Page 1 of Alien God

PROLOGUE

The stone sky god Cynewylf found his mate, a Sionnachan woman named Sashkah, during the deadliest Sionnachan snowstorm in a hundred eons. But despite the breathless howl of the wind and the drowning drifts of snow that made his steps heavy and numbed his wings, he felt no cold. He felt only the blood-boiling fever, the starburn that consumed him, at the discovery of his fated one after an immortal lifetime of searching. At long last.

When he claimed Sashkah as his love, his mate, his destiny and only desire, his immortality was snuffed out like a star getting swallowed by the tender dark. It happened to every stone sky god when they claimed their mate – the agonizing, beautiful, and inescapable shortening of their lifespan to match that of their mortal love.

It was then that Cynewylf understood why only mated gods could serve on the Council of the Gods in the hallowed halls of Heofonraed. Why the gods with mortal brides were considered the wisest, to be held in esteem above all others.

Because immortality made even the best of men into fools.

Too much time to waste.

Too much time to ruin.

Too much time to fix it all, to build it all up – a world, a universe – and to ruin it all again.

True wisdom came to Cynewylf, as it had to every mated stone sky god before him, when he became mortal in the embrace of his bride. Finally, he understood. Understood that everything could fall apart.

Even him.

When Sashkah bore him a son, a glorious new stone sky god they named Wylfrael, Cynewylf felt the merest flicker of his old, boundless life inside him, brushing at the back of his skull like a feather fallen from the wing of his own long-dead father. In his immortal child Wylfrael, he saw the star-tipped sprawl of the universe that had once been endlessly his. He saw love, like that he held for Sashkah. And the death such love would bring.

His wisdom deepened. And so too did his pain.

Because in that wisdom, he had learned the sharpest and oldest truth of them all, the kind of truth that could break even the heart of a god:

The things we are born to love the hardest are always the things that die.

And when they die...

They kill us, too.

CHAPTER ONE

Wylfrael

With my cousin Skallagrim’s fingers around my throat, I smashed through the stone of the sky and plunged into the world of the gods.

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