Prelude

PRELUDE

T he guards would rip her to shreds with their sharp canines—but only if they caught her. Hands trembling, the woman in gray scrambled along the rocky beach. The red moonlight cut a path toward a broken section in the towering wall that led into a fortress no living mortal had ever seen. The rocks scraped her bare feet, but she scarcely noticed, too focused on how her pounding heart sounded like a terrifying drumbeat. In her world, drumbeats were a prelude to violence.

She was alone with her fear—the others had gone missing—and the shadows pressed in around her. The island at night felt as tight and suffocating as the farms back in Olympia, where one could not even exhale without brushing against another body.

The woman approached the crumbling bit of wall slowly. The lapping of the waves against the shore drowned out any sounds from within the fortress—if there were any. Rumors about this place had swirled for decades, like wild and scattered leaves. If you plucked one from the sky, you might get a hint as to which tree it belonged, but it was impossible to deign the full shape of it.

In fact, the woman knew very little of what truly lurked behind those fortress walls.

All she knew was something monumental had happened.

Something very, very good.

And that something was death.