<h4>Chapter 190: Return Home</h4>


    <strong>LILY POV</strong>


    I mmed into the ground outside Silver Peak’s main hall with enough force to crack the stone steps.


    Pain shot through my shoulder as I rolled, but I was too relieved to care. Solid ground. Familiar smells. The sound of pack wolves going about their daily work. After what felt like forever jumping between worlds, I was finally home.


    "Lily?" Caleb’s words came from somewhere behind me, sounding just as shocked as I felt.


    I turned to see him picking himself up from a pile of snow, dimensional energy still sparking around his hands like tiny lightning bolts. The Architect had torn us apart and thrown us across worlds, but somehow we’d ended up in the same ce.


    "How are we here?" I asked, trying to stand. "The Architect broke our bond. It separated us."


    Caleb looked at his hands in wonder. "I can still feel the physical energy. It didn’t go away when our link broke."


    Before I could answer, the main hall doors burst open and pack members poured out. But instead of running toward us with joy, they stopped dead in their tracks, their faces filled with fear.


    "Stay back!" Alpha Marcus ordered, his voice sharp with authority. "Don’t get too close!"


    My heart sank. Of course they were afraid. We probably looked like walking wrecks after everything we’d been through.


    But then I noticed something else in their faces. Not just fear of us, but fear for us.


    "The energy around you is unstable," Elder Iris said, approaching carefully with her walking stick. "You’re both flickering between this reality and somewhere else."


    I looked down at myself and gasped. She was right. My hands kept fading in and out of reality, and I could see through Caleb to the trees behind him.


    "We’re not fully here," I realized. "We’re still partially dimensional."


    "Lily!" Aiden pushed through the crowd, ignoring his father’s advice. "Thank the moon you’re alive. When you disappeared through that opening, we thought we’d lost you forever."


    "How long have we been gone?" Caleb asked.


    Aiden’s face got grim. "Three days. And they’ve been the worst three days in pack history."


    Before he could exin, a howl echoed from the trees - but not a normal wolf howl. This one sounded wrong, twisted, like it wasing from something that was trying to be a wolf but didn’t quite know how.


    "They’re back," someone whispered terrified.


    "Who’s back?" I asked.


    "The Changed Ones," Alpha Marcus said heavily. "Pack members who were touched by dimensional energy when you opened that first link. They’ve been... different ever since."


    As if summoned by his words, shapes started emerging from the tree line. At first, they looked like normal wolves, but as they got closer, I could see the terrible truth.


    They were pack members I recognized - Sarah from the nursery, Tom who worked in the kitchens, even young Jake who’d just turned sixteen. But they moved wrong, their eyes glowed with an unnatural light, and worst of all, they shed between human and wolf form without control.


    "The dimensional breach you made," Elder Iris exined quickly, "it didn’t just let you travel between worlds. It leaked energy into our world. Anyone with even a trace of dormant dimensional sensitivity got infected."


    "Infected?" Caleb stepped protectively in front of me. "They’re not sick. They’re just changing."


    "Changing into what?" Alpha Marcus asked grimly. "They can’t control their moving anymore. They phase through solid things randomly. Some of them say they can see other realities ovepping with ours."


    My blood went cold. "They’re bing like us. Partially dimensional."


    The Changed Ones reached the edge of the clearing and stopped, their bright eyes fixed on me and Caleb. I could feel their hunger - not for food, but for security. They sensed that we had something they needed.


    "They’ve been gathering," Aiden said quietly. "More arrive every hour. And they all seem to be looking for you, Lily."


    One of the Changed Ones - Sarah from the nursery - stepped forward. When she spoke, her voice echoed strangely, like it wasing from multiple ces at once.


    "Omega," she said, reaching out with hands that shed between solid and translucent. "Help us. We’re lost between worlds."


    My heart broke for her. I knew exactly how that felt.


    "I don’t know how," I admitted. "My powers are different now. Unstable."


    "Then learn," Sarah begged. "Please. We’re so tired of being nowhere."


    I looked around at the pack - my family, my house. They were all watching me with a mixture of hope and fear. They needed me to fix this, but I had no idea how.


    That’s when Caleb took my hand.


    The moment our skin touched, something incredible happened. The dimensional energy that had been crackling chaotically around us suddenly calmed, making a steady glow that enveloped both of us.


    "The bond," he said in wonder. "It’s not broken. It’s just different now."


    He was right. What bonded us now wasn’t the original mate bond or even the echo bond that had survived Aiden’s ritual. This was somethingpletely new - a fusion of our consciousnesses that had been forged in the space between dimensions.


    "We’re two people who are also one person," I realized. "That’s why we can both handle dimensional energy now."


    Together, we approached the Changed Ones. Instead of trying to fix them, we simply offered them what we had - security through connection.


    One by one, the afflicted pack members started to calm. Their shing stopped. Their eyes returned to normal. They were still changed, still partly dimensional, but no longer lost.


    "It’s working!" Aiden said excitedly.


    But our celebration was cut short by Elder Iris’s sharp intake of breath.


    "Look at the sky," she whispered.


    Above us, the blue afternoon sky was forming cracks - literal cracks, like broken ss. And through those cracks, I could see other worlds bleeding through. A world of endless night. A level made of crystalline structures. A ce where gravity worked sideways.


    "The dimensional barriers are failing," I said in fear. "Our world is starting to merge with others."


    Caleb’s hand squeezed in mine. " The Architect said it would rather destroy everything than let our ’infection’ spread."


    "It’s not destroying the dimensions," I realized with increasing dread. "It’s blending them all into one chaotic mess. No barriers, no order, just infinite worlds smashing together."


    Through the cracks in the sky, I could see things falling through from other worlds. Strange creatures, alien nts, even pieces ofndscape that didn’t belong in our world.


    "How long do we have?" Alpha Marcus asked.


    Elder Iris consulted a small device I’d never seen before - something that hummed with dimensional energy. "At this rate of deterioration, maybe six hours before the barriers copsepletely."


    "And then?" Aiden pressed.


    "Then every reality that has ever existed will upy the same space at the same time," I said quietly. "Ultimate chaos. The end of everything the way we know it."


    Caleb looked at me with determination I recognized from our first night together during the Winter Moon Festival. "So we stop it."


    "How?" I asked desperately. "We can barely maintain a few pack members. How can we fix the entire multiverse?"


    "The same way we’ve solved every other impossible problem," he said, squeezing my hand. "Together."


    But before we could make any ns, a new voice spoke from the cracks in the sky above us.


    "Toote," the Architect’s voice boomed across our world. "You wanted to fix dimensions with love? Let me show you what love leads to - absolute chaos."


    The cracks widened considerably, and through them, I could see the Architect descending toward our world.


    But it wasn’t alone.


    Behind it came an army of beings I didn’t recognize - creatures from the spaces between worlds, entities that fed on chaos and destruction.


    "The Void Walkers," Elder Iris breathed in terror. "Beings from the null gaps between dimensions. They were imprisoned when the barriers were first built."


    "And now," the Architect revealed with satisfaction, "they’re free to reim all of reality as their feeding ground."


    As the first Void Walker touched down in our clearing, its presence made the nts wither and die. Where it stepped, reality itself began to unravel.


    I looked at Caleb, at our pack, at the Changed Ones who were counting on us to save them.


    We had six hours to stop the end of everything.


    And our enemy had just brought reinforcements that could unmake life itself.