❝ The future was yet to be written, uncertain in every way except one: there will be fire.
When the dawn closed her eyes, she awoke in flames-a hellfire inferno burning as leaves on briar-thicket trees. A forest of thorns alight. A vision of the fut...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
a malevolent rising
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
GOLDEN GLORY STREAMED LIKE a river through stained glass all around and as the rainbow prisms danced from wall to wall, Aurora Tyndale wished for nothing more than to crush it all beneath her fist. To see the skies alight and bright felt like a dagger to the heart, for how could the sun dare shine when their beloved moon-maiden would not wake?
Morgana le Fay had always been a beauty fair—enough so that her late father coined the endearing sobriquet little snow white—but she no longer echoed wintertide radiance. Every touch of rose and moon-bright glow was blanched pallid and were it not for the rise and fall of her chest, one would've thought her to be dead. Two agonizing days had come and gone since the affliction first took hold, swilling the honey from her breath evermore by the hour, and they were helpless to save. All her life she'd known Gaius to be a master in his craft, lauded as such throughout the kingdom—to see him so baffled and unsure was a terrifying thing.
The moon's light was a mere breath away from extinction and knowing she was powerless to prevent the dark days ahead... Aurora felt she could have returned every star in the heavens to dust. All seemed hopeless in the heart of Camelot, and from those rising shadows came a man with castle-in-the-air promises.
A remedy to cure all ills—a scientific impossibility in every sense, yet one the stranger claimed ownership of. She could have laughed herself to death at the idea alone and though she interjected at first, she gave in. Why wouldn't she? After all, it was Morgana's life that hung in the balance, drifting ever closer to the world beyond by the hour. Any chance to save her—nonsensical or otherwise—was one worth considering. Even if she was right and his promises proved no more than castles in the air, at least some solace might be had knowing every possible avenue had been exhausted.
Though she expected to remain at Morgana's bedside during the examination, he had other plans. Edwin Muriden—the madman with mired flesh and a vault of secrets—bade them all to leave and wait elsewhere. Every fiber of her being banshee-wailed in alarm at the thought of leaving her friend alone with an untrustworthy stranger, but an order with their king's backing was one she could not defy. Aurora, from the bottom of her heart, would have fought Edwin to the ends of the earth and back again, but Uther's damn-fool intervention forced her into acquiescence.
