Page 1 of The Shadowbound and the False God

Across realms blackened and broken when war claims the land,

A prophecy long hidden, fate now demands:

Amidst bloodshed and darkness and winter's bitter sting, the Red Woman will rise to bring revenant spring.

Affined to another, when three signs converge, She stands a beacon of hope to quell tempest's surge.

With unwavering spirit through desolate night, She must face darkness unnamed, guided by celestial light.

When those stars align with the threads of Her fate, sacrifice begets a dormant magic innate.

Beside Her, a great White Bear shall tread, a guardian and companion through trials ahead.

In a union unmatched with a bond beyond compare, their harmony is forged by this destiny they share.

It began with fire.

Kael’s body would not rest in Talamarís, as he would have wished it to. Just before dawn broke at the end of his third night lying in that vast, dark cavern in the Undercastle, the late Unseelie King was secreted away. In a solemn procession led by Merak, their auras softly lighting the way, he was carried on a litter of branches and pine boughs into the forest. Aisling, Rodney, Lyre, and Raif each held a corner; Aisling gripped hers in one hand so that she could keep her other resting on Kael’s unmoving chest.

Raif was the strongest opponent of it all, as committed to Unseelie customs as his king had been. From where he stood watch outside of the cavern’s entrance, he’d heard everything the Silver Saints said to Aisling during her vigil. About Elowas, about the capture of Kael’s aneiydh. When Aisling presented Merak’s promise in secret to Rodney and Lyre, Raif had been just behind her and just as loud in his dissent against opening the god realm.

“It’s sacrilege,” he’d hissed venomously. “To do as they’ve suggested, you’d damn him.”

“He’s damned as it is, it would seem,” Lyre posited. “If he has indeed been taken to the god realm, he is damned regardless of what we do with his body.”

“Where is Elowas?Whatis it?” Aisling stood beside Kael’s desk. She could have taken a seat—his seat—as Rodney and Lyre occupied the other chairs in the study. But as wrong as it felt to see it empty, it would have felt worse to sit in it herself. Raif paced the perimeter of the room, back straight and eyes dark. Not bothering to hide the mask of fury and disgust he wore.

“It is a broken realm, unreachable and half-collapsed in on itself since the earliest days of Fae.” Lyre drummed his long fingers on the arm of his chair. “It is where the Low One resides, trapped just as our king. Maybe—”

“Don’t,”Raif cut him off harshly, but Lyre’s cunning smirk only widened.

“Maybe we’ve been offered a chance to free them both.” His yellow, catlike eyes sparkled.

“Your ambition is showing,” Rodney told the Prelate flatly. Then, to Aisling, he said, “Ash, I know you want to bring him back. But no one just comes back from the dead, human or Fae or otherwise.”

Dead.That word hit her like an arrow to the chest each time she heard it spoken out loud. She gripped the edge of the desk harder so that the wood bit into her palm.

“He isn’t dead, not truly. If his aneiydh is in Elowas, there is a part of our king still alive.” Lyre was focused on Aisling now, too. Both parties were attempting to appeal to one side of her or another, as though they thought she had the final say. She realized then that maybe she did.

“He will lie in Talamarís, as it is always done. As he wanted. There is no bringing him back.” Raif’s conviction was unwavering.

“Is it not your sworn oath to follow your king to whatever end, soldier?” the Prelate sneered.

“He has met his end,” Raif shot back. His hand dropped to the hilt of the longsword he still carried strapped to his waist. Its tip nearly grazed the ground, expertly forged to fit his proportions alone. The last time Aisling had seen the weapon, it had been jutting out of Niamh’s stomach in the center of the battlefield. “He has made a great enough sacrifice without having to relinquish his beliefs, too.”

“But what if Merak is right?” Her voice was barely above a whisper when she addressed the three males standing before her. If Aisling was honest, Raif nearly had her convinced. She knew as well as he did what Kael wished for in death. But for Kael, to lie in Talamarís was to be at peace, to honor the forest and to return to the earth. If what Merak promised was true, he would never be at rest there. His body would rot, a shell, while his soul remained trapped in some distant, liminal space.

To cross into Elowas seemed an impossible task, and stupid. She was only a human, with no magic, no defensive skills, and no connection to the dark god they hoped to find there. But then she’d consider Kael, lost and adrift. Waiting for the day that the broken realm finally collapsed in on itself completely. And then—Aisling didn’t know what would happen then. Whether his aneiydh would be set free, or if it would remain imprisoned in the realm’s crumbled ruins. She thought of what it must be like for him there, day after day the same. Even if it was but a vast, dark, empty plane; even if he could do nothing but float there endlessly—what an exquisite sort of torture that must be.

It was those thoughts that shored up her resolve to find him, or at least to try.She could bring him back.

In the end, it was the determination in Aisling’s voice—the barest hint of it—that brought Rodney over to her side, too. With the numbers stacked against him then, the three having made it clear that they would proceed with or without him, Raif was left with little choice but to relent.

His anger never diminished, though, and it colored his every move as the group carried Kael’s body toward the tree line.

Even through the haze that had settled over Aisling’s thoughts and the constant, alternating waves of pain and numbness that washed over her, something in her understood where they were going. Her feet knew the path, though she’d traversed it only once. As they drew closer, she saw from a distance the turquoise glow of the moss that covered the ground before the ruins of the moon gate.

The forest enclave was just as it had been when Kael had brought her there: quiet, untouched, reverent. It took her breath away, even now. She closed her eyes when they halted and listened to the wind in the trees, the gentle sounds of the brook tumbling over stones and under roots. If it hadn’t been for the weight of the litter pulling on her arm and the roughness of the branch scratching against her palm to tether her to reality, she might have imagined Kael standing behind her. He’d be in the same spot where he stood that night, watching her explore the place he’d never shared with anyone else before her. It was theirs, then—he’d made it theirs.

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