Are Beast Nobles Supposed to Be This Lewd?

Mirabelle knew this feeling. She had experienced it before.

Her brows drew together as she searched through her memories, trying to grasp something that hovered just beyond reach.

Then it came to her.

Every time that ancient power had awakened inside her.

Every time it had risen from somewhere impossibly deep, taking control of her body until Mirabelle had felt more like a passenger within her own skin.

Every time she had marked one of her mates.

She had seen these places. Visions.

Places she had never visited and yet had somehow stood within.

Ancient forests. Endless landscapes.

Places filled with something so vast that she’d never found the words to describe what she’d felt there.

And they had watched her.

Not with eyes.

Not like an animal hiding between the trees, following her movements.

The places themselves had been aware of her.

Mirabelle had always been left with the strange impression that she’d been standing inside something alive.

Something breathing.

Something impossibly old.

A single enormous being composed of trillions upon trillions of individual pieces.

Every tree a part of it.

Every leaf.

Every root buried beneath the earth.

Every insect crawling beneath bark.

Every drop of water.

Every grain of soil.

Separate lives, separate pieces, and yet somehow all belonging to one vast whole.

Mirabelle slowly looked around her.

At the metallic veins running through the leaves.

At the glowing moss spreading across ancient roots.

At the tiny lights drifting silently between the trees.

At trunks so enormous they disappeared into the darkness above.

A faint shiver traveled across her skin.

It was the same.

Not similar.

The same.

That impossible sensation of standing before something without being able to point toward where it began or where it ended.

The forest wasn’t merely surrounding her.

It was aware of her.

And just like those places in her visions...

It was watching.

Instinctively, Mirabelle reached inward.

Toward her mate bonds.

Toward Kaelith and Lucien.

Toward Silas, somewhere far beyond the borders of Luchsenstein.

She needed something familiar. Something that reminded her that she wasn’t truly alone in this strange, breathing forest.

And they were there.

Relief immediately loosened something in her chest. All three bonds remained exactly where they should be.

But...

Mirabelle frowned.

Something was wrong with them.

Not wrong. Different.

Muted.

She focused on Kaelith.

Usually, sensing him required almost no effort at all. His presence was simply there, warm and familiar at the edge of her consciousness. If she concentrated, she could distinguish emotions flowing through the bond with surprising clarity.

Now... it felt like trying to hear someone through water.

The connection was there.

She could feel the vibration of emotion traveling through it, but everything arrived strangely muffled and distant.

As though Kaelith wasn’t somewhere behind her in the forest, but impossibly far away.

Lucien felt the same.

Even Silas, whose bond she’d grown accustomed to sensing across enormous distances, somehow seemed no farther away than the other two.

Distance had become meaningless here.

Mirabelle concentrated.

Confusion.

That came from Kaelith.

Concern.

Lucien.

A restless pulse followed, sharp enough that she suspected they had realized they could no longer follow her. But beneath those emotions, she sensed what mattered most.

They were alright. There was no fear sharp enough to suggest danger.

Mirabelle released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

’I’m fine.’

She pushed the thought toward them.

Or rather, not the words themselves. She still wasn’t entirely sure how to describe communication through the mate bonds.

It wasn’t speaking.

It was more like taking the meaning behind a thought, wrapping it in emotion, and pushing it gently along something that wasn’t physically there.

Safe.

Calm.

I’m alright.

Don’t worry.

She sent as much reassurance as she could toward the distant warmth of her mates.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then something faint returned.

Relief.

Mirabelle smiled.

Good. Her attention began to withdraw from the bonds. And stopped.

There was something else!

Mirabelle went completely still. Her smile disappeared. For several heartbeats, she didn’t move.

Then her ears slowly rose.

There was...

Another bond.

Her eyes widened.

’What?’

She immediately searched for it again.

There.

Definitely there.

A fourth connection.

Mirabelle’s heart gave one hard beat against her ribs. For one completely absurd moment, her first thought was that she’d somehow acquired another mate without noticing.

Which —

No.

Absolutely not!

Even by the standards of her increasingly ridiculous life, surely she would have noticed that.

Mirabelle closed her eyes.

The forest disappeared.

The glowing flowers.

The ancient trees.

The drifting fireflies.

All of it faded as she turned her attention entirely inward.

She knew what her mate bonds felt like by now. They were difficult to describe because they weren’t physical things, and yet her mind seemed determined to translate them into something she could understand.

If she had to give them a shape, they were like threads. No. Wires.

Fine strands of warm light stretching outward from somewhere deep inside her.

Three of them.

Each distinct.

Each alive with the presence at its other end.

They pulsed. Warmth traveled through them.

