Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
PROLOGUE ▪▫▪▫▪
MORANA ZORESLAVA KILLED HER MOTHER.
Well, perhaps that was an exaggeration of sorts. She hadn't murdered her mother. And in fairness she blamed her father for cursing Yelena Zoreslava with a child that would corrupt her being, leaving her frail to finally die at the hands of a mere plague that had poisoned the streets of Ketterdam.
She was there one day and gone the next, her body carted off to Reaper's Barge and sooner rather than later Morana had been evicted from their tiny flat in East Stave. The slums of the city were beginning to rot from disease, corpses lining the streets, and panic wafting through every corner, of the closed-off city.
Finding a vessel that was leaving the city was harder than she realized but Morana managed to leave the decaying streets of the Barrel without catching the plague—or rather, dying from it.
And so, the Queen's Lady Plague had arrived and Morana had left. There couldn't be two plagues corrupting the streets of the crooked city. Her mother was dead so really, what did she have in Ketterdam that would get her to stay?
Morana was young when she left Kerch for the first time and traveled to Shu Han, hidden between the barrels of salted fish and spices from the trading vessel. And in Shu Han, well, she managed to get by on well-twisted lies and tricks only growing up in Ketterdam could've taught her. As well as a good illusion or two and those were her specialty.
She wouldn't go as far as calling herself Grisha—Saints knew, her mother never dared to, Yelena preferred to call her an abomination. Morana was fine with the latter, it had flare to it, making her sound unnatural, which really mustn't've been far from the truth.
Morana Zoreslava could bend and manipulate the darkness and light around her to her will, weaving strands of light and shadow to create dazzling displays of light that could trick the naked eye. Illusions. Mirages. Maddening sights left grown men sputtering in her wake.
She was sure it was Small Science, it had to be. She could not summon from anything, and in complete darkness could not control the light, and vice versa. Dawn, she found, was when she was more powerful, where she was faster and stronger and her wounds healed unnaturally quick. Those moments as the sun rose in the sky were when Morana felt more alive, and yet, the more power she used the bigger the toll it had on her afterward.
Which was why, she wouldn't go as far as calling herself Grisha. She didn't glow from using Small Science, she paled. It didn't make her healthy and peppy, it rather took a strenuous toll on her mind and body as if she'd been running for hours.
But with her illusions, living in Shu Han worked for a few years. Allowing herself to try and get by without a fuss, without corrupting another mother with a plague—not that she had those to spare, her only one was already gone. It worked well until it didn't. Until the day she was found.
