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Kissed by the Gods Chapters 54–63 Summary
This Caty Rogan Kissed by the Gods chapter summary contains full spoilers.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 54
Ryot walks in to find Leina with Roran, a man he’s hated for years. Before Roran can get a word out, Ryot grabs him by the throat. Leina talks him down, and he lets go, but when Roran tries to speak, Ryot kicks him in the throat and crushes his larynx. He drags Roran out and hands him off to Nyrica to find a healer. On his way back in, Thalric catches him and warns that pursuing anything with Leina will change everything and that once he starts down that road, there’s no undoing it.
Back in the room, Leina demands to know why Ryot stepped in when she’d already handled it. He admits he was jealous when he heard she was there with Roran. He cups her face and tells her she undoes him completely, that he has no composure around her. She replies that composure has never been something she needed from him. He asks her to tell him to leave. She won’t. They kiss.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 55
Leina and Ryot finally act on their attraction, kissing as he carries her to the bed. When he notices how much of her the silk dress revealed to everyone downstairs, jealousy takes over and he tears it off her. She smooths things over by reminding him that he’s the only one who gets to see her like this. He goes down on her until she climaxes, then draws her on top of him, making clear he wants them to continue together.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 56
Ryot and Leina sleep together. Partway through, he pauses to confirm she took a contraceptive tonic, and she has. Afterward, they lie quietly until a knock at the door signals they need to return to the Synod. He tells her their relationship has to stay secret, and she already knows, nodding toward Nyrica and Thalric as people who keep the same kind of confidence.
After stepping out briefly, Ryot asks Nyrica to find Leina something to wear since her dress is ruined. When he turns back, Leina is unconscious on the bed. Her pulse has dropped to almost nothing, and she’s gone cold to the touch. He holds her, reassures her quietly, wraps her in a sheet, and draws his sword.
Ryot stands guard over Leina’s body while praying to the gods to protect her in the Veil, where her consciousness has apparently gone.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 57
Leina crosses into the Veil alone this time and struggles from start to finish. When she finally pushes through, Bri is already waiting.
Bri tells Leina to calm down because her fear is unsettling the Veil itself, something Leina had no idea was possible.
Leina asks what Bri is doing there. Bri explains that her parents have always forbidden her from sharing what she sees and hears, but she’s breaking that rule now because keeping quiet means everyone dies. Leina swears she’ll never tell anyone about Bri or her gift.
Bri says she needs to show Leina something and reaches out to touch her. The moment she does, Leina is pulled into a vision of a battlefield, ash and blood everywhere, draegoth cutting through bodies, Kher’zenn flooding past broken barricades, faravars dropping from the sky, and someone she loves screaming. A face forms and mouths a single word she can’t hear but knows in her bones. Run.
Leina returns to herself in the Veil, shaking. Bri is panicked and apologizes, saying she only meant to show her part of it.
Bri then warns that the vision is what awaits everyone if Leina doesn’t go to Aish in time to warn them the Kher’zenn are on their way.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 58
Leina wakes after a day and a half unconscious in the Veil, and the first thing she does is warn Ryot and the Elder that the Kher’zenn are planning to strike Aish before pushing into Faraengard and Selencia. Ryot argues the Kher’zenn have never been able to reach Aish geographically, but Leina is adamant that this time they’ve found a way.
Outside, Vaeloria is so desperate to reach Leina after the long separation that she beats her wings hard enough to shatter the infirmary window. The Elder takes this as his cue and announces they’re all riding for Aish immediately. Ryot tries to block Leina from going, pointing out she just woke up and isn’t even dressed, but she shuts him down, grabs her boots and daggers, and walks out to find the rest of her things.
Before Ryot can follow, the Elder stops him with two additional orders. He wants Princess Rissa brought along and the full cast assembled at the galehold.
Ryot absorbs what the mission actually means, since the Crown and the Synod haven’t had any contact with Aish in nearly a thousand years, and Aish has never allowed outsiders through its borders.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 59
The group flies to Aish to warn its people that the Kher’zenn are planning an invasion. They land outside the capital, Amarune, and are immediately met by armed Aishan soldiers who have no interest in welcoming them. Aruveth, their commander, accuses Faraengard of being entirely self‑serving and dismisses the warning outright, arguing that geography and the season make a Kher’zenn attack impossible. He starts to leave.
