All Chapters of Bones of the Betrayed: Rise of the Last Bonekeeper: Chapter 101
- Chapter 110
112 chapters
CHAPTER 99 — “THE ECHO THAT WILL BREAK THE WORLD”
The ritual chamber burned with blue-white marrow fire. Chains of carved bone held Elias suspended above the sigil circle, each link vibrating violently as his Echo fought to tear free.Every breath he took sent a shockwave through the chamber, cracking pillars, rattling the ceiling. Seren screamed his name. “ELIAS!”He lifted his head slowly. His eyes were no longer amber. They glowed like fractured stars. “Don’t,” he said hoarsely. “Get back.”“I’m not leaving you!” Seren shouted, fighting against two Alchemists restraining her. “You promised!”“I know,” Elias said. “That’s why you have to listen now.”High Alchemist Vaelor stepped forward, robes fluttering in the violent resonance. His smile was reverent almost worshipful.“Magnificent,” Vaelor breathed. “Even bound, the Echo sings.”Caedia struggled against her own restraints, blood running from her temple. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” she spat. “If you finish this ritual.”Vaelor cut her off. “the world will be rewritten.”
CHAPTER 100 — “THE ECHO ANSWERS BACK”
The palace undercorridor shook as Elias stepped forward. Not from an explosion. Not from an attack. From recognition.Seren felt it first the vibration beneath her boots, sharp and deliberate, like the palace itself had drawn a breath.“Elias…” she whispered. “The floor.”“I know,” Elias said quietly.Caedia stopped walking. Her blind eyes lifted toward the vaulted ceiling above them. “The bones remember,” she said. “You’ve reached the heart of the old foundation.”Sylare swallowed hard. “This place feels… angry.”“It is,” Caedia replied. “Because it has been violated.”Elias’s jaw tightened. Ahead of them, the corridor widened into a vast circular chamber beneath the palace throne room.Pillars of reinforced bone and stone rose like ribs around a sunken platform etched with ancient sigils. At the center. Chains. Seren’s breath hitched. “No…”Lyra was bound to a bone altar. Her wrists were shackled above her head, resonance suppressors biting into her skin. Blood streaked her temple.
CHAPTER 101 — “WHEN THE BONES FALL SILENT”
The silence was wrong. Elias noticed it the moment he stepped through the fractured gate of the lower palace corridors. No hum. No whisper. No marrow-song beneath the stone.The bones weren’t speaking. Seren felt it too. She slowed beside him, fingers tightening around his sleeve. “Elias… do you hear that?”He shook his head. “Nothing.”“That’s not normal, is it?”“No,” Caedia said quietly from behind them. “It’s worse.”Elias stopped walking. “Worse how?”Caedia tilted her head, her blind eyes unfocused in a way Elias had learned to fear. “The bones aren’t silent,” she said. “They’re… restrained.”Seren swallowed. “Restrained by what?”Caedia’s jaw tightened. “By a counter-resonance.”Elias’s pulse spiked. “An Alchemist construct?”“No.” Caedia shook her head slowly. “Something older. Something built specifically to suffocate the Echo.”Elias felt the Echo inside him recoil not violently, not angrily, but warily. Like an animal sensing a trap. They moved forward again, slower now.T
CHAPTER 102 — “THE BONE THRONE”
The chamber was not built. It had grown. Elias felt it the moment he stepped inside the slow, ancient breathing of the Bone Throne pulsing through the floor, the walls, his ribs.Ivory arches curved overhead like the inside of a colossal ribcage, each bone etched with runes older than the kingdom itself.At the far end of the hall rose the throne woven entirely from fused vertebrae and crowned with a skull carved from living marrow.Seren stopped beside him. “This place…” she whispered. “It’s alive.”Caedia’s blind eyes glowed faintly. “The heart of the Vault,” she said. “Where the Echo was first bound.”Elias swallowed. His bones hummed in recognition. Welcome home. He clenched his jaw. “I didn’t come here for answers. I came to end this.”A slow clap echoed through the chamber. “Well said.”The voice slid across the bone walls like a blade.Elias stiffened. “Show yourself.”From behind the throne, a figure stepped into the pale light tall, robed in black and silver, bone sigils craw
CHAPTER 103 — “THE PRICE OF THE ECHO”
The scream tore out of Lyra before Elias even reached her. “STOP, DON’T TOUCH HIM!”Chains of glowing bone snapped tight around Elias’s wrists and ankles, slamming him to his knees at the center of the ritual dais.The impact rattled his skull. The Echo inside him surged violently, hammering against the restraints, but the runes etched into the floor drank the power greedily.Lyra struggled against two Alchemists holding her upright. “Let him go!” she screamed. “You said you wouldn’t hurt him!”Arch-Alchemist Vorun didn’t look at her. His pale eyes were fixed on Elias, shining with reverent hunger. “We are not hurting him,” Vorun said calmly. “We are saving the world.”Elias forced himself to lift his head. “By killing her?” His voice shook the chamber, thick with resonance even suppressed. “You think I won’t tear this place apart if you do?”Vorun smiled faintly. “You won’t. Because you can’t.”He raised one skeletal finger. The runes flared. Pain exploded through Elias’s bones. He s
