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PROLOGUE

ADOM

M y first memory was of screaming. Shrill, gut-wrenching screams, sharp enough to pierce the veil of unconsciousness. It was a sound I had no name for then but would come to know well—fear. The kind of fear that clawed its way through the air and lodged itself in the bones.

They weren't my screams. Later I would wonder if they should have been.

The screaming belonged to the midwife. She stumbled from the chamber, pale and wide-eyed, clutching her skirts as though something unspeakable was chasing her. I wasn't chasing her. I was too busy taking my first breath in this world.

Breathing came as naturally to me as seeing clearly in the darkened room. Seeing and discerning figures came as naturally as turning over onto my belly and coming to my paws to stand. I also knew that if I opened my tiny paws, the sharp claws would draw blood.

The air in the room was thick with the earthy tang of blood and the faint, coppery scent of sweat. Inhaling the second breath of my life, I decided I liked them both.

A set of massive hands came toward me. They were unclawed. Bigger than my entire person. My tiny heart pounded as the giant brought my body to him. When he spoke, my fear dissipated. He was not going to eat me.

I'd heard my father's voice every day of my existence in the womb. His booming laugh when he spoke with his friends. The different voices he used as he read me stories of daring princes, beautiful damsels, and evil villains. The amorous whispers he spoke in private to my mother. The guttural cries when he was training with his warriors.

He gathered me in his arms and held me against the strong beat of his chest, grinning proudly as though I were something precious. His callused fingers were gentle against my skin, like he was trying to comfort me. Realization dawned that something was wrong. With me.

My father bent down and placed me in her arms. Her body trembled as she took me. Not the shivering cold of someone afraid for their life. Her lips quivered, her golden eyes—so sharp, so striking—filled with unshed tears. Not a single one fell. It was my first lesson as her son.

My mother looked at me like I wasn’t whole. Like she couldn’t decide whether to toss me from her or clutch me closer. I caught my reflection in the flash of her cat-gold irises. If I were her, I would've chosen to cry out and toss me away.

I didn’t need a mirror to tell me that the sight of me would turn stomachs or send maids screaming from the room. I could feel it in the way my body didn’t feel like a body at all. Not fully boy. Not fully beast. A liminal thing, caught between worlds.

Mother blinked, and the reflection was gone. She pulled me to her chest. Her heartbeat thundered against my ears. I was hers—a lioness’s cub. Her trembling arms said what her words couldn’t: She would protect me.

I belonged to her. Just like my father did. She would protect us both.

I was only ten solars old when that protection broke.

The day my father died in the Troll Wars, the world I knew crumbled. Grief swept through the palace like a storm. It didn’t roar or howl as it left destruction in its wake. It didn’t come in sobs or wails—it settled in the walls, in the air, in the spaces between us, dismantling what was left of our family with devastating quiet.

The queen's silence was a heavy, unyielding thing that pressed against my chest like a stone. She shut herself away from the world. In the hollow space she left behind, I heard what she didn’t say aloud.

I felt it in every wincing glance she sent my way in the darkness of her rooms. I saw it in every averted gaze at the dinner table. The curse that marked me was a symbol of the forbidden path my parents had chosen. Their love, a defiance against the will of a god, had brought ruin. Avarix had punished them, not with fire or famine, but with me.

I was their mistake. A reminder of their rebellion, their hubris. An abomination born of a love that never should have been.

I grew into that beast. My body followed the curse, growing monstrously larger, fiercer. My mane thickened, my claws sharpened, and my roar carried across battlefields, terrifying enemies and allies alike.

On Lunaterra, a boy became a man after the planet made thirteen revolutions around the Mother Sun and the Daughter Sun. Parties were thrown for a man child in honor of the thirteen moons that chased the Daughter Sun across the night sky hoping for her favor. There was no party thrown for me on my thirteenth solar. Only a cheer sent up across the battlefield after I made my first kill on that night.

In the land of Solmane, the center of Lunaterra, people whispered of the Beast Prince. Fear was a shield, stronger than their pity. It was easier to embody the monster they believed I was than to show the boy who still longed for something as impossible as his mother’s love in the light of his father's death.

Each battle I fought brought more victories. With every drop of blood I spilled, my mother slowly began to emerge from the shadowed confines of her grief. She spoke some. She moved through the halls a bit. She even glanced at me a time or two during battle briefings. But even as her silence lifted, the threat of the trolls only deepened. Without Avarix’s protection, the trolls’ numbers swelled unchecked, their attacks growing bolder and bloodier and ever closer to the capitol city of Pridehaven.

There was only one way to stop the senseless war. Only one path to salvation for my people. Only one way to break the curse that kept me chained between man and beast.

I would have to do what my parents had refused.

I would marry the girl the First Moon had chosen. The one Avarix decreed would restore balance. Not the girl I had loved.

There was no girl I loved. Because no girl would ever love me. Damsels, fairy princesses, and girls lost in the forest never fell for the brutish beasts.

I buried any fairytale notions deep within me, locked away with the part of me that still remembered the softness of my father's calluses, the hope in his smile, and the love he shared with me and my mother.

All that remained was the beast. And beasts did not need love.