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In The Beginning

Eidolon

A thousand years ago

There is nothing more breathtaking than watching the woman I love taking her power as she’s crowned queen.

This day feels like the start of something new. A turning point in the turbulence of these past few decades. Even the Celestial Alignment, which happens only once every hundred years, has arrived on this day to mark the occasion, blessing and sanctifying the new queens.

Gauzy light glints through the stained-glass windows of the Arydian throne room. At the beginning of the coronation, radiant sunlight poured rainbow-colored beams over the dais, but the eclipse is almost upon us now.

Through the moonhole above the gathered guests, our three moons hover like dark discs in front of the sun, inching ever closer together.

Even in the growing darkness, the two women standing on the dais in front of me glow in the lights of the braziers and lanterns all over the chamber, sending the jewels adorning their matching coronation gowns glittering in dazzling sparkles. Twin sisters, Esha and Lillnya, only twenty summer solstices of age, identical in beauty and grace, kneel before the masses of authoritates and rulers.

But I only care about one.

Esha.

She is my everything. My heartmate. My bondmate. Never to be separated. Even in all our afterlives to come, we will find each other.

Always.

And now that she is queen, together, we will be unstoppable.

I let my gaze trace the curve of her cheek, the line of her jaw, the shell of her ear, the sweep of her neck. I want to put my mouth to that spot that I know makes her quiver when I suck there. Maybe after the coronation is over. I have a fantasy of what we will do together on her throne. Forbidden in such a sacred place, but it belongs to her now, and we do what we want. After the celebrations are over and the palace is asleep, I will bring her here for our own very private celebration.

At the peal of the bells in the tower overhead announcing the new rulers of Aryd, a shout of jubilation echoes around me, filling the throne room to the vaulted ceilings. Pride swells within me along with every expectation I have for the future.

Our future.

Mine and Esha’s.

Ruling together for the rest of our lives—me on the throne of the icy dominion of Tyndra, and her sharing the throne of the desert dominion of Aryd. United, we will become the strongest dominions in all of Nova. We will bring a desperately needed peace and prosperity to the world after a century of fear and upheaval.

Thanks be to the goddesses.

The bells continue to toll, and a new roar of sound joins the musical clanging—approval from the masses of people gathered around the palace and throughout the capital city of Oaesys. Across the room, I catch Esha’s glance, and I send her a brief smile. Nothing overly demonstrative. I am a king after all.

My queen does not return the smile. She is not allowed. This occasion, the responsibilities she is taking on, are solemn. To anyone else, I am sure she looks serene, but I do not need our bond to be able to see she is tense as a desert mouse holding still to avoid being pounced on by a nearby cat.

As her bondmate, I can help her, send her reassurance and all my love and support down our connection, but I am not allowed to keep that open to her during her coronation ceremony. The high priestess does not want to risk the wrong soul being ordained to rule here. Maybe I should risk it, now that the crowning is complete. The twitchy way Esha has moved throughout, the tightness of her face, the way she keeps seeking me out, have gotten worse with each passing moment. Her tension makes me want to break protocol and stride to her side, wrap her in my arms, and soothe away her worries.

Placed on my own throne at the age of ten, at twenty-five now, I am a veteran king. I can show her how to rule, how to govern her people to the best of her ability with whatever blessings and torments the goddesses deign to grant her during her reign—be that famine or feast.

I pray for feast. A bounty.

Surely that will come to us at least, given that my own mother is the Goddess Tyndra herself. We all deserve a break.

A herald bangs a bronze staff against the marble floor three times, and throughout the throne room, all take a slow inhale of anticipation, even as the celebrations outside continue. The priestess who performed the ceremony holds her hands over the new queens’ heads. She says a quick blessing, then bids them to rise.

The priestess smiles widely, and in a raised voice, proclaims, “I present to you Queen Lillnya Tabranelle I and Queen Esha Mereneith I of Aryd. May they reign in wisdom, grace, and peace all their summers.”

