Bound in Blood and Scale (the Aetherfell Chronicles #1)

PROLOGUE

Two hundred years before the fall of the last veil-gate

The seer was dying when she made the prophecy, which was the only reason anyone believed her.

The Hollow Court had gathered that night for reasons that had nothing to do with prophecy — a border dispute between the dragon and wolf clans, the kind that had been settled and reopened a dozen times before, the kind that would have been forgotten by morning.

No one remembers now what the dispute was even about. They only remember what happened after.

The seer was old even by shifter years, an owl-blooded woman named Thessaly who had outlived three generations of the clan leaders she'd advised.

She had not spoken a true prophecy in decades.

Most of the young lords in that hall had assumed her gift had burned out long ago, the way old magic sometimes did, guttering to nothing like a candle no one remembered to tend.

They were wrong.

She rose from her seat at the edge of the chamber without being asked, and the room went quiet before she'd said a single word — because something about the air had changed, gone thick and close, the way it does right before lightning finds ground.

Her eyes had turned the flat, depthless white that marked a seer mid-vision, and when she spoke, her voice was not entirely her own.

Fire and earth, she said, were never meant to be enemies. They were meant to be bound.

A day will come when the last true flame and the last true root find each other across the fracture the clans themselves created — and on that day, the old law will be tested by something older still.

Blood will be spilled to keep them apart.

Blood will be spilled to bring them together.

And when the fire and the earth finally choose each other, something buried since the founding of this world will wake with them.

Not all who stand in that hour will survive it. But what comes after will be stronger than anything that came before — if the two halves are brave enough to become whole.

Then she collapsed, and three days later she died, and the prophecy of the Fire and the Root passed into legend the way all inconvenient truths eventually do — spoken of at festivals, argued over by scholars, and steadily disbelieved by everyone with any real power to lose if it turned out to be true.

The dragon clans decided, quietly and without much debate, that the prophecy did not apply to them.

Their bloodlines were too pure, too carefully kept, to be left to something as unpredictable as fate.

Better to arrange their own matches. Better to keep the old magic in the old families, where it could be measured and controlled.

The wolf clans decided much the same, for their own reasons.

And so, for two hundred years, the prophecy of the Fire and the Root slept — filed away in old records, half-forgotten, waiting for two people foolish enough, or simply unlucky enough, to prove it true.

It did not have to wait much longer.