Page 2 of Born of Starlight
Her father returned from the harbor, shocked by the sight of his fallen love. “Cursed! She took her mother. The girl is cursed!”
As a crowd gathered to see the glowing child, thousands of stars streaked across the sky. All five warring Corridors looked up. The direction of the winds changed, and the tides ceased for a few rhythms.
That night, Adelaide’s father set the babe he deemed a bad omen on a raft and let the tides whisk her away. An offering to the sea.
But the sea carried Adelaide safely to the main isle, where she washed ashore on the beaches of Eros. Word traveled fast from Ikanten across the narrow seas, and the people of Eros celebrated Adelaide’s arrival—a girl saved by stars and protected by the moonlit tides, a promise that the Sources favored their progress.
Knowing that no other home would suit her, the High Enchantresses of the Corridors took the child up into their towers. No one ever beheld the face of the beautiful child of starlight again.
Some say the heavens intervened that night and sent the star to save Adelaide. Others say it was the Source Origin of the Stars herself that fell into the child’s heart to resume its beating. The Sisterhood renamed the child in the Star Origin’s honor—Asterie.
That is how the fifth High Enchantress of Henosis was thought to be born, lost and saved.
That night began two centuries of renewed peace in the new realm. Asterie’s origins were retold and revised. The story bent and changed over the years to suit the storyteller. But our story doesn’t start at the beginning of the Sister of the Stars’ life. It starts at the beginning of the end.
PartOne
Wicked Woods
Chapter1
Fenris
Adoe was grazing in a clearing of tall grass. The night fog of the northern woodland tangled around the animal’s hooves.
The docile animal didn’t know it was being hunted. I watched the deer through Vangard’s eyes as it stood calm against a backdrop of cricket song and pine trees. But judging by the angle, Vangard was lowered onto his canine-like haunches in the thick of the treeline. The deer had only moments before it would be wrenched from tranquility and shredded to pieces.
“Leave it,” I commanded quietly through the bond.
Vangard growled in protest, and the deer’s head shot up. With a quirk of an ear, it fled.
I returned to my own vision in time to see Van run across the clearing to my side. He let out a deflated grunt as I patted his shoulder. With only half of my power, it was sometimes hard to reel him back to me, as his will grew stronger by the year.
Van made horrible company—endlessly blood hungry and always thinking about food above all else as though he was deprived. But Van was company nonetheless.
“Oh, come on…I let you eat the rabbits back at the creek. That’s plenty.” I waved him away.
When we had lived amongst those in the courts, they had always been cautiously intrigued by our connection. I wasn’t the beast, and he wasn’t I, and yet in some ways, I would always be the beast. I shook that confusing thought from my mind, motioning to the field before us.
“Go and run—you’re supposed to be stretching your legs.”
Van gave me a whale-eyed sigh but soon bounded away to pounce and run around the clearing, snapping at lightning bugs and looking like a puppy out of his cage. A terrifying, bone-chilling, hair-raising puppy.
Finding a boulder to sit on, my eyes wandered to the night sky. It sent a chill down my spine. The vastness and depth glistened over us with promises of Sources and heavens no one could prove existed.Bullshit.I’d always been a skeptic. I had seen the conflict between those who idolized the Sources and those who did not.
Yet the stars continued to orbit while I was stuck in these damp, dark woodlands.But I deserved far worse than this.That repeated thought had eaten away at me for four centuries.
It was the damned truth. Here, in these woods, I was no risk to the world beyond the treelined mountains. Here, with the fog and the chilled air, was a peace that someone like me didn’t, for one moment, deserve.
A comet streaked across the sky. Its glow was brighter than the rest of the stars as it plummeted to the South. Standing with a lump in my throat, I listened for a collision. A cracking of our atmosphere. Fire meeting ground.Was I praying for the end?
No sound came.
My blood ran cold as stars continued to fall; hundreds…thousands of silver threads streaked across the sky at once. Even Van stopped his frolicking and looked up at the illuminated skies.
Then a voice boomed through the clearing.
“Find her.”
