and their abominations. So they created the closest thing to nature they could. Humans that helped their cause and could shift into animals. It didn't disrupt the balance because to shift into another life-form is not prolonging its essence or even rendering it immortal. It doesn't damage the balance because it didn't need to tap beyond its boundaries."

"I still don't understand how creating an immortal exactly is so... bad?" I asked.

Bad might have been an understatement and the wrong word in general, but the whole thing rose more and more questions the deeper into the story they got. It was the first time I was hearing it and the way they were talking, it didn't just sound like a story you'd tell your younglings. 

It sounded like a load of grown-up fiction too complex for younglings, and to make it more believable, they had everything make logical sense.

But was there truth behind their words?

Probably not. There couldn't be.

"Imagine magic being like life. When you are alive, you can do a lot. But you can't do everything, right? You can grow stronger if you are resilient, you can grow weak if you are lazy. Magic is similar. And like life, magic is always there. It lives inside you. And if you're strong, you can wield magic. If you're not, then it just resides in you like an organ. You don't control it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there." 

The twin paused, waiting for Kendra and me to nod.

"Now, you have a lot of humans who are too weak to tap into the magic within them because it's not as strong in every living thing. But, humans found a way to channel the magic in, lets say, the earth. As I told you, magic is like a network. And once you take too much magic out of one place and put it into another, that place dies and withers away. When humans succeeded in channelling the magic, they used the magic and put it into their own.. They combined their spells with words of the Ancients' language, a language that was spoken by the ancient race that got ridiculed. They took more magic than the earth could handle," he finished.

Finally, the guy had said something I was semi-familiar with: the Ancients and the Ancients' language. But the way he'd said it, it sounded like those creatures that embodied magic, according to him, were the Ancients. Could that really be?

In our history, they had created every living thing. Not magic. They had been gods, not creatures.

I wondered. Was he really speaking the truth?

The lot of them had been weird since they'd arrived. But throwing all of the few beliefs we had into the gutter like that? He was eradicating every bit of history I thought had been halfway true.

There had been gods and goddesses once, too long for their names to have survived the ages, that I knew. At least, that was what Emmet had told me. A few hundred years ago, witches had come to Everett Valley and extinguished any beliefs in gods with their knowledge they'd brought from the East. 

People began to believe in the witches, instead. 

Amerah, the witch of the sea, was one of few I was still able to name. But the idea of them too had fallen into an endless abyss of negligence and carelessness. Humans came with their innovations. Immortals with their secrets. And shifters with their methodologies. Where was there room for magic, aside from the immortality-part and shifters? It was all just beliefs. Religion.

But was magic really a religion?

What if magic was... actually what held together everything that lived, the way Dante's twin had explained it? 

Would that mean the gods and goddesses and the witches had never existed at all? 

If they didn't, were all our beliefs lies or unknowingly spread false-truths?

It was a lot of information to process and I noticed myself growing tired of listening although I had sucked up every piece of it like a dry sponge.

I was mesmerised, astounded, shocked and somewhat scared of it all.

It made me think how much we still didn't know. And it made me doubt whether we could survive outside of Everett Valley if we didn't know what was out there. It made me doubt everything I knew.

"Because of this ancient feud between the four races, it is highly unusual for three of them to be living in the same community without ripping each other to shreds. And now we have arrived at the question that we have been trying to answer."

Dante's twin, diplomatic as he seemed to be, folded his arms in front of his chest and glanced through the round.

Then the fourth and youngest brother spoke for the first time.

"Now. Who's the one that's been wielding the magic amongst your kind? Who are your spell-casters?"

This one was a bit longer than the past few chaps - I felt inspired and couldn't stop writing. I hope you enjoyed reading and look forward to hearing your opinions and thoughts!

Chapter Question: What did you think of all the new information? I hope it wasn't too much of in info dump!

Reader Question: What's your favorite disney movie? 

Mine's probably gonna beee... The Lion King. Yep. Makes me cry EVERY TIME but it's a beautiful story and I loooove the music. Same with Tarzan!