Page 1 of Anathema

PROLOGUE

Two hundred eleven years ago …

Lady Rydainn held her infant son close as she approached the glowing vein that, only days ago, had been a snarling fissure of black fire that cleaved the ground. With the two moons nearly as one, the chasm of violet lava had hardened to stone, leaving only the flickering remnants of that sinister flame. It was almost time to harvest the igneous rock, but they weren’t there for the bounty it held.

They were there for the fire itself.

The men who typically guarded the vein from thieves lay in diminishing piles of ash, their bodies and armor charred to useless lumps of soot that scattered in the wind. Burned alive by a flame so hot, she could feel its radiance a half-furlong away. Sablefyre. An ancient element of the gods, forged eons ago in Aethyria’s fiery heart. A single touch could turn a body to ash, and blood to stone.

And she had arrived to offer up Zevander, her second-born son, to it.

Not by choice, of course. Lady Rydainn would’ve sacrificed herself right there and then, if it would spare Zevander from such a horrific fate. Unfortunately, the mage who’d demanded the exchange wasn’t interested in her pittance of an offer. He wanted her youngest son, and nothing more.

She forced herself to set her eyes upon the dark and corrupt soul, where he stood alongside her eldest son and husband, watching her every step from the edge of the vein. The man she’d come to know as the most dangerous mage in all of Aethyria. One of few who’d mastered the ability to control the otherwise chaotic sablefyre and discovered a means to harness its deadly and divine power. He’d once been the king’s highest Magelord, a member of the exalted Magestroli, disgracefully dismissed on accusations of demutomancy—a dark form of magic decreed illegal by the king.

Cadavros. The mere thought of his name cast a shiver down her spine.

Yet, she and her husband had been forced to make a Faustian bargain with him, in exchange for protection against the Solassions who hunted their family. Ruthless warriors, known for their brutality and violence. Enforcers, who’d have made sport of their execution.

In their moment of desperation, the reclusive mage had approached the Rydainns with an offer they couldn’t refuse. A powerful protection spell against those who sought their heads, in exchange for their firstborn’s blood magic—a sampling Cadavros had claimed would be used in his studies.

If only Lady Rydainn possessed the power to reverse time. She would’ve chided her stupidity. Warned herself not to trust his lies. For, what he’d taken from her eldest boy was far more than a sampling of his magic.

Black, beady eyes, those deep soulless sockets, stared back at her, as if daring her to run from his ghastly form. There was a time he was said to have been handsome, but the dark and forbidden magic had taken a toll on him. Sank its claws into his flesh and twisted him into a wicked beast. From the top of his head breached long branching antlers, with horns that curled back. Deep grooves etched into his hardened skin reminded Lady Rydainn of tree bark, the black pulsing veins beneath said to house small serpents trapped inside his flesh.

Evil begging to be unleashed.

His appearance was the result of having performed the Emberforge ritual on himself, the same ritual he intended for her son. A rite that only young children were believed to tolerate without any permanent disfigurement, seeing as they hadn’t yet gone through their Ascendency.

Beside the mage stood her husband and their eldest son, Branimir, whose similarly protruding black veins and coarse skin marked the horrific deformities of her first sacrifice only weeks before. A sacrifice that’d proven insufficient for the greedy mage, when Branimir had suffered the same grotesque mutations as Cadavros’s. Though far from puberty and his Ascendency into blood magic, Branimir had already begun the physical transitions, before the flame had corrupted the seed of magic that’d taken root inside of him. And while his resulting deformities weren’t as pronounced as those of Cadavros, they ensured her poor child would never know his true power—because once the black flame entered the body, it destroyed all natural blood magic.

Her demands to break the devil’s bargain with Cadavros had proven hopeless, when he’d vowed to slaughter both boys should she fail to comply. Not an idle threat, given the many inquisitions she’d witnessed where he’d exerted his power with merciless cruelty.

Tears blurred her vision, her steps faltering as she drew closer to the vein. Her younger son lay sleeping in her arms, completely unaware of the night to come. A night that would forever change the innocent baby boy she so dearly loved.

For hours, she’d prayed to the old gods in hopes his fate might be changed, that he might somehow be spared. Alas, the gods had never answered, and darkness closed in on her as the moons slipped into the shadows.

Had she the choice, she’d have sooner taken young Zevander and fled to Mortasia, beyond the Umbravale that separated the mortal lands from Aethyria. A place believed to be nothing but a barren wasteland, brimming with famine and death.

There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere to flee.

The remorse in her husband’s eyes failed to move her, the anger slinking its way through her blood with renewed fervor. After all, it’d been his nefarious dealings on foreign Solassian land that had sealed their family’s fate. His unfaltering determination to elevate their social status, no matter the cost. She bit back the proud Lunasier magic pulsing in her veins that would’ve surely struck down her husband, had she the gumption right then. How easily he’d been convinced to offer their only sons.

Run, her head urged. Save them.

It was too late for Branimir, though. The eldest boy was the first to have suffered the ritual, and his darkened eyes had grown even more vacant in the fortnight since.

The sickly pallor of her eldest son’s skin spoke of the hours since, during which he’d been locked away in the cells beneath the castle, as his father attempted to hide him from the world. An abomination, other villagers would have called him, and understandably so. What thrived inside of him wasn’t a power of the gods, but a deeply rooted malice that’d grown stronger in the weeks since the ritual.

The notion of watching her jubilant baby, an echo of the sweet, loving boy Branimir had once been, suffer the same fate was an agony she couldn’t bear.

Lady Rydainn’s power trembled like a plucked thread, as rays of moonlight hit the sigil on the nape of her neck, penetrating the thick fabric of her cloak and eliciting a charge that hummed in her veins. It innervated every cell in her body, rousing a cold rush to her fingertips, where it begged to be turned loose. The moon affected all Lunasier that way, and Zevander shifted in her arms, as if sensing the vibration beneath his mother’s skin.

It would’ve been years before his power would come to fruition, and she’d longed for those heartwarming moments of discovery that would soon be tainted by the poison of the flame.

Standing apart from her son and husband, she kept her distance from the flame, her breaths hastening as Cadavros approached her. She curled her fingers into Zevander, when the mage reached out a bony finger that appeared more like a branch than a limb and stroked its tip down her baby’s soft, cherub cheek. A trail of blood followed, and Zevander stirred, letting out a quiet mewl that heightened as the small cut on his face deepened to a dark gash. One so frighteningly malicious-looking, she wondered if the tip of Cadavros’s finger was tainted with death poison. The mage reached again, and on instinct, she jerked the baby away, shielding him with her hands. As she took in the unsightly wound, a seed of rage bloomed inside of her. Her kettled magic surged, winding around her bones and beating against her skin, demanding to punish the mage. Her baby screamed in her arms, his face red, limbs shaking. He’d hardly made a sound most nights, a contented baby from the day he’d been brought into the world, and it tore at her heart to hear his distressed cry then.

Fighting Cadavros was futile, though. With the power of sablefyre at his command, she’d be reduced to ash, like the guards who’d tried to fight him off when they’d first arrived at the vein.

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