Reaping the Fae Rose

Prologue

THE MANTLE

There was a whisper through the trees before the female parted the branches.

Nym lay, looking up at the stars while the night opened. Realms shifted, revealing the one who was brighter than all of them.

We both sat, watching her.

A flash of blue fire in a black night licked up from the heart of the realm, delivering her before us. Neither creature nor Fae. A female with a young face and sky-blue hair. Eyes that churned like the sea crested. She sat in the grass before us, wanting to play.

She had a name once.

Then again, she had many names and many faces. Magic poured from her depths, searching for her counterpart but finding nothing save herself in this realm.

Nym cocked her head, watching the female as she traced a pattern in the wind.

Singing a song that was not Fae or human.

It tangled in my thoughts and twisted them.

Seared them from my mind the moment I thought them.

As if this fire, pouring from her throat, was to be heard by something other than us.

Arms stretched, she reached.

Magic barreled in all directions, stripping me of strength and being. I tried to find my sister’s hand in the space between us, but my fingers never met Nym’s. I could not reach any longer.

We were apart, and we were one. We were close, but so far. Nym was the glowing moon, and I was the lightning raining from the sky. The aether was not just a part of me—it was all.

To listen was to be lost, but to hear was to lose one’s mind to the stars, and we heard every word.

The song continued, and the tongues changed. Time became nothing more than a seed splitting open, breaking through the soil. Growing, blooming, dying. It became nothing more than a vine parting the dirt so that it could birth a flower, waiting for the realm to swallow it whole.

The cycle began again and again.

Time was nothing, and when I blinked, my eyes didn’t move. But the female was gone—contained.

The night was empty.

The sky cold.

Around us, the grass no longer blew in the breeze. Like us, the blades did not flinch. They were sheets of obsidian, tethering us in place.

All had changed in that breath. In those centuries that drank us. We were no longer who we were. We were simply the binding of things that would soon come undone.