Total pages in book: 362
Estimated words: 347293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1736(@200wpm)___ 1389(@250wpm)___ 1158(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 347293 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1736(@200wpm)___ 1389(@250wpm)___ 1158(@300wpm)
The one who walked only stopped when he saw her, his hand protectively cradling the leather satchel that had faded from brown to yellow in the centuries that had passed.
We waited.
We waited and watched as he whispered in the new Queen’s ear, told her more than what the son of Primals had even spoken of. We watched as heroes became villains and entire histories were rewritten. We wept when the forgotten symbol of true Death was raised throughout the mortal realm, etched in gold and surrounded by crimson. And we saw the day he brought the Crimson Queen to the cliffs and, for the first time, opened the satchel, now a shade of tan, pulling out The Star. We watched as he gave it to the Queen, and she took possession of it with great care.
And we knew that what the realms had first whispered thousands of years ago, even before a Queen ruled Iliseeum, would not be stopped.
And we saw.
Her birth stirred Death from his slumber. Each year that passed, he grew stronger, and those buried even deeper than him in lands across all the realms began to grow restless. We could not look away when her Ascension, at the hands of her fated mate, released Death and woke our brethren in lands beyond the Primal Veil. We wept again as the tallest mountains erupted, spewing forth flames and clouds that consumed all in their path, boiling the rivers and turning seas into deserts as they clawed their way from the ground. We didn’t look away when they saw what man had done to their precious land and blessed forests. We mourned as they laid waste to sprawling stone kingdoms and toppled great steel cities in their rage, ending the lives of billions of mortals in one cruel sweep of retribution.
For as told by the last oracle, they had risen as the ruin and wrath of the once-great beginning.
And she, the second daughter, with blood full of ash and ice, fated for the future King, summoned the true Primal of Life and then rose as Blood and Bone.
And what we saw then, as old gods rose and the Primal Veils weakened, shocked even the eldest of us. We saw the future that would come, but this end was different.
It would be a beginning soaked in blood. For every choice—from the moment the first viktor sacrificed himself to save the Silver Queen to when Sotoria fell from the cliffs; when Nyktos screamed at the realms and Ascended a mortal to become the Queen of the Gods; the failure of the first daughter and the birth of the second; the desperate love of a mate, to that of a mother’s desperation—and every action had been birthed from the same emotion.
Whether it was unrequited or welcomed. Whether it was felt between siblings who never moved past the loss of the other or for one’s children before they were even born into the realm. Whether it was forged from unending grief, between true mates of the heart, or drove a mother to plunge a dagger into the heart of her true mate instead of her daughter. It was all the same. Some great. Some terrible. And it had driven the realms to the brink of what was to come.
It was the most selfish and altruistic thing in all the realms, more powerful than the Ancients, and the only thing that could snap the threads of fate. It was the only hope the realms had now.
Love.