Page 2 of A Kingdom of Shadow and Ash

Tabitha lifted her head, her gaze locking onto the sky one last time before her vision blurred into blackness.

…

She awoke to silence.

The weeping willow stood charred and lifeless, its sorrow carved into blackened bark. And beneath it, where the roots curled around his fallen body, her beloved lay cold and still.

She did not cry. The tears had dried. The grief had hollowed her out.

All that remained now was hatred.

Tabitha Wysteria pressed her palm to the earth, her fingersdigging into the soil. Her voice, when it came, was steel wrapped in shadow.

‘I curse the kingdoms and their gods.’

Her purple eyes glowed like dying stars, seething with power.

‘Let it be that, on the night of my lover’s death, a hundred years from now, darkness shall descend upon them. Let them suffer as we have suffered. Let them know ruin as we have known it.’

The winds howled. The marshland trembled.

‘Only when fire breaks through the shadows shall they be forgiven.’

Tabitha stood, hollowed and unmade, as she watched the waters rise. She did not stop them as they reached out, did not flinch as they took his body, did not whisper a farewell as the marsh carried him away to the land of the dead.

When at last the darkness swallowed her whole, the witch was never seen again.

Some whisper that a war is brewing. I do not want to believe them. Our love will keep us strong, no matter how much the gods continue to intervene. I am scared every single day now. Hadrian talks in his sleep, he keeps mentioning the name of someone, someone that is not from this world. I fear for him. They say there was a king once touched by the hand of a god, and he was driven to madness. What if Hadrian has fallen into the same path? What if the gods have found him? I must keep him safe. I must keep them all safe from them.

Tabitha Wysteria

The Forest of Silent Cries was silent.

Mal Blackburn listened intently, waiting—though for what, she did not know. It was unnatural, this silence, this absence of whispering voices that usually wept through the trees, beckoning her deeper into their blackened embrace. The air here was rarely stirred, locked in an eternal hush, but tonight, a breeze slithered through the white-barked sentinels, curling around her ankles and lifting the scent of rot to her nose.

She did not like it.

The skeletal trees stood taller, their obsidian leaves as motionless as death itself, their stillness almost mocking her. Something was wrong.

The soft windwove through her raven hair, cool and insidious. Her bare feet dug deeper into the cold, unyielding earth, searching for something familiar, something real amid the eerie quiet.

‘Princess,’ came the whisper, deep as the abyss. ‘You are not welcome in this forest.’

Mal smiled—a slow, knowing thing, all wicked edges and quiet defiance.

‘So you always say, Seer,’ she murmured. ‘And yet, here I am.’

Through the gathering mist, beyond the veil of shifting darkness, stood her—the creature the world feared and called the Seer.

A woman, and yet not.

An owl, and yet not.

A thing born of despair, sculpted from nightmares, woven together by forgotten gods.

Her bones had been carved from the sorrow of ashes, her yellow, haunting eyes plucked from the skulls of the forsaken. Her feathered scalp shimmered with an eerie life of its own, stitched together by hands that had long since turned to dust.

Most who beheld her recoiled. Mal never had.

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