Page 5 of The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2)
The Glimouria Archipelago
Anya’s home was in the bright-lit southern end of the Glimouria Archipelago.
In the Archipelago you would find thirty-seven species of dragons, and mermaids with shimmering tails twenty feet long. You would find behemoths in the ocean that could eat a dozen people in a mouthful, and sphinxes on the (unimaginatively named, Anya felt) Sphinx Peninsula.
The sphinxes cut words into the rock of the mountains with their claws: mathematics, astronomy, history, and even jokes, most of which did not work in translation.
One of those histories was that of the island of Dousha, and the family of Argen: the last royal family left in the Archipelago.
A king or queen from the Argen family had ruled the island of Dousha for more than a thousand years.
They had built Argen Castle back at the beginning of their reign and bedecked it in silver; the metal had been beaten to the thinness of paper by blacksmiths and hammered onto each brick.
It had, the histories said, been a thing of astonishing beauty.
It had not, though, been practical. The sunlight had caught the silver, burning the grass and toasting the feathers of birds in the gardens.
Nowadays, the silver was largely gone, through rain and time and theft. But the castle was still silver- flecked , and seen from above, as the phoenix flies, it still glinted in moonlight.
It had been a strange year. The army had grown larger, and soldiers lined the streets in ways they had not done before. It should be spring, but the snow had lingered on the island of Dousha for far too long. The sky felt uneasy. People said the snow was a sign of nothing good to come.
The current king, His Majesty Halam Argen, had just turned seventy years old. He had a stern jaw, a thin mouth, and wrinkles that expressed a life of skepticism and pride.
Anya Argen—with hair the color of an unwashed moon, brown eyes, gagana scars on every finger and all the way up her forearms—was his granddaughter.
Though she did not know it, as she carried the egg to the fire to warm it, her life was about to change—beyond all recognition, and forever.