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“The true measure of strength is not in the lives we take, but in the lives we save. Rhon Ghislaine, I spare your life today. Take your second chance and use it wisely—do not make me regret my mercy.”
Luther gazed at me like I was the embodiment of hope fulfilled. Like I was the answer to every question he had ever asked, the harmony to every song he’d ever sung. He looked at me like I was the sun and the moon and the stars, all the light in the world, shining a path for him out of the lonely dark.
I had tried to show mercy. I had offered them peace, something beautiful and human, a chance at a better world, and they had turned up their noses.
There was no longer a realm and her Queen, but one single devastating force of nature.
but the sight of Luther in a crown to match mine left me unexpectedly flushed and more than a little breathless.
“Because, while I was ready... you were not.”
Luther—the beloved, feared, universally respected Prince Luther, the late King’s favored and the hero of the realm—was a forbidden half-mortal, just like me.
Then she showed me a vision of myself as a man, kneeling to a powerful grey-eyed Queen.” I took a sharp breath and pulled back to look at him. “She showed you... me?”
Then I saw you standing there half-naked and spitting fire, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I became...” He smiled guiltily. “...distracted.”
“Flameroot?” Luther’s eyes flew open, his voice heating with anger. “Your mother was giving you flameroot?”
“Go get coronated, my Queen,” he murmured against my lips. “We’ve got a realm to save.”
Everflame was the source of all life and death, an eternally burning tree with branches that scraped the clouds and roots that spread all the way to the Sacred Sea.
It had been eight months since I’d first heard it in my head that afternoon in the alley, but it had haunted my dreams ever since.
The black pools of her eyes rolled skyward. “I sent a vial of blood, did I not? Clearly you were able to complete the ritual without me.”
“Good luck, Daughter of the Forgotten.”
heartstone.
They shed their blood on this heartstone to Forge a mighty spell that created our nine realms.”
“This is our most precious secret, the truth that each of us guards with our lives. For if the heartstone is destroyed, so too...
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The flameroot may weaken, the godstone may kill, but only the heartstone could put an end to their rule forever.
The handle was set with a series of milky white gemstones.
Their eyes were fixed on the blade in their hand, its opalescent stones now a smoky grey.
“Blue,” they whispered. “The stones should be blue.”
Her face was smooth with perfect calm and that cold, all-knowing smile.
“Diem!” she screamed. “Diem, run!” And with a deafening boom and a blast of fire and rubble, everything exploded. And my world went black.
Soon, Auralie would be forced to unearth some truths she’d spent the last two decades desperate to keep buried.
The scent of moss and cedar wafted to her nose as the man growled in her ear.
Luther
But if Prince Luther had not inherited the Crown, how could he be here on the island?
There was a surprising sincerity in his tone, and for some reason, she found herself believing him.
Auralie’s heart stopped. Long, wavy white hair. Grey, terrified eyes. A face she knew and loved more intimately than any other in existence. “Diem,” she breathed.
