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PROLOGUE 2
The City of Numenos
The warm sun bathed the streets in light as I walked along. Morgan’s laughter echoed through the air as she ran ahead.
Around us, most of the city's inhabitants were carrying on with their lives, unaware of the impending doom that threatened on the horizon.
There was no panic yet. But soon there would be. The truth song rang in my heart.
Whispers had already begun to circulate in the marketplaces. And marketplace whispers moved fast as wildfire.
We had days. Perhaps only hours.
A plague had emerged in the neighboring city of Meridium in the midst of a festival.
Its merciless grip had fallen upon Meridium's children.
The rumors were too horrific to be believed. Some said the children died painlessly. Others spoke of wild, nightmarish things worse than death. A gruesome tapestry of pain and torment.
My heart was full of fear, heavy as a storm cloud, for I knew today would be my undoing.
My husband Gorlois ruled Valtain with an iron fist.
Within me, hatred and fear for him intertwined like ivy strangling a once-proud oak.
My hate and fear ran as deep and as true as the love he bore our daughter. An affection he concealed, even from me, for he could not afford to be seen as weak.
His other children were fully grown and had come into their power.
Lorion, indulgent and arrogant, served his father's whims with blind loyalty as the most brutal general of his armies.
Sarrasine, with her haunting melodies and captivating voice, was traveling through Aercanum, no one knew quite where. She cared nothing for the ongoing war, oblivious to everything but the sound of her own ballads.
Orcades oversaw a fleet of ships. Her heart was fierce. She was the boldest and most clever of her father's generals, his right hand in the battle we waged with Myntra. Orcades could be reasoned with. But she was not here now. If she was... Well, perhaps she might help me. Or perhaps she would see me bound and chained.
But the others, the progeny of a High King who had defied death for millennia, were little more than idle symbols of power. Spoiled and consumed by their own desires. Children of a sovereign who had lived for thousands of years, choosing wives who would sate his lust and caring nothing for their own needs or desires.
My own union to Valtain’s High King had been arranged in my childhood. Gorlois's keen gaze had selected me from a crowd, seeing within me a fragment of the daughter he had lost long ago.
In me, he said, he would plant the seed of that child again and see it come to fruition.
In Morgan, our precious daughter, his dreams had materialized, breathing life into the legacy he thought he had lost forever.
She was his dream come to life.
The daughter he had lost.
The dream I was now contemplating taking away.
Because for all the love he bore our daughter, more than any of his other children, I knew Gorlois would never protect her.
The fear of appearing weak and vulnerable consumed him, clouding his judgment. My desperate pleas to close the city gates had fallen upon deaf ears, met with nothing more than laughter. He silenced the truth song that resided in my heart, dismissing it as a mere distraction.
All the people of Valtain were his people and Numenos must shelter them, he said. No matter what the cost.
With a chill in my heart, I had forced myself to a calmness I did not feel. When I had said I was taking Morgan for a walk, he had not even tried to stop us. Even knowing what I had told him, he saw no need to shelter this girl so young and precious to his heart.
