The Thorns We Inherit (Tales of Nyxarra #1)
Prologue
There was only shadow and night.
Both infinite.
Both alone.
They wandered the stars for an age—
two silences circling one another—
until loneliness gave them shape.
Together, they began to tell stories.
Each word a seed.
From their stories, the first worlds were born—
mountains rose like breath,
oceans swelled with memory,
creatures emerged from the hush between their voices.
They made mortals who could live and die,
believing there was mercy in endings.
For a time, this was enough.
Then, they fell in love.
He was Night—
the stillness before thought,
the ache for meaning in the void.
She was Shadow—
the pulse that followed,
the spark that taught silence how to listen.
And where her shadow passed,
life bloomed.
Because she knew the oldest truth:
darkness was never the enemy.
It was the womb that cradled light,
the quiet that made beauty possible.
Without shadow, the stars would burn unseen;
without night, nothing would remember to rest.
Even the sun needs the dark to rise again.
For a while,
they were whole.
Creation and unmaking, entwined.
But love has teeth.
His stories turned cruel—
filled with hunger and endings.
Hers still sang of warmth—
of hands, of fleeting lives,
of the beauty that dares to fade.
And when she turned her gaze toward a mortal man—
when she chose a life that could end
over a throne that could not—
the silence shattered.
He watched her tear herself apart for love,
dividing her light into four daughters
and scattering them across the lands they had made together.
In his grief,
he broke himself open.
And in the breaking,
he stole what remained of her divinity.
From that theft, he made his own children—
the first to outlast death.
Born before gods.
Before prayer.
Before even the sun dared rise.
They were the echo of his heartbreak,
the proof that eternity could still bleed.
They do not die by time.
They endure because they were forged
from what the heavens tried to bury—
the fragment of her light
that darkness could never return.