“All their summers!” I shout along with the others.

The members of the court drop to their knees before the new queens, fists held over their hearts. All except for the rulers of the other five dominions of Nova—the queens and kings of Mariana, Tropikis, Savanah, Wildernyss, and me, Eidolon Calix I. We bow our heads in a sign of mutual respect.

Ceremony complete, all but the sovereigns file out of the room to the ringing of bells and excited chatter. We remain behind for the final private blessing.

Once they have gone, the priestess steps aside and a sand nymph enters from an alcove behind them. In Aryd, sand nymphs are known to honor events like births and even deaths, the same as ice nymphs in Tyndra, especially for royalty.

Esha does not meet my gaze.

Standing between the sisters, the sand nymph’s lips move in silent words. A blessing. Someday soon, one will do the same over our children on their name days. Perhaps tonight, I will put a baby in Esha’s belly, and we will start our legacy together.

I know she is not able to hear my thoughts right now, but I catch a tiny glance in my direction from my lover’s amber-hued eyes.

Eyes I have watched widen, then go slumberous with pleasure. Eyes that appear to glow with an inner fire when she is angry or when she laughs. Ebony hair that spreads out on my pillow and over my chest when she curls into me at night. And a mind and heart that are my truest match.

How have I been so blessed to find her? To have her choose me?

I am tempted to run a finger over the winding, invisible lines of our bond that mark my arm the same way they mark hers, to awaken that connection, but it will have to wait.

The nymph finishes her rite with a kiss on first Lillnya’s forehead, then Esha’s, and then faces us once again. “New sovereigns,” the nymph announces. “To join you in the goddess-anointed ruling of our lands.”

I sneak a look at Esha and wink.

I expect her lips to twitch in the shared moment, but she does not even blink.

Esha and Lillnya bow their heads silently, then lift their gazes to the moonroof. The sun is now a bright halo circling a black center. Once again, I am struck by the rare blessing they have received on their coronation. It is as if Nova herself has anointed them this day.

After the Alignment wanes, we will make our way into the gardens and palace proper to begin a reception where we will celebrate for the next three nights, in honor of the three full moons, of which the Goddess Aryd is the patroness.

Esha nods to someone at the back, and the guards open the massive double doors.

With my own goddess-given power to control and sense darkness, I feel a familiar tug on the shadows that fill the corners and crevices of the room—spaces the light has left behind. A tug that I have felt all my life.

The Goddess Tyndra is here.

Why?

I turn and find she is not alone.

Her five sisters stand beside her, adorned so splendidly they are almost blinding in their beauty.

I frown. They should not be here.

The people will not want them here.

Not after these last decades.

First, the Devourers appeared in the oceans, raining terror down upon any who dared to breach those waters, creating a forced separation between the people of the dominions. Followed by years of…less. Famines, plagues, droughts, and death. Not created by the goddesses, but not stopped by them, either.

Their people blame them. So have some of the rulers of their dominions.

But I know why the goddesses changed. Why they seem cruel and unfeeling. Why they have retreated to the Allusian heavens and hardly speak to their creations anymore. I have told Esha those reasons. Did she feel pity for them? Compassion? Is that why she invited them here today? To start a new relationship between the goddesses and us mortals?

The six goddesses start down the long, velvet-carpeted aisle.

I glance back at Esha to find her staring not at the goddesses approaching the dais, but at me. Rather than the hope I would expect, her gaze is filled with something…darker. I try to open the connection between us, to ask her through our minds what this is about.

She keeps me out.

Beside her, Lillnya claps her hands. “We wondered if you would hear our prayers and come, goddesses of Nova!”

Esha drags her gaze from mine, a tight smile pinned to her lips. “Be welcomed here!”

But I know her, and her voice is strange around those words. There is a ring of something insincere. Wrong.

“ Now .” The word comes from Lillnya. A whisper directed only at Esha, but I am seated close enough to catch it.

