Prologue
THE MANTLE
1 BTC
The sea stirred.A warning of the Prince of Light’s approach.
An instrument of chaos.
Of fate.
They can be so similar in how they laugh at a carefully crafted plan.
The prince came to beg for answers, as so many do, and I slept. It is not worth the time of the stars to guide him in understanding what cannot be changed.
But my sister cracked an eye.
Stirred against the obsidian that is our body. Our being. Our blood.
She heard the whisper in the night from the unspeakable gods, and her curiosity got the better of her.
So Nyxia woke for the prince. She listened to his tale of vengeance and desire. And though she knew he was reckless, she gave him a gift to see what these cursed creatures would do with it.
Chapter 1
Elorie
293 ATC
Blue morning gloriesused to grow at the edge of Alyssium’s prison gates. The delicate petals drew a colorful boundary against the slick obsidian walls. As children growing up in the village at the center of the island, we were warned not to cross that line of morning glories. Warned of what dwells in the depths of the Fae prison.
I never understood the fear of what was locked inside when what stirred around us was just as deadly.
After all, the island of Alyssium doesn’t favor human or Fae. Death sticks to every branch in the frostbitten forest. It lingers on the icy shore and crashes like an unforgiving tide with the roll of the seasons. It claims everything, regardless of what tries to contain it. A few years back, it even claimed the morning glories.
Nothing is immune to death here. Not the trees. Not the birds.
Not even the Fae.
Which is why the prison was built on this horrible island.
The realm of Lyrichia is teeming with magic, but the island ofAlyssium, set in the middle of the sea, is without a single drop. The stony ground is cold and ordinary, fine for humans who can’t withstand the intensity of the magic saturating the rest of the realm, but deadly for the Fae if they stay too long.
Without magic, their hearts suffer the sickness of the Beating, when heartbeats quicken until they turn mortal. And even then, they don’t slow. They continue to speed up until their hearts beat so fast and brutally that they stop entirely.
So the prisoners wait, locked in their cells until the day their hearts still and their bodies are dragged out to be burned beside our own dead.
I scan the rocky beach, covered in corpses. Death hangs like a tang in the air. The stench is nearly unbearable, even with the icy wind blowing it out to sea. There are more bodies on the heaps lately—from the village and the prison.
Tonight’s funeral pyre will burn long into the night.
Callum says we’ve only seen the beginning of what will empty from the prison walls these next few moons. The Beating has started to claim the first Fae locked away at the start of the Realm War, and with how many have been brought here in the years since, I don’t doubt he’s right.
My stomach, usually steel, churns with tonight’s body count. Masses of dead Fae stretch the shore. Fae might consider themselves above us humans, but in these piles, we’re all equals. We’re all mortal in the eyes of Sarrow.
An icy gust whips a strand of white-blonde hair across my eyes as I tend to the next body on the beach. I carefully arrange the young Fae’s hands, resting one over the other on her chest. Her empty eyes reflect the storm brewing overhead. They darken as the clouds thicken, until they’re nearly as gray as the churning sea.
As the rocks.
