House of Flame and Shadow (Crescent City, #3)

by Sarah J. Maas

“But when I came out, there were rumors. That a great number of people had vanished, as if they had never been. Some said to another world, others said they’d moved on to distant lands, still others said they’d been chosen by the Cauldron and spirited away somewhere.”

“It is in our history, Rhysand,” Amren said gravely. “But the Asteri were not known by that name. Here, they were called the Daglan.”

lodestone

“The glowing letters inked on her back … they’re the same as those in the Book of Breathings.”

Nesta glanced to the shadows behind Bryce, as if someone stood there. But she said, “A Middengard Wyrm.” “Middengard?” Bryce started at the word. “Like—Midgard? Did they come from my world originally?” Horrific as the creature was, to have another being from her world here was … oddly comforting. And maybe finding a scrap of comfort in that fact proved how fucking desperate she was.

Nesta’s eyes gleamed like a cat’s in the dimness. “Just the shadows.”

Showing a masked queen, a crown upon her head, bearing instruments in her hand and standing before an adoring crowd.

The last carving before the river had been one of transition: a Fae King and Queen seated on thrones, a mountain—different from the one with the palace atop it—behind them with three stars rising above it. A different kingdom, then. Some ancient High Lord and Lady, Nesta had suggested before approaching the river.

Azriel said softly, voice tinged with pain, “She looks like Rhysand’s sister.”

eyes. She lounged in golden robes, a crown of stars upon her head. Her red lips pulled back in a cold smile as her hand closed tightly around the seed of power.

But my mother, Theia, used the time she served the Daglan to learn all she could about their instruments of conquest. The Dread Trove, we called it in secret. The Mask, the Harp, the Crown, and the Horn.

Thus the land’s powers became my mother’s. Dusk, twilight—that’s what the island was in its long-buried heart, what her power bloomed into, the lands rising with it. It was, as she said, as if the island had a soul that now blossomed under her care, nurtured by the court she built here.

They were Fae like us, but not. The ears, the grace, the strength were identical, but they were shape-shifters, all of them. Each capable of turning into an animal. And each, even in their humanoid body, equipped with elongated canine teeth.

Not as screaming echoed through the walls. Through the stone. Silene’s people had reached the pass, and now banged on the rock, begging to be let through.

World-walkers.”

Light-Stealer

“It’s called a smokeshow,” Roga drawled. “Whiskey, grated ginger, and a little draki magic to make it look fancy.”

“And she,” the Under-King went on, gesturing to that unusual depiction of Urd towering above him, “was not a goddess, but a force that governed worlds. A cauldron of life, brimming with the language of creation. Urd, they call her here—a bastardized version of her true name. Wyrd, we called her in that old world.”

It confirmed what Lidia had long guessed. Why she had named Brannon after the oldest legends from her family’s bloodline: of a Fae King from another world, fire in his veins, who had created stags with the power of flame to be his sacred guards.