Both the sisters’ hands alight, a sign they are using their powers. Esha’s palms glow a yellow that is sunny like her, and her sister’s a luxurious hue of deep purple.

Bile surges up my throat. They cannot mean to fight the goddesses? They will lose. They will be obliterated.

“No!” I try to jump to my feet, only I do not make it.

The moon and stars must align in that instant, because the room goes eerily dark. At the same time, everything about me just stops. My body feels paralyzed. Immovable. I cannot even access my powers, the shadows refusing to do my bidding.

How?

But I already know the answer. Only one person in this room has that ability. Chetan, King of Mariana—a Hylorae Imperium with the ability to freeze objects in place. People, too? Another Imperium’s powers?

What happens next comes so fast, I see it as flashes of moments as time seems to both crawl and escape its bounds.

The sand nymph screams as sand is dragged from her body—six colors from the different deserts of Aryd that sand nymphs are made of. As fast as it comes off the nymph, floating through the air, the grains start to glow as my Esha—a Hylorae Imperium who wields power over sand—manipulates it.

Mother goddess, she is doing this to that poor creature. She is stripping her of the element that makes up her very flesh.

At the same time, a shriek of fury rises from the goddesses.

“Faster!” Lillnya cries out. She is visibly shaking, sweat beading on her face.

What are they doing?

“Esha!” I try to reach my bondmate the only way left to me, through our minds. Through the bond that she participated in with me, went through the ritual and the vows with me. Because she loves me.

I know it works when she glances back again with a look that is all things desperation and apology . “I’m sorry,” she mouths. “You know I have to.”

“No!”

Agony rips through me, rips through all of me, leaving behind shreds of my heart and soul until there is only the darkness left.

It is all true. She did this. She planned this.

Then I see them. The goddesses have moved down the aisle, but not of their own will. They look like I feel, frozen while wide awake.

Chetan again.

In less time than it takes a flying ice fox to beat its wings, Esha forms the different colors of sand she took from the nymph, like six small colored piles in the air, heating and molding each into a small molten mass I know will eventually cool to glass. She works so fast that rather than taking a smooth shape, they remind me of lightning glass from the desert, roughly shaped, still glowing with heat, each about the size of a scarab beetle.

In that same beat of time, Lillnya—who is starting to look like death warmed over, eyes sinking into a face hollowing out—does the unimaginable.

Before my frozen gaze, the goddesses’ corporeal bodies…disintegrate.

Mouths already painfully, grotesquely open, their screeches splinter the air like broken glass scraping my skin. Their solid forms continue to dissolve and fade. The last thing I see is the shock and fury in my mother’s eyes—my eyes—before her body is…gone.

She is gone.

All that remains is a glittering haze of what must be the essence of their souls.

Lillnya keens, the sound like a tear in the fabric of the world, but she does not stop as she forces the goddesses’ souls floating in the air like stardust into Esha’s glass.

Amulets, I can see now.

One amulet for each goddess.

An amber light sparks inside the green glass amulet as Wildernyss disappears inside it. Then Aryd into the white glass, Mariana into the black glass, Savanah into the red, Tropikis into the purple, and Tyndra into the blue.

Except my goddess…my mother …makes a last desperate attempt to fight, her stardust soul crawling out, reaching toward me.

“Eidolon!” her voice calls my name, though I think I am the only one who can hear it. “Save me, my child!”

“Mother!” I try to reach for her but am not able. I am helpless to stop this.

Then silence as the amulet closes around her. Their souls, like lights inside each amulet, spark one last time as Esha seals them closed. Then those lights sputter out, leaving just the glass.

But it is not over.

Indoua, Queen of Wildernyss, uses her power to create fine metal filigrees which she binds around each piece of glass, then links them to matching metal chains.

Were all the other rulers part of this horror? This treasonous act? Was only I duped?

