Until one day, a woman walked back across.
She wasn’t a soldier or an explorer or a scholar or a thief. She wasn’t sent by the monarchs. She was a stowaway. An orphan girl whose father had gone over the bridge and never returned.
At age ten, she slipped past the guards who stood at the start of the bridge and ran silently, determinedly, into that void to search for her father.
No one ever knew. No one ever saw.
She walked through time and space, battling madness and starvation and thirst. Where all others finally caved and tossed themselves off the bridge, giving in, she pressed on. Where every other Orean man had failed, she succeeded.
Saira Turley did the one thing that no others had—she walked the bridge of Lemuria, and came back to tell the tale.
But she didn’t return alone.
Because the bridge, that narrow road in the nothing, led to a new world. A world of magic.
She might not have found her father, but Saira did find Annwyn—the territory in the realm beyond.
The realm of fae.
Saira fell through their ground and landed on their sky. Bird, they called her. Broken-winged bird.
A group of fae took her in, cared for her, and she was amazed at these people with their remarkable power. She found a new family in the magical paradise, made a life there.
But her heart was always in Orea, the place where her mother was buried, where she had fond memories of her father.
When she turned nineteen, Saira fell in love with a fae male—the prince of Lydia. It was said that their love was deeper than all the seas of Annwyn, that music was made from the song of their hearts.
And before they married, the prince gave her a wedding gift.
He couldn’t bring back her father for her, but he could bring back her home. So the prince took her to the bridge of Lemuria once more, at the edge of their glittering sky, and he bound it.
Through space and time, he found the thread that connected their realms through this voided bridge. With his great powers, he yanked it closer to Annwyn, to the fae kingdom, so that Saira could return home to Orea whenever she wished.
Orea and Annwyn became sister realms. It was a celebration for all seven kingdoms when fae and Oreans united.
After that great joining, Lemuria was no longer that voided, endless path of death, but a true bridge between the realms, one that only took minutes to cross.
And for hundreds of years, we coexisted. Mingled. It’s where Orean magic still comes from, mixing with the fae. But year by year, that magic dies out a little bit more because no more fae come here. And no more Oreans cross into Annwyn. They haven’t for three hundred years.
Because the fae betrayed Orea.
A new monarch rose, long after Saira Turley and her prince drew their last breaths. A king who spoke against cohabiting with Oreans, against mixing with lesser beings. He snapped the thread that Saira’s husband had tied with love, severing the bridge, and cleaving the realms in one mighty swipe.
Seventh Kingdom, vulnerable there at the edge of the world, was swallowed whole from the force of the magical cut. The land and people were never seen again. And the bridge of Lemuria fell into that void, crumbled to nothing.
So Orea has the fae to thank for the magic that still exists here. But it’s a bitter gift that’s laced with betrayal.
Because there is no Seventh Kingdom anymore. There is no peaceful alliance. There is no bridge to Annwyn. There are no more fae.
…Or so people think.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Drums.
My heartbeat feels like drums beating through my veins, too loud, too fast, too harsh.
I’d always thought that the stories of the commander, even the written accounts in Highbell’s library, were exaggerations. Dramatics to overemphasize the terror of his presence and justify people’s cowardice when they buckled in fear of him.
The commander—who people call Rip for his predisposition to literally rip soldiers’ heads from their bodies—became a modern legend, someone to be feared, just like King Rot himself. But I didn’t expect Commander Rip to actually be this frightening.
Of course, there were rumors that he was fae—more fae than any other Orean. But again, I thought they were just that. Rumors. Gossip. Embellishments. More exaggerations spread, probably by King Ravinger himself, to make his commander seem that much more frightening.
But now that I see him for myself, I can tell that he’s not just another Orean with a watered-down magical bloodline from long-ago fae ancestors.
He’s more.
The spikes prove it. Most written accounts made it sound like it was just a part of his armor, another dramatic elaboration. But I can tell that it’s not. The spikes, the height, the menacing presence, it’s all real.
I don’t know what to think of it.
My eyes can’t seem to leave him, and I find myself counting the black spikes that trail down his spine. Starting from between his shoulder blades to his lower back, he has six of them, each one shorter than the one above. They’re curved in a slight downward arc, popping right through his armor, a vicious gleam to them that reflects the red-burning lanterns.
The ones on his outer forearms are much shorter, but look no less sharp and deadly, four leading from above his wrist to below the curve of his elbow.
I’m too terrified to wonder what he looks like without his helmet. Some accounts have said he has horns on his head or vile scars ripped down his face. Some have alleged that he has fangs, while other written records swear that he can kill a person just by looking at them with his burning red eyes.
I don’t want to find out if any of those are true.
But what I do want to find out is why he’s here, in the Barrens, meeting with the Red Raids.
“Captain Fane,” a low, deep voice rumbles out. The saddles beside me stiffen at the sound.
“Commander Rip,”
