Page 17 of Taken
Like magic is slipping away from us.
The tide-gates that answered my thoughts in my youth seem to stick more easily.
Like rotted wood.
My people whisper about kelp rot, black blooms, fishermen returning with nets full of foam and nothing living.
Lord Alaric’s plan to trick the Fates and bring our power back to where it belongs seems rash and foolhardy at first—but look at him now.
I have followed the pull because I have no other option.
Crowns crumble when their magic runs dry.
A Sea Lord who can’t raise a tide can’t hold this place.
When the sea’s song falters, enemies smell weakness like gulls smell blood.
I smell it now.
I could have come with war—ships and banners and the kind of force that burns coasts clean—but war buries what it claims.
I need restoration, not conquest.
The old writs speak of a Sea Lord and his true viyella—a shore-born woman carved of salt and sun who can become a conduit, a living tide-line.
The prophecy isn’t poetry.
It is arithmetic.
A zareth bond plus human soul equals the difference between success and ruin. And possibly—a crown.
I searched for days, but then I found her.
Not in some temple or wild place of power—no.
In a cement tank beneath fluorescent lights.
The human is beautiful, but looks don’t matter. Not in this.
Not when the Tidal Lands will be next to fall under the shadow of the SoulTakers.
Still, she is soft and curved in all the right places with long sandy hair pulled back from a sweet face that glows when she laughs.
It’s that sound that struck me first. The way her laughter cut through the static of Earth’s ugly noises and landed like the only honest thing left in the world.
All thewhat ifswon’t change the fact I did take her.
I brought her back here, to Castletide.
And now,she is mine.
The runes decided it for me. The symbols etched into me at the beginning of my existence burn hot against my skin when I move closer and take her in my arms.
Now, with her lips sealed to mine, drinking oxygen through a kiss, I am hit with a desire so strong it nearly collapses me.
Yes, it’s a trick. An unnecessary one, for I could feed her breath beneath the water with a touch of my hand—but the truth?
I want this.
