Chapter 3

The end of Hollow Creek came on a Tuesday.

The sky was clear blue, the air warm. I was tending the graves of my neighbors, the last of the generation I' d grown up with. Their grandchildren now ran the town, and they looked at me with a mixture of awe and fear. The man who never aged.

Then the sky darkened. Not with clouds, but with a presence.

He descended from above, a figure of terrible beauty and power. Caelus. I had only seen him in Elara' s rare, fleeting descriptions, but I knew him instantly. He radiated an arrogance that poisoned the air.

He saw me standing there among the graves, and a look of profound disgust crossed his perfect face. He didn' t see a man. He saw an insect.

"So this is the stain," he said, his voice echoing through the valley. "The mortal filth that touched her."

He wasn't speaking to me. He was speaking to the world.

He raised a hand, and a wave of black, sickly energy rolled out from him. It wasn't fire or wind. It was a blight, a wrongness that drained the very life from the world.

The trees withered instantly, their leaves turning to dust. The grass blackened and died. The birds fell silent from the sky.

I heard screams from the town, short and sharp, then nothing. Every man, woman, and child in Hollow Creek died in that single, silent moment. Their life force was simply... gone. Drained away to nothing.

The blight washed over me, but I didn't die. Elara' s "gift" of long life protected me from it, leaving me standing alone in a dead world.

Caelus walked toward me, his steps silent on the dead earth. He was going to kill me himself, to wipe the "stain" away personally.

Just as he reached for me, a flash of light intervened.

Elara was there. She stood between us, her hand on Caelus' s chest. She looked distraught, her face twisted in something that might have been pain.

"Stop," she pleaded with him. "Please."

Caelus looked at her, his anger softening slightly. "He defiles your memory, Elara."

She turned to me, and her eyes were filled with tears. But they weren't for the dead people of Hollow Creek. They were for the inconvenience. For the mess.

"Liam, you have to understand," she said, her voice a desperate whisper. "His power... it' s volatile. He gets these rages. The lives of the townspeople... it was a necessary sacrifice to calm him."

A necessary sacrifice. My friends. My family.

"I' m paying back my debt to him with their lives," she said, as if that explained everything. As if that made it right.

I stared at her, speechless with a grief so vast it had no sound.

"I have to protect you," she said, her expression hardening with resolve. She grabbed my arm, her grip like steel. "You' re coming with me."

She didn' t ask. She told. She dragged me from the corpse of my home, from the graves of everyone I ever knew, and pulled me up into the sky.

She was taking me to Aethelgard. To her gilded cage. To protect me.