Leina rides forward and calls Aruveth back. She reveals she’s Selencian, which catches him off guard and changes the mood of the encounter. The Elder then points out that the last veilstrider appeared during the previous great invasion and that the unusual surge of gifted warriors across kingdoms is a sign something catastrophic is approaching.
Aruveth sends a message into the city via a trained messenger bird and receives a reply almost immediately. Whatever it says changes his mind. He formally welcomes the group into Aish, though he singles out Princess Rissa with a pointed warning that any betrayal will be met with lethal consequences. The group takes flight and heads for Amarune.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 60
Ryot and his companions find themselves at a banquet in Aish, badly outnumbered by their armed and watchful hosts. They quietly agree to keep their heads down and avoid trouble.
The mood shifts when Leif openly wonders if Aishan Altor are permitted to have families, a question that visibly shocks their hosts and lays bare how differently things are done back home.
Everything changes during Aruveth’s toast, when he marks the occasion as the first time the three peoples have stood together since a massacre nearly a thousand years ago. Faelon dismisses it outright, insisting Selencia has never had Altor of its own, but the rest of the group has already started connecting the dots. The horror on their faces speaks for itself.
Aruveth clears the hall and asks the group what they believed the annual Collection of Selencian boys had actually been.
Leina collapses under the weight of it and cries out names in anguish. Ryot crosses the room to reach her, but she scrambles away in terror and screams at him to stay back. In that moment, he understands what she sees when she looks at him now, and the devastating realization that he’s been on the wrong side of history the entire time hits him hard.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 61
Leina wakes in the middle of the night, still reeling from the revelation that her brother, Levvi, and Alden were murdered. She heads for the door intending to take a walk in the garden below but finds Ryot asleep on the floor outside her room.
Startled, Ryot jumps up and draws his sword before realizing it’s Leina. She pulls him inside and immediately goes after him about Rissa, demanding to know what’s really going on between them. Ryot tells Leina that she means everything to him, and something in her breaks open. She collapses against him sobbing, finally letting herself grieve without pretending to be fine.
When Leina steadies herself, she asks Ryot to lower his mental defenses. He does it without hesitation, and she feels everything he’s been holding back, including a love so fierce it nearly overwhelms her. She opens herself in return and lets him feel the fear, the longing, the grief, and the love she hasn’t said out loud. They share a deep kiss until the distant sound of trumpets cuts through the quiet, interrupting them.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 62
Trumpets blast across Amarune, and the riders mobilize. Ryot orders Leina to stay at the rear with Thalric and the other wards. Before the two groups split off, Thalric pulls Nyrica into a fierce, desperate kiss.
The Aishan force lines up along the shore: Ryot, the Elder, and Aruveth at the front; Leina, Leif, and Thalric at the rear. Leif explains why the Kher’zenn prefer a daylight attack—their pale draegoths are nearly invisible against cloud cover. Thalric adds that the last major swarm was more than three centuries ago.
What everyone took for stormclouds rolling in turns out to be hundreds of draegoths. Riders peel off to warn the city and the surrounding desert tribes as Amarune evacuates. Aruveth tells his badly outnumbered force plainly that they cannot win, but every moment they hold the line buys their people a chance to escape.
A larkling arrives with orders for Leina and Leif to pull out and escort Princess Rissa to warn Faraengard. Leif goes without hesitation, taking Rissa along with a baby a grandmother pressed into her arms. Leina refuses, ignoring orders from both Thalric and the furious look Ryot throws her across the battlefield.
The archers manage to bring down a handful of draegoths, but the swarm barely thins. In the middle of it all, Leina spots one Kher’zenn watching her rather than fighting, and she feels a strange pull connecting them through the Veil. She recognizes this as the moment Bri foresaw. When she asks Vaeloria what to do, the mare rears in answer, and Leina slices open the Veil, and they vanish.
Kissed by the Gods Chapter 63
Leina enters the Veil and has a revelation about what it truly is. She’s always thought of it as something wild and dangerous to be fought, but she realizes it’s a living presence made up of souls rather than a place at all. She locates a cluster of corrupted souls within it, and she and Vaeloria turn toward the battlefield below.
The Altor are losing badly in an aerial fight against the Kher’zenn and their draegoths. Leina dives in on Vaeloria and starts cutting down enemy riders, giving the Altor enough of an opening to push forward. She searches the chaos for Ryot, terrified he’s already dead, and finds him alive and still fighting hard. A shredwhip tears across her forearm, but she shakes off the pain and reaches for the Veil. It comes to her immediately, feeling completely natural.