The Lord of Whispers: Book One of The Queen of Light and Darkness Series

Prologue

Jay

Our magic was dying. Our people were dying. And now, our queen was dead.

I stood at the foot of a mountain next to my best friend of the last two centuries, King Greyson Heroux. Grey was overlooking the too-still form of the love of his immortal life while his only son, Prince Nikolas, stood to our right, unable to look away from his mother’s lifeless body. Nik bowed his head, causing his dark curls to pool around his handsome face and hide the pain I knew lingered in the depths of his deep green eyes.

The sun began to sink behind Mount Renascor, leaving a pink summer sky of wispy clouds. Grey reached his hand out toward his late wife and roots and vines loudly erupted from the ground at the King’s beckoning. They wove an intricate pattern over the fragile body of Queen Heroux until they formed a mound. None of us altered our somber gazes as her small mass was pulled into and made part of the earth, disappearing completely.

Black shadows began to emanate from the Prince, unfurling at his feet and working their way up and out toward the mountain. Soon, the entire bottom half of Mount Renascor was shrouded in the darkness of the Prince’s formidable power. Then the mountain shifted twenty feet to the left, as if someone had picked it up and placed it over the Queen’s grave. The three of us stood in the silence of our sorrow, our eyes burrowing into the mountainside, until many hours after the pink sky had faded to black.

“We’ll find her, Grey. We’ll find her, or we’ll figure out another way to stop the magic from dying,” I promised the King fiercely, at last breaking our silence.

But, no matter what graveside promises I made to my closest friend, the truth was that I did not put nearly as much stock into prophecy as he did. And I was not going to just sit around while our people died waiting for us to find the girl who prophecy promised could save us all. I would find another way.

After another moment of silence, the King clapped me on the back and then cleared his throat, indicating to his son that it was time for us to leave the mountainside. Without a word, Nik’s shadows enveloped us and we popped out of existence, arriving moments later hundreds of miles away on the east coast of Valencia at the Emerald Court.

Nik turned away from us immediately, his footsteps muffled by the sounds of the crashing waves of the ocean, leaving his father and me with our insurmountable task of figuring out how to save the future of our Kingdom.