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I am yours forever…

Present Day, Somewhere in the northwestern Amazon Basin

Two thousand yearsafter it was closed, a young woman enters a forgotten tomb. She has the same cinnamon hair as Roxilana, the long-dead Queen of Sarmatians. She has the same heart-shaped face and bright eyes too. She even has the same magic. But she goes by a different name and wears different clothes; she has lived a different life, one unimaginable to the ancient witch.

And yet when this woman looks at the writing that adorns the tomb walls, she finds she can read it. And when she descends deeper and discovers the sealed sarcophagus, beneath her curiosity and fear is a growing awareness that she can neitherunderstand nor place, one that compels her to use her magic to cast its lid aside.

Within it, there is no corpse but instead a scarred, seemingly sleeping man. He’s familiar to her, though her mind cannot grasp why. Her heart and her magic, however, they seem to know, and they rule her actions.

The woman’s hand goes to his cheek, and she utters a single word in a language she should not know.

“Wake.”

The man’s eyes snap open, and he draws in his first lungful of air in two millennia.

“Roxilana,” he breathes. “You found me.”