Series: Lords of Rathe Series by Meagan Brandy
Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 95227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 476(@200wpm)___ 381(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 476(@200wpm)___ 381(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
He bristles.
Good.
“Open the gates, Legend.” Creed orders.
But nothing happens.
Legend frowns at the space in front of him, his hand pushing out, but his limbs start to shake. Unease slips into my bones. He evades my attempts at catching his gaze as he runs his fingers through his dark hair. Slowly, his head swivels to Sinner.
A silent conversation takes place between them before Sinner tsks and waves his hand.
A tear in the air rips open as a portal appears, Rathe humming behind it. Lightning sparks not in warning, but in welcome. The realm instantly recognizes the blood of its Kings—and Queen. Singular.
Knight and London step through first, followed by the rest of us, and the portal closes the moment Creed’s feet hit the soil.
The scent shifts—metallic smoke, iron-rich air, magic old enough to bite in an intoxicating way. My skin prickles, every instinct purring like it finally has room to breathe again after being suffocated in the mortal world.
Weird, considering my entire life was spent on an island that is literally located on Earth. Here, in the real realm of Rathe, everything is wild.
The air itself thickens, heavies, leaving no question or uncertainty—but making it undeniably clear that these lands are wild and you are at their will.
It’s untamed.
Unmatched.
“What do you know of the weapon? How does it work?” Knight pushes without meeting my gaze, his eyes focused and scanning for a threat in the distance, just like his brothers.
“You were right before,” I tell him. “Isle’s Kiss doesn’t attack the senses. It eats the soul.”
Everyone jerks their heads my way.
“You’re sure?” Legend asks, a curiosity in his gaze rather than the acidic looks I’m getting from his brothers that say they think I’m full of shit.
“As sure as Creed is an asshole.” Creed scoffs, but I press on. “On the isle, some called it the island’s gift. The one and only mercy it gave the discarded.”
“Mercy?” London peers at me.
“Yep.” I nod, climbing the hillside and turning toward the sound of howling coming from the forest surrounding us. “The island is intended to torture. It’s a free-for-all of chaos; and my people don’t hate that. They crave it, but sometimes even the damned get tired and when they do…Isle’s Kiss is the answer. It kills slowly. Painfully. It’s the only way of death on the island that leaves you dead long enough for them to rest.”
“What do you mean?” London asks. “Is it a false death?”
I shake my head. “Everything is a false death on the island, remember? You die; you come back. And eventually, you die again. Wash, rinse, repeat. Day after day, year after year.”
Creed glares. “No one here will pity you, so stop trying.”
I roll my eyes. “Oh, fuck off.”
A low wind sweeps up the ridge, dragging a coil of gray fog with it, thick enough that it swallows my boots halfway to my knees. Something pale juts through the mist a few strides ahead—long, curved, too smooth to be stone. Bone. Lots of it. A whole stretch of the hillside littered with half-buried remains, some small, some the size of overturned canoes, but all pointed downhill like they crawled here to die.
“Where are we going?”
“Keep walking and keep talking,” Creed demands. “How does it work?”
I fight a smirk and nod. “It’s not poison, or maybe it is, essentially, but its very soil is cursed. The seed grows of that curse, and the flowers grow of those seeds. Basically it enters the system and eats the gifted from the inside out.”
“Eats?” Sinner grins, hands in his pockets.
“It doesn’t just kill,” I nod, stepping over a jagged chunk of bone half sunk in the hillside. “It eats. Slow. Methodical. First it slips into the veins, threads itself through every pathway it finds, like it’s mapping you. Then it starts digging deeper, past the blood, past the marrow. It goes after whatever makes you…you.” I tap my sternum once. “Your spark. Your core. Aka…”
“Your soul,” Legend completes, reaching out and pushing my hair from my face as he continues to walk beside me.
“Exactly.”
“Soul-eating is a fairy tale, even for the gifted.” Knight frowns. “There is no such thing. If there were, if anyone knew about it, it would be us. Not some outsider.”
An outsider who saved your sorry ass once upon a time.
“Why, because you’re big bad royals?” I look across them. “I’d bet there is a lot more out there than your little golden crested realm shows you. You’re gifted. Royals, at that. You have powers, and a being that lives inside you. The possibilities are likely endless. For you more than any… But you’re closed off because you sit on your pretty velvet chairs and boss people around. So how could you possibly learn more, become more, if you just keep doing the same shit the Kings before you did?”