A Veil of Truth and Trickery (The Veiled Realm, #1)

by Analeigh Ford

There was a curse over this world. That curse was me.

He was no willowy creature of fairytale. He was massive, looming, and oh so very real.

I was looking at him for the first time, but the way he looked at me…

Moments hung between us, a silence that held weight. It would have hung there forever, until I aged into dust and he remained a shining beacon of unadulterated youth,

“You’ll soon learn that none of us are true masters of our own fate. Our lives were decided for us long before we were born. Human or fae, that’s where we’re the same.”

“Tell me this isn’t your first time. I wouldn’t want to hurt you.” “It’s not,” I said, trying to steady my trembling lips. “There was another.” “Good,” he said. “Now I’m going to make you forget him.”

He made my fumblings with Leofwin seem positively innocent compared to how he took me. He dominated over me, giving pleasure as much as he took it.

He was a picture, a window into a dream I wasn’t entirely sure I’d awakened from.

He wasn’t a monster, not in this realm. I was merely rumored to look like one of these creatures, and I’d been ostracized and hated for it. But here one of them was, an actual, living fae, and nature itself treated him like a god.

“If it wasn’t for Caldamir, none of us would be doing this, you know.”

“He’s the one who keeps insisting on going through with this. He’s the only one. If it were up to the rest of us, now that we’ve gotten to know you, we’d find another way.”

Sometimes nature tells us what she wants. Sometimes, we’re better off listening.”

I think you just want to be the hero. You don’t want to admit that maybe, just maybe, you’re the villain.”

I’d never seen a human die before, but somehow, I didn’t think it would amount to this. This wasn’t the cutting short of a life. This was the ending of an eternity.

It was more like watching a star die, the light in his eyes burning so fiercely for that final moment as the huge piercing end of the fiend’s tail sliced straight through his body as if it were nothing more than smoke that I thought I might be blinded by it.

“Is there really anything wrong with savoring what’s right before us, even if we know it has to end?”