PROLOGUE
Grandyr felt it before the stars did. Not a sound, not a tremor, but a shift—subtle, malevolent, and ancient. The kind of wrong that didn’t crawl through the sky or across the land, but moved beneath the bones of the world.
He rose from his lair to spread his wings, wings wide enough to darken the twin moons. Clouds scattered like frightened prey when he moved gracefully through them. From above, the planet of Leander looked unchanged—green, ice, stone, ocean. But Grandyr knew better.
Something stirred below.
Something familiar.
His wings thundered as he descended, cutting across the horizon in a blink. Birds scattered. Storms broke behind him. He flew over the lowlands, over cities and rivers, over the glittering towers of Bantahar. He didn't stop until the Pyme mountains rose like broken teeth beneath him.
Ezzorith.
Its name still echoed through his blood. Once, it had been beautiful. Then arrogant. Then dangerous. Now, it was a tomb encased in a mountain of rubble. Nothing was left, not even memories. Only Eulachs roamed these catacombs, but they didn't matter to him.
Grandyr landed near the highest peak, his claws slicing into stone that still held a thousand secrets. The ground pulsed under him. Not with life, but memory. The kind of memory that seeped through ages and still burned. A memory, old and dark, filled with insatiable hunger for power. Old whispers, older than the Leanders. It touched him. Moved through him. Awakened things from long past that were supposed to have been forgotten. But like all things forbidden, once again it was trying to claw its way to the surface, to the light of day. This had happened before. Before the Eulachs. Before the laws. Before the gods had buried the Zuten weapons and made the few surviving people swear never to build here again. They were to forget everything Zuten. From that moment forth, they would be Leanders. A new race, a new start. With no past and a future shaped by the gods.
Grandyr roared once, not in rage, but in mourning. For his people. For what they’d forgotten. For what they were about to awaken. He flew higher and higher yet. Past the highest trees, past the highest mountains, until they were merely specks. He needed a messenger. But not from here.
He made it past the atmosphere and out to where darkness and cold reigned. He felt neither. The pain in his very core was too much to notice the lack of oxygen, the lack of anything, or the cold that would have turned any other creature to ice. None of it could touch a god.
He flew until he reached Hoerst, knowing where to go, who to summon. He found the mountain he was searching for,Grandyr’s Crown. Named in his honor, a fitting place. He crawled higher, curling his massive body across the ridge like an old beast lying down to die. And there, beneath the weeping sky, Grandyr cried.
One single tear.
The single drop of divine sorrow slipped from his eye; it glowed golden in the dying light as it fell from his cheek, across stone, down the jagged slope. It burned as it touched the rock and carved a path like molten truth. It passed through moss, dust, forgotten runes. It found the crack in the mountain, where glass met shadow. There it slid down the side of a hidden shrine—silent and perfect—striking the coffin inside.
The crystal surface rippled.
The tear moved through it as if it wasn’t there. It touched the pale skin of the seffy—woman—within.
She didn't move.
Not at first.
Then—
Her chest rose as she took her first breath in over twenty rotations. It was faint and fragile. But it was real.
Her lashes fluttered. Her lips parted.
And Grandyr, far above, opened his eyes.
The darkness had returned.
But so would Daphne—his messenger.
During the past rotation—rotation—the Vissigroths' Council Room had seen more of me than in all my fifty rotations prior. As much as the room had become familiar to me, it still didn't stop impressing me. Dark walls were decorated with carvings of our gods, wars, and heroic deeds of vissigroths from the past. The domed ceiling was also carved and painted in a similar fashion, albeit a bit lighter to bring color into the otherwise stark chamber.
Pillars stood in regular intervals about ten feet from the walls. During times of war, such as now, a dragoon would be posted at each pillar. Not that they were ever needed, because any fool entering a room filled with fourteen vissigroths would find their end sooner than they could unsheathe a dagger. But they were there, providing a deterrent.
The room's center was dominated by a large, round table whose edges were engraved with images of dragons, as well as fourteen chairs, none of which differed in size or looks. Around this table,all were the same, all vissigroths. No matter that one of our number was our susserayn. Not here.
The table had been carved, in front of each seat, with a shallow groove that marked the perfect resting place for our swords, their tips angled inward toward the center, where an ornate sunburst gleamed from the stone.
"Vissigroth Mallack, what do you say?" Cyros the Vissigroth of Agradyr pulled me from my musings. I took a moment to get my bearings and stared at the atrocious weapon currently hiding the carved sun in the center of the table. How could such a small thing bring so much death and destruction? It was unfathomable.
We Leanders might not have looked it, but we were technologically advanced. Advanced enough to have mastered spaceflight, and we’d just won a major battle against one of our main enemies, the Chrymphten. We might have preferred swords over high-tech weapons, but we were no strangers to them. What lay in the center of the table, though, was beyond any weapon I, or any of us, had ever seen.
