Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Cracks tore through the white walls of the temple, the world itself screaming as the home of the sun god, Saresh, was ripped asunder. Ancient paintings on the walls split down the middle, depictions of Saresh offering out the gift of life to the first of the Fae were blasted apart as the wrathful fury of the deities made the air quake.

The ground beneath my bare feet bucked and quaked until I was thrown onto my back so violently that pain lanced through my flesh, and my long, ebony hair was thrown across my golden eyes.

The thin, white nightgown I wore tangled around my legs as I scrambled backwards, trying to avoid the statues which toppled and smashed on the marble floor, the face of Saresh shattering a thousand times over as if he wanted all traces of his history destroyed.

The intricate marks of the gods blazed on what remained of the walls, filled with golden light as their rage made the world tremble.

“We gave you everything,” the air itself seemed to cry. “And all we asked of you was virtue. All we begged for was truth.”

Beneath me, a crack ripped through the marble floor, and I rolled over, tearing at the nightgown as I fought to get up, throwing myself aside to avoid the lumps of masonry falling from the domed, golden roof of the temple.

There had been other Fae here worshipping with me. Those who had come to pay homage to Saresh at the midday rite. But they had vanished as surely as the peace had been broken. One moment sitting all around me, the next, banished as if they had never been here at all.

What had I done to deserve this?

“You know the black deeds of your heart!”the world screamed, and I screamed with it, a lump of glimmering golden tile crashing down from the roof and slicing into my shoulder.

“I didn’t mean to,” I gasped as I lurched aside, blood pulsing through my fingers as I clamped them over the wound, my gaze on the distant door and the sunlight beyond. If I could only reach it, then I might stand a chance.

But the light was fading, the golden glow sinking into grey, then black, nothing but shattered starlight peering back at me as I ran for the arched doorway. It only seemed to grow more distant, no matter how fast I moved, and a sob tore from my throat as I saw the way my fate was falling.

“Please,” I begged of the gods who had cursed me. “Please, understand why I-”

“There will be no mercy,” they spat, many voices as one. “There is only the end.”

Power slammed into me with such violence that the air was torn from my lungs. I crumpled, my knees splitting open on the stone floor. My power was dragged from me, all that had made me what I was ripped free and returned to those who had bestowed it upon me. My Affinities were cleaved from my veins, the magical connection they had built between me and the world snapping like the chords of a harp sliced with a razor, the off-tune melody they released like a cry of death as my gifts were lost.

A sob caught in my throat as I tried to reach for those parts of my soul, the power which had lived in my veins for years upon years spilling from me like grains of sand through my fingers, impossible to hold on to.

The gods were taking away all they had ever offered us. Our magic, our Affinities, our immortality. I could feel it racing out of me as I shook beneath the force of its removal. I was consumed by the fear of what I would become now, and I begged the gods for a mercy which they had no inclination to give.

The ground broke apart beneath me and I gasped, my stomach swooping as I fell with another scream tearing from my throat.

But it wasn’t my end I feared as the fires of the pit yawned wide for my rotten soul. It was the end of all as we knew it which sent me careering into the dark, our demise spiralling ever closer, and the wrath of the gods insurmountable in its violence.