Epilogue

For seven thousand years, the Split Sea stood perfectly still. No waves lapped at the shoreline. No being alive—fae, human, or beast—had seen its crystalline surface disturbed. No one knew why the once rich, life-giving sea had died in the days following the Great War.

Fisherman's nets, once filled with fat catches of fish and many-limbed crustaceans, all came back empty. Or worse, filled with death and decay. The mammals that had once built their dens along the shore disappeared. Elemental water-wielders tried to channel their magic into its depths, but found it did not answer. Terrestrials who might have once explored its swirling eddies in their beast forms found lakes to swim instead.

But on that day when the faerie queen who was prophesized opened a rift, when she found her home taken by the darkness, destroyed by the ancient evil that her kind had long forgotten… on that day, something changed.

The surface of the Split Sea broke for the first time in seven thousand years.

And from it arose not one figure, but two.

A male of cold wind, of ire and anger, well-suited to dwell in those frigid depths… and to tend to the female at his side.

The heir to the realm of shift and mist.

Hand in hand they rose. And when they took that first step onto land, ready to fulfill their own destiny, the entire continent of Annwyn shook.

It is death to all but the one for which it is made—the best of them all—the one who shall come at the moment of direst need.

Far away, on a distant strip of land at the heart of a mighty kingdom, a king reached out a hand to steady his queen. Found her ready, at last, for what was to come.

The end was near. The wheel of time run out.

The moment of direst need.

The Siege Perilous.

THE END