And no one knows what’s causing it
At first it was one or two suffering from this sickness. We knew nothing of it, except for its aftermath. It happened in the south the first time, during a blizzard along our southern walls. A shattered guard tower broken apart as if by beasts. Bodies torn apart and drained of their blood. Not a single survivor left to tell the tale.
I saw the report sent back to the king. One of the guards was missing, and to all appearances the guard tower was locked and warded against outside forces. They had to assume the guard had gone on a killing spree, but no one knew how. The puncture marks left on the bodies spoke of sharpened canines and elongated claws, and while wraithenkind are considered abominations by the Blessed fae, we’re not animals.
My father set the report aside. There were wars to plan and fae princes to manipulate. It wasn’t until the second attack came at a town much closer to the court, that he sent someone to investigate.
Six months passed. There were more attacks, vicious and bloody. The guards dragged one of the afflicted back to court, revealing a creature with maddened eyes and fangs and claws. It was as though everything the fairer courts spoke of us had sprung to life, as if some strange magic heard tell of their tales and conjured a monster right out of their nightmares.
A Nightstalker.
It was not an illness. Nor a poison. There was no rhyme nor reason to the blight’s occurrences. It simply happened. And kept happening.
I’m one of my father’s favorites. I’ve knelt by his feet as he’s heard the reports, and seen the fury and fear mingling in his eyes when his seneschals retreat.
“The curse,” he’d whispered once. “It must be that the curse is… evolving.”
And ever since that moment he’s been obsessed with breaking it.
“Well?” Father barks, shattering my thoughts. “What now?”
“Your daughter, Your Highness,” one of the guards says stiffly. “You sent for her.”
“She looks half dead.” There’s a hint of menace in those words.
“Half dead is still half alive,” I manage to rasp. My throat feels like someone reached down it and ripped my lungs out, but the warm tingly feeling means my fae heritage is healing me. I barely have the strength to push myself to my hands and knees, every inch of me shaking.
But I swore myself an oath when I was a little girl.
No matter what happens to me, I will not crawl before this creature.
I will never beg.
I will never abase myself.
Slowly, my chin lifts until our eyes meet.
“Father,” I say.
“Stand up,” the Wraith King snaps.
Stand up, they yelled in the training camps when I was forced to endure trial after trial in order to prove my worth to this creature in front of me.
And if you didn’t stand then you earned a slit throat.
I force my muscles to move as I slowly push to my feet.
And then I behold the true horror of the Unblessed king.
Raesh Ghul had any sense of mercy whipped from him as a boy and it shows in his face. An enormous troll’s skull is carved into a crown atop his head, and his long, raven-black hair is bound into a myriad of plaits. If not for his ghostly white skin—maggot pale—he’d almost be handsome.
And maybe that’s the true horror, for a monster lurks within that fair façade. One who stole my fae mother from her bed one night and bred a child on her to forge as a weapon against her kin. A child with the gifts of both sides of her heritage—and one who can pass as fae if I’m focusing on my glamor.
A half dozen soul-traps hang from his throat. He likes to leave his fur cloak open, so they’re visible. One of them calls to me, the wisp of pale blue mist caressing the glass it’s trapped within as if it can sense me.
My soul.
It was cut from me the night I was born in order to ensure my loyalty. With it, he owns me. Without it I can never truly escape, for he can snuff my life simply by closing his fist around that small crystal cylinder and crushing it.
I’ve heard stories of my birth. There’s something about the meld of wraith and fae that often makes delivering a half-born child difficult. Some say it’s the curse cast upon us, fighting to twist the fae mother’s magic. In defense, my mother’s power sought to protect her, which nearly killed me. My father cut me from her womb in order to save my life, and she was left to bleed to death in her bed as he beheld all his hopes and dreams... and found them utterly lacking.
I was small, sickly, and gleaming like mother-of-pearl. In the eyes of my father, who had hoped for a strong child born of two powerful bloodlines, I was an abject failure. He cast me at a wet nurse and told her that if I lived, then I was to be brought before him at the age of five in order to see if anything could be redeemed of my worth.
The first I knew of the world was the small hovel where I was raised. The potential of my bloodlines was too important for the wet nurse, Thia, to dare let me starve, but there was no kindness to be found among the several bastards she raised in exchange for my father’s coin. With three older “brothers” and a “sister” who liked to cuff me when nobody was looking, there were only scraps of food to eat, and a small nest of hay under the bed to sleep in.
The first time I ever Sifted—slipping from shadow to shadow—was when I was four, and a pair of my “brothers” tried to drown me in a well. All I can remember is
