The crown—his crown—falls from his brow, shattering the earth where it lands before vanishing in a flare of wild magic.
And Nightfall screams.
The SoulTakers are driven back that day—Alaric’s fury in the skies, Kael’s wrath in the tides, Thorne’s inferno on the Plains, my rage in the earth—but it doesn’t matter.
Because the balance is broken.
The Prime is dead.
And something inside me cracks with him.
I bury my grief where I bury everything else.
Deep.
Stone-hard.
Unyielding.
I will not break.
I will not trust like that again.
Not ever.
Prologue 2: Dagan
Years Later, New Jersey, Earth Realm
I’m in some shitty industrial park at the edge of a marsh, midnight has just tolled.
The human realm smells wrong.
Too much metal. Too much oil. Not enough stone.
Concrete and rebar and asphalt stretch in every direction, pretending to be solid, pretending to be permanent.
Underneath, the earth is riddled with fractures—tiny, jagged lines where Nightfall’s pain has started to bleed through.
I walk unseen.
A glamour borrowed from Alaric hides my wings and my eyes that glow when I’m careless.
To these humans, I’m just another tall, broad-shouldered man in a dark coat, boots heavy on the cracked pavement.
They don’t see the way the streetlights flicker when I pass. They don’t feel the way the ground settles under my step, relieved to be acknowledged.
But I feel everything.
Every tremor that doesn’t belong to this world.
Every shiver that whispers of SoulTaker corruption trying to chew through the dimensional seams.
Alaric, Kael, and Thorne told me to come here.
“Look for a viyella in New Jersey,” they said, like it was that simple.
Like you could just drop into a random patch of mortal rot and trip over a fate-chosen mate.