Emotions. Sometimes something so intensely physical that Mirabelle would have preferred her mates learn a little emotional privacy.

They were delicate in appearance, but she knew better than to mistake that for weakness.

Those bonds had survived distance.

Pain. Even whatever strange barrier now separated her from Kaelith and Lucien.

But this new connection...

Mirabelle’s mental attention shifted toward it.

And everything about it was different.

It wasn’t a thread.

It wasn’t light.

It was a current.

A broad, black stream running through the darkness of her inner perception.

Mirabelle instinctively recoiled.

Not because it felt dangerous.

Strangely, it didn’t.

The darkness wasn’t cold.

It wasn’t malicious.

It didn’t carry the hunger or hostility she would have expected from something that looked, at least within her mind, like an endless river of blackness.

If anything...

It felt calm.

Deep.

Unmoving despite the sensation of constant flow.

The mate bonds demanded attention simply by existing. They pulsed and shifted with every emotion of the males connected to her.

This didn’t. It was quieter.vSo quiet that Mirabelle suspected it might have been there for several minutes before she’d noticed it.

And yet...

It was stronger. Far stronger.

The realization made her uncomfortable.

Her mate bonds felt like something that could stretch endlessly without breaking.

This felt as though it didn’t need to stretch at all.

It simply...

Was.

Solid.

Stable.

Ancient.

Mirabelle cautiously reached toward it with her awareness.

The instant she touched it, something seemed to move beneath her feet.

Her eyes flew open.

Nothing had changed.

The forest remained still around her.

Fireflies drifted between the enormous trunks.

Water gathered along the tip of a fern and dropped silently into the glowing moss below.

But Mirabelle could suddenly feel the earth.

Not merely beneath her bare feet.

Farther.

Deeper.

She sucked in a breath and immediately pulled her awareness away.

The sensation vanished.

Mirabelle stared down at the ground.

"What the hell..."

Her voice sounded impossibly small here.

She closed her eyes again.

The black current remained.

Waiting.

Mirabelle examined it more cautiously this time.

There was no emotion coming from the other end. No recognizable consciousness.

Nothing she could interpret as another person.

So no.

Definitely not a mate bond.

But it was a connection.

A connection that hadn’t existed before she’d entered this place.

Or...

Mirabelle’s fingers twitched.

Her thumb brushed against the heavy signet ring on her little finger.

Had it?

Perhaps it had existed before.

Perhaps she simply hadn’t been capable of sensing it?

Her attention returned to that immense black current. Somewhere beyond her closed eyes, the forest seemed to breathe.

Mirabelle swallowed.

"What are you?"

No answer came.

And yet, as she focused on it again, she realized something. Just like her mate bonds, it went somewhere.

The connection didn’t simply exist inside her. It stretched outward, flowing in a distinct direction.

Mirabelle opened her eyes.

Slowly, she turned in a circle again. The black current shifted within her perception.

She stopped.

"Alright..."

Apparently, that was as good a direction as any.

Mirabelle began walking. There was still no path.

Ferns rustled around her bare legs as she pushed through them, their damp fronds brushing cool trails across her skin. Moist earth yielded softly beneath her feet, occasionally interrupted by thick roots that forced her to watch where she stepped.

Tiny purple lights drifted through the shadows around her. The deeper she went, the stranger the vegetation became.

Clusters of mushrooms grew from fallen trunks, their translucent caps glowing from within in muted shades of blue and green. Thin streams of white mist rose from some of them, curling lazily upward before dissolving into the humid air.

Mirabelle gave those a slightly wider berth.

She wasn’t about to discover whether magical mushroom smoke was poisonous during the most important ceremony of her life.

Something chirped somewhere high above her. A second sound answered from much farther away.

Leaves whispered.

Water dripped.

And beneath all of it, Mirabelle could almost imagine she heard something deeper.

A slow vibration traveling through the earth.

The black current guided her onward.

Until the ferns suddenly ended. Mirabelle stepped between two enormous tree trunks— And stopped.

The forest opened before her.

A clearing.

It was bright. After the deep green twilight beneath the trees, Mirabelle almost had to squint.bYet when she looked upward, the canopy was still there.vCompletely closed.

Ancient branches intertwined high above the clearing, their leaves forming such a dense ceiling that not a single ray of sunlight could possibly penetrate it.

The light came from below. From the center.

A lake filled almost the entire clearing.

Its surface was perfectly still. Not a ripple disturbed it. Not an insect touched it.

Not even the occasional droplets falling throughout the forest seemed to reach this place.

The water itself appeared almost transparent, yet something within it shimmered in shades of white and the palest blue, giving the entire lake an ethereal glow.

And reflected upon its mirror-like surface was... Mirabelle slowly raised her head.

"Oh..."

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