WRATH OF THE ASHEN TWINS: REBORN IN BLOOD

The Denial

You’d think a prince would at least have a spine. Turns out, when you mix royal politics with pure, unadulterated cowardice, men fold faster than a cheap tent.

The second my morning sickness started giving me away in the middle of the capital, the Cresthaven high court moved like a pack of starving wolves. They didn't care about the secret hours we spent talking in the orchards. They didn't care that I had spent half my life bleeding in the mud so those fat nobles could keep their castles. All they saw was a massive scandal that would make the crown look like an absolute joke.

They dragged Prince Cassian right into the high chambers to face the music, expecting some dramatic showdown. Instead, I stood there in heavy iron chains while the man who swore he hated the crown as much as I did looked straight through me like I was a total stranger.

"I don't know this woman," Cassian said. His voice was completely flat, his eyes dead. He stood beside the Cresthaven King, draped in his fine Valen furs, trading his honor for a peaceful border treaty. "Valen takes no responsibility for a disgraced soldier losing her mind."

I didn't scream. I didn't beg. I just stared at him, feeling every single piece of warmth I had ever felt turn straight to ice. He threw me under the bus without even blinking, just to keep his own throne safe.

The sentence was swift. A public execution would cause my veteran soldiers to riot and burn the capital to the ground, so they chose something much crueler. They stripped my rank, loaded me up with heavy, iron-spiked chains, and dragged me out to the northern edge of the map.

The massive iron gate of the border wall swung open, and they threw me bodily down the rocky, mist-choked cliffs into the Ashen Wastes.

The fall tore the skin off my arms, and the heavy iron gates slammed shut behind me with a final, crushing *thud*. I was completely alone, pregnant, and bleeding into the freezing mud of a forest where everything wanted you dead before sundown.

For weeks, it was pure, unadulterated hell.

I pushed deeper and deeper into the terrifying heart of the Wastes, eating whatever roots didn't kill me, sleeping in hollowed-out tree trunks, and fighting off anything that moved. But the forest eventually fought back.

It happened on a ridge choked with black thorns. A massive, jagged beast—half wolf, half nightmare—lunged straight out of the mist with a roar that rattled my teeth. I didn't have a sword, just a sharpened bone and pure, unhinged rage. I fought the thing tooth and nail, driving my makeshift blade straight through its throat, but not before its massive hind paw tore clean through my leather trousers and ripped open my thigh down to the bone.

I didn't care about the blood at first. I just wrapped a dirty strip of cloth around my leg and kept walking deeper into the dark, hidden thickets of the woods, desperate to get away from the border.

Biggest mistake of my life.

Three days later, the fever hit like a freight train. My vision went black at the edges, my skin burned like I was standing in a bonfire, and when I finally unwrapped the wound, the flesh around the tear wasn't healing—it was turning jet-black, bubbling and rotting away. The beast's claws hadn't just torn my leg; they were coated in a slow, rotting neurotoxin.

I collapsed in the thick mud, unable to stand, the poison eating its way toward my vital organs with every single heartbeat.

That was when she found me.

An old, scarred hermit woman living deep in the forbidden interior of the Wastes—someone who had fled the kingdoms decades ago to escape the madness. She dragged my half-dead body into a damp, hidden cave, pouring burning herbal washes over my leg while cursing a blue streak under her breath.

"The beast's rot," the old woman grunted, shaking her head as she looked at the black veins spreading up my stomach. "There’s no cure for this, girl. The venom is in your blood. It’s going to melt you from the inside out within the month. And with those twins kicking in your belly? You're both dead meat."

*Dead?* I laughed, a harsh, rattling sound that tasted like copper. I hadn't survived the Red Ravine, survived Cassian's cowardly betrayal, and dragged myself down this frozen hellhole just to let some random forest monster finish me off.

"I'm not dying," I hissed, gripping the stone floor until my knuckles turned white. "And neither are my kids."

For the next two months, while the poison slowly ate away at my body, turning my leg into a permanent ache and leaving me scarred for life, I fought death every single day. I forced myself to stand when my legs felt like lead. I learned every poisonous plant and healing root the forest had to offer. I turned my own suffering into armor, refusing to let the venom win.

When the time finally came in that dark, freezing cave, alone with the old woman, I brought two screaming, healthy infants into the world. Vesper and Cael.

They had my stubbornness, my eyes, and the ghost of an empire waiting for them to grow up. The poison couldn't kill me, and Cresthaven couldn't bury me.

Now, twenty years later, those twins are sharp, deadly, and ready to walk right back through those capital gates to collect the debt they owe us.