Sea of Shadows (Sea of Stars #1)

Prologue

Once upon a tide, the world was whole.

The sky burned a thousand faithful stars,

and the sea reflected them—

an endless mirror of light and silence.

In those days, the world still breathed magic.

It pooled in rivers, whispered through coral, shimmered in the blood of those born from elements and starlight.

There was order in the chaos—

sea beneath, sky above, moon between.

It was a time of wonder.

Of reverence.

Of perilous beauty.

But wonder makes men greedy.

They came from the continents of dust and iron,

sailing the open waters with fire in their bellies and hunger in their eyes.

They called themselves explorers. Conquerors. Kings.

They did not seek to understand the world.

They sought to own it.

The first to fall were the nymphs.

Their groves were burned to ash, their rivers dammed and bottled.

Then came the dragons—hunted for their bones, their hearts, their flame.

Their dying screams split the sky and silenced storms for a century.

The trolls were shackled and and forced to mine until their blood turned to stone.

And even in the blackest depths of the sea, the merfolk began to vanish.

Men learned to drain power from what they killed.

Magic could be harvested, sold, consumed.

The old gods fell silent.

The ocean filled with ghosts.

What began as conquest became contagion.

The world dimmed.

The stars drew back from the horizon,

as if unwilling to watch what came next.

For when man kills enough miracles,

the world learns to hide from him.

Magic recoiled—

curling inward, bleeding into hidden places.

The merfolk sealed their cities in the deepest trenches.

The fae vanished into the wilds, their courts swallowed by mist.

Even the vampires retreated to the drowned isles,

their thrones abandoned to rot.

And still, humanity was not satisfied.

They hunted the remnants of what once was divine

until the very air trembled beneath the weight of their greed.

Until the sky itself cracked.

The night of the Eclipscera Convergence came without warning.

Three moons crossed,

and their light—once pure—bled red as rust.

Tides rose like mountains.

Stars fell screaming into the sea.

And when the storm cleared, the world was no longer one.

The realms had split apart.

The mortal above.

The mythical below.

Between them shimmered a rift of salt and shadow—

a thin barrier of light that rippled like glass.

The last mercy, or the first curse.

They called it the Veil.

It was meant to protect what little magic remained.

But no wall built from fear can stand forever.

Once upon a tide, magic was endless.

Now magic is a secret—buried, stolen, waiting to be found again.