CHAPTER 104 — “WHAT ANSWERS THE BLOOD”
Lyra screamed again. This time, the scream did not come from her throat. It came from the bones beneath the chamber.The floor buckled violently, hurling Seren backward as Elias tightened his grip around Lyra, bracing himself as the Echo surged instinctively to shield them. “Caedia!” Seren shouted. “What’s happening?!”Caedia stood rigid, staff trembling in her hands, blind eyes wide with terror. “It’s not the Echo,” she whispered. “It’s responding to her.”Lyra arched in Elias’s arms, gasping as golden veins flared beneath her skin, glowing brighter with each convulsion. “It hurts,” she cried. “Elias, something is pulling”“I’ve got you,” he said fiercely, pressing his forehead to hers. “Don’t let go. Listen to my voice.”The chamber groaned. Above them, the ceiling split open as massive bone struts shifted, rearranging themselves like a living skeleton responding to a command it had waited centuries to hear.Seren scrambled to her feet. “The Vault, it’s opening!”“No,” Caedia said h
CHAPTER 105 — “THE WORLD ANSWERS BACK”
Elias was falling. Not through air. Through memory. Stone scraped his palms as he twisted, trying to catch himself, but the darkness swallowed everything light, sound, direction.The Echo screamed inside him, flaring instinctively, but even it felt distorted here, stretched thin like a voice yelling underwater. “Lyra!” he shouted.No answer. Then the darkness spoke. Not with words. With pressure. With weight. With the sensation of something vast turning its attention fully finally on him. CHILD OF ECHO.Elias slammed into stone. Hard. The breath punched out of him as he rolled, coughing, Echo flaring to keep his bones from shattering. He forced himself up onto one knee, chest heaving.“Show yourself,” he snarled.The ground beneath him pulsed. Not alive. Not dead. Aware. A low vibration rippled outward, rattling his teeth. YOU FALL WHERE ROOTS MEET MARROW.Elias swallowed. “You’re the World-Bone.”The darkness shifted, revealing an endless cavern walls formed from titanic ribs, arches
CHAPTER 106 — “THE THING THAT CHOOSES”
The crack widened. Not outward. Downward. Elias felt it before he saw it the sudden release of pressure, like a lung finally allowed to breathe after being crushed for centuries.The cavern screamed as stone peeled back from itself, ribs splitting, marrow-light spilling like blood from a reopened wound. Something reached for him. Not hands. Intention.CHILD OF ECHO, the World-Bone thundered, no longer patient. YOU STAND AT THE FRACTURE.Elias staggered, barely keeping his feet as the Echo inside him convulsed violently half surging upward toward Lyra’s call, half being dragged downward into the deep marrow of the world.“Stop!” Elias roared. “You don’t get to tear me in half!”The cavern answered with a laugh. Not mocking. Ancient. ALL THINGS BREAK WHERE THEY ARE STRONGEST.Pain ripped through Elias’s chest as the Echo split again this time not cleanly. Memories tore loose. Sensations. Fear. Love.Lyra’s laugh in the rain. Seren’s grip on his arm. The city burning. Bones singing. He d
CHAPTER 107— “WHAT SURVIVES THE LIGHT”
White burned. Not brightness erasure. Elias had no sense of up or down, no sound, no Echo only the sensation of being stripped layer by layer, as if something were reading him from the inside out and discarding what it didn’t need.Then pain returned. Sharp. Grounded. Real. He slammed into stone hard enough to crack it. Elias gasped, rolling onto his side, coughing dust and blood. His hands trembled as he pushed himself upright.The cavern was gone. The Vault was gone. Above him stretched an open sky ashen, fractured, threaded with slow-moving fissures of golden light. The air hummed like a struck bell that hadn’t stopped ringing.“Lyra,” he whispered. His voice echoed strangely, as if the world itself hesitated to answer. He staggered to his feet.The ground beneath him was wrong smooth like polished bone, warm beneath his boots, faintly pulsing in rhythm with a heartbeat that wasn’t his own. He followed it.The capital was unrecognizable. Entire districts had sunk into the earth, sw
CHAPTER 108— “THE NAME BEFORE ELIAS”
The world did not stop. It waited.Everything hung frozen in the exact shape of its last intention smoke suspended mid-coil, shattered stone hovering where it had been torn free, even blood arcing in the air like a paused confession.Only Elias could move. Only Elias could breathe. The Silence recoiled. Not physically. Conceptually. For the first time since it had spoken, its presence faltered like a thought interrupted mid-sentence. …WHAT IS THIS?Elias felt it then. Not power. Not energy. Recognition. Something ancient stirred beneath his ribs not rising, not erupting, but unfolding, like a truth finally allowed to exist.His Echo did not answer. It bowed. Elias exhaled. Slow. Steady.“You knew,” he said quietly. The Silence tightened its grip on Lyra’s body. Her face contorted in pain, eyes flickering gold and shadow.YOU WERE NOT MEANT TO REMEMBER. Elias looked down at his hands. They were changing not glowing, not transforming but clarifying, edges sharpening as if reality itself w