Chapter 1
Elariya
“The Chain You Cannot See”
The sun sank toward the horizon, bleeding burnt orange across the garden in ribbons of fire.
There was always something special about sunset, when day surrendered to night and the world held its breath in the space between. It was a moment suspended. A moment meant for reflection.
And I had far too much to reflect on.
From the stone bench where I sat beneath the old hawthorn, I could see the mouth of Griffin Forest gaping beyond the garden’s edge.
Past the stables where the horses ate in quiet contentment, the forest stared back at me. As if it were beckoning me inside.
It was ridiculous, the thought that a forest in the mortal lands could call to anyone.
And yet…
Something stirred within me when I looked at it. It wasn’t fear or curiosity. It was something deeper.
A persistent tug low in my heart, steady as a second beat.
ApullI couldn’t explain.
Maybe it was because Griffin Forest held the last thing I could remember with perfect clarity.
The day my father vanished.
The day my world cracked open.
The day I was cursed and time stopped moving forward for me.
I watched my father disappear within a swirling vortex—an impossible rift that devoured him whole.
And in the wake of it, that same darkness shoved me into a memory loop.
Every new moon, my mind reset, wiping itself clean. I started all over again.
Like my mind was being punished for trying to hold on.
It had been that way for the last five years.
To survive it, I relied on my monthly journals, my grandmother’s notes, and whatever my family chose to tell me.
It was no way to live. A world constructed from reports and hearsay.
I had no memories past the age of fifteen. The world changed, time passed, people moved on, but my mind was stuck. Stuck on that day, that moment, that hour when I lost my father.
To break the curse, I had to find him.Easier said than done.
How do you find a man when you have no idea where to start looking?
And what more could anyone do when everyone had tried everything to find him and failed?
Besides, telling people a swirling vortex took him wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you could go around blurting in the mortal lands, where magic was forbidden, frowned upon, and breathing a word of it could get you killed.
Now I was running out of time again.
