Prologue
THE DROWNED STAR
Before kingdoms carved coastlines and empires crowned their kings, there were the Damned: gods cast out of the heavens for defiance against the divine code, wandering the world in exile.
From their devotion to humanity came children—half-divine, half-human—cursed to walk the earth as living paradoxes. They were both blessing and blight, heirs of impossible power who rarely lived long enough to wield it. Alone, they faltered. Together, prophecy whispered they might stand against the Others, the entities of ancient evil who had cast their parents down.
Among the five Damned was Ellira, the Goddess of the Deep. She was not born of the heavens, but starlight that chose the waves over the sky. Her fall split the ocean floor, birthing abyssal chasms and monsters sung of in sailors’ dirges. She ruled over the tides, storms, wrecks, and forgotten things, and while the sea itself wasn’t cruel, Ellira was. She remembered every body that sank, every oath betrayed, and every secret drowned, simmering amongst them like the wrath she held for those responsible for her demise.
And yet, even in cruelty, the mistress of the tides fell in love with a mortal woman: Sereyn, a cartographer’s daughter with ink-stainedhands and dawn-lit eyes. She was the first to seek Ellira without fear, diving into her depths as if the sea could be mapped like any other land. Their union was not in worship but wonder—the goddess of storms and the girl who dared to chart them.
For years, they met in drowned caves and storm-wracked cliffs. From love came a hidden bloodline: the Waveborne, mortal-born daughters who carried the sea within their veins.
The Others, fearful of such unions, decreed that Ellira’s descendants would not know her. While they believed their ability to weave fate would prevent her from reaching them, the goddess sought her children in their dreams when they were close enough to the ocean she commanded.
As if fate wished to spite Ellira further, Sereyn’s mortality became the shadow that neither could ignore, and she was swept from the arms of the goddess without notice. With the loss of her other half and the destiny of her daughters twisted, Ellira unraveled.
Her voice scattered into the wind, and her eyes sank into the abyss, becoming twin rubies still alive and filled with her knowing. Once word spread of the power resting beneath the depths, these pieces of Ellira became the most coveted the seas had ever whispered of. The Eyes of Ellira were said to grant not riches, but dominion, truth, and the power to command the ocean. Pirates, kings, and desperate fools scoured the seas for them, but Ellira’s wrath sank all who sought her wisdom in greed.
As humans scoured the expanses, Ellira’s grief no longer became just hers to bear, for the one who had taken Sereyn’s final breath came to her—Elaros, the God of Death. At first, she raged against him, cursing him for the pain he brought upon her and the woven fate of her children, but her sorrow only drew him closer.
In Elaros, she found not comfort, but recognition: another exile, another god condemned for loving what he could not. Their bond was the furthest thing from tender; it was inevitable, a union of endings and abyss. He fanned her wrath, sharpened her anguish, and from him, she learned to wield her mourning as a weapon.
With him, she guided her Children with a fierceness that never wavered, calling to them in dream and storm, offering protection wherever they were. Alongside those born of her and Sereyn, other paradoxes gathered—descendants of the Damned drawn to one another because of their prophecy-bound destiny.
It was not a fate woven by the Others, but one built in opposition to the darkness that polluted what once was divinity. The Others ruled without understanding or improvement, purely out of a hunger for power. Their punishment of the Damned’s love for humanity came not from celestial expectation, but malicious intention.
With those no longer around who were coherent enough to recognize their viciousness, they did all they could to keep the descendants of those fallen as far away from one another as they could. Their overarching goal was to ensure their reins on destiny, and corruption remained taut, for they knew the Prophecy.
Alone, none will endure.
When Children born of Damned gods’ breath unite as one and defy death, only then will their strength arise to push forward the Others’ demise.
Until then, they wander blind, hunted by methods both cruel and unkind. Or turn their wrath on their blood the same, and burn their kind in endless flame.
Thus, the knowledge of their tales is lost and drowned, like their parents before, no trace and no sound. A cycle bound by fate’s command until they rise as a single hand.
Still, beyond prophetic bounds, the Others knew something deeper, older, that’d been hidden.
When the gods fell, the world did not shatter into ruin, but intoreflection.Two realms, split like a cracked mirror—one carved by sea and storm, the other by shadow and bone. Each held fragments of the same ancient power: half a heart bound to the deep, half bound to the sky. In each, a lineage survived, separated by fate but woven by the same primordial thread. Two pieces destined to tilt the balance in both realms.
For somewhere beyond the horizon, in the realm that reflected all Ellira lost, the other shard stirred—unaware that fates were converging, and that the sea itself remembered the shape of what was once whole.
So Ellira pushed, finding the last heir of her and Sereyn’s line and influencing her life course to ensure she would remain with those needed for the ethereal war.
Rohen Levitte.
CHAPTER1
Severed Limb
ROHEN
Icaught my reflection in the shining steel of my dagger. Consumed by wrath, my emerald-green eyes, mixed with a sheen that mirrored sea glass, blinked once.
As an orphan, I’d met plenty of individuals who were annoyingly talkative; all of them complimented the hue in which my gaze gleamed—a stare that now harbored a beckoning glare. Vibrant red strands framed my sharp jawline, having fallen from the braid I’d woven before I left to execute my orders. The freckles that dusted my cheeks were the only gift I’d received from the sun, my porcelain skin the furthest thing from “kissed” with color.
Clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth, I lifted my chin back to the soldier I’d lured into the bathroom of The Gutted Siren. The bar itself was a foul den of salt, smoke, and blood-soaked coin, squatting at the edge of a crumbling dock in Darswyth—a port town, pressed up against the glittering spine of the Capital’s outer gates where the king, royal family, and the most well-off indulged.
