The Bloodlines Begin Here

She was three years old the night her mother gave her the knife.

In the burning halls of Khartoum Palace, with Lord Commander Natas’s obsidian falling against the foundations and the Narsan legions breaking the gates, High Queen Nergal of the Orishan bloodline made the choice no queen should ever face. She pressed her daughter’s small hand to the hilt. She guided the blade to her own throat. And she told Oadira, with cerulean eyes the color of her mother’s, the eyes the Orishan bloodline had carried since the founding, that her essence would pass into Nebiriau’s bracelet on the child’s wrist, and that the bracelet would carry her mother with her through the long darkness ahead.

That night, four princesses of four bloodlines were scattered across Aarde so the apparatus could not find them all at once.

Oadira would walk out of Khartoum carrying her mother on her wrist. The witan world that took her in would not know what she was. She would not, for some years, fully know either. But Nebiriau’s bracelet would know. And Nergal’s essence inside it would know. And somewhere across the dispersal, three other small girls, Aamira of the Yoruban, Heziara of the Hausan, Damisiah of the Demerrian, would be walking their own dark paths toward the same eventual gathering.

This is the volume in which the long darkness begins.

This is the volume in which Oadira learns to walk.