Chapter 1

They call me the pet.

The Aethelings whisper it when they think I can' t hear, their voices like chimes in the wind, but the word is always ugly.

"Elara' s little mortal pet."

I live in a gilded cage called Aethelgard, a place of impossible light and floating islands, but all I see are the bars. Today, Elara came to see me. She no longer looks like the woman I knew for forty years, the one with laugh lines around her eyes and a streak of grey in her hair.

Now, she is eternally young, her face a perfect, cold mask. She brought me a fruit that shimmered with inner light. I didn't take it.

"You' re not eating, Liam," she said, her voice without warmth.

"I' m not hungry."

She sighed, a sound of mild annoyance, not concern. "You must understand. My life in Hollow Creek with you, it was a trial. A test to break the curse on my powers. You were the final step."

The words hung in the air between us, colder than the mountain winters I remembered. My husband, my wife, our life, our love. A step. A tool.

"And now the trial is over," I said, my voice flat.

"Yes," she said, looking relieved, as if I' d finally understood a simple lesson. "I' m with Caelus now. It was always meant to be this way. He is my equal."

She looked past me, towards a gleaming spire in the distance where Caelus, the leader of the Aethelings, lived. The one who looked at me with open contempt.

"I' m happy, Liam. You should be happy for me."

I looked at my hands, the hands of a healer, a folk herbalist. They knew the texture of every leaf and root in the Appalachian mountains. Here, they were useless. I was useless.

She had given me a "gift" before she left me, a curse she called long life, but it was just a prison. I was bound to Hollow Creek, unable to leave, forced to watch everyone I ever loved grow old and die. Until Caelus came.

He destroyed my prison by destroying my world.

Now I was in a new one.

Elara stood to leave, her silken robes making no sound. "Try to adapt, Liam. It' s a great honor to be here."

An honor to be a pet. An honor to be a reminder of a test she passed.

I watched her go, a radiant, powerful being who was once my wife.

And in the silent, shimmering prison of her world, I felt something shift inside me. It was not hope. It was not despair.

It was the cold, quiet promise of a reckoning.