Maybe not. I can hear the Queen of Savanah crying about how she can feel the goddesses’ fear and fury. As an empath, she would.

Lillnya gives one last whimpering cry, then collapses to the floor, eyes glassy and face lifeless. I am fairly certain she is dead.

“Lilly!” Esha lets go of her own power to drop to her knees beside her sister. The amulets fall to the floor with a tinkling clatter, but they do not break.

In the next breath, the moons complete their path out of line, lifting the darkness in increments. The Alignment is over.

The King of Tropikis falls to the ground in a limp heap.

The hold over me abruptly disappears, and I stumble out of my seat. Immediately, I drag my power forward, my own palms igniting in a lavender glow as, at my command, a new darkness descends over the room. A total darkness through which only I can see.

I do not wait to ask questions and I do not go to Esha.

Goddess, how could she?

What she has done to me. To my mother. To our people. She has doomed us all.

My bondmate. It is unfathomable.

I run straight for the amulet that holds my mother. I pick her new prison up off the marbled floor, the blue glass dangling from the fine metal chain attached to the filagree aground the glass. I try to sense her, feel her, but there is nothing. Twisting my other hand in the air, I try to break the glass with my shadows—crush it, stab it, disintegrate it, infiltrate it.

Seven hells, I have no ability to reverse this.

The sand nymph appears before me and drops to her knees, staring in agonized horror at the terrible monstrosities made from her own body. If it is possible for a creature made of sand to lose color in her face, she does.

She shakes her head once. Twice. Then looks at me. “I had no willing part in this, domine. You must believe me. I want no part of this. My people will kill me for it.”

Esha’s voice is a whisper in my mind. One trembling word full of sorrow and regret. “Eidolon.”

My name is spoken in her beautiful, lying, betraying voice. The same voice that just last night called my name so sweetly as our bodies joined together. That sound ricochets through me, and my insides shrivel, darkness trying to consume me. To protect what is left.

As I lift my gaze, I send the shadows away and allow my building rage to shut my connection with Esha down so hard, she flinches. Then she reaches a hand toward me. “Listen to me. We had to—”

My darkness whips out at her, making her duck. I do not hurt her, though. That is not possible for me.

“ No .” The word comes out as a snarl.

Though I have cut Esha off from our bond, I still feel the slice of agony that skewers her.

I take a step back. “Never speak to me again. Never come to me. This is my only warning. If I see you in any of our afterlives to come, you had damn well better run.”

Esha sobs as she holds her sister in her lap. I stare back at her. At her beautiful, perfect, deceitful face.

I take the sand nymph by the elbow and do not even have to will my power to do my bidding, because getting away from this place, from Esha and the pain building inside me under the rage, is a burning instinct. Shadow swirls, coming up and over us, darkness obliterating my vision.

When the shadows dissipate, I am standing in the throne room in the palace of Tyndra. In my palace. My mother is in her amulet that swings from my fingertips. The sand nymph shivers in shock silently beside me.

And my precious bondmate, still in Aryd, is now my most hated enemy.

Pain wrapped in rage shreds through my body. My soul had torn with Esha’s betrayal, but it was nothing like this. Now it shatters and splinters within me, agony hitting in wave after wave as I feel my very being ripped apart. As if looking through a kaleidoscope, my vision fractures, loosing a thousand voices, all my own and yet not.

Then, as fast as it started, the pain is gone. My vision returns to find the sand nymph’s horror-filled eyes on me, and I am whole again.

But not.

All the pieces I have become, all the shards of my soul, are trapped inside me, a cacophony in my head.

Esha.

Esha did this to me. To my mother.

A cry rips from my throat and I drop to my knees as the future lays itself out before me.

One without Esha in it.

Worse…a future that pits us against each other.

Curling my hands into fists at my sides, I make a vow then and there. I will undo everything Esha and Lillnya did this day. I will release the goddesses from their prisons.

And may they curse anyone who gets in my way.