Prologue

Thunder crackled outside, dividing the world in half. It lighted up the Castle that peeked out between the misty forest. High in one of the towers a girl with raven hair and scales upon her arms and face tossed and turned in her bed, dreaming of the night her life ended. 

The night she watched her father die. 

Every night. 

Every night I watched my father die in front of me. Every night my body seemed to quake watching my mother crawl towards my father’s prone body, blood lacing her fingertips as she searched for a pulse that was not there. 

That would never be there. 

Then HE was there. 

Always there, his silver eyes gleaming like the steel he gripped that dripped down crimson tears on the shiny marble floor. He had magic at his fingertips, but he still chose to strike down her father with a blade as shiny and elaborate as a toy. 

“Now,” he pronounced licking his lips, looking hungrily at me. “Back to the question at hand.” 

“My answer,” I declared shaking with a near all consuming rage, “Will never change.” 

The sorcerer Shazir looked down at me a dark shadow passing through his eyes as he regarded me from where I stood on the podium. The Holy man who had stood earlier had run through the doors hidden by the throne, smartly with the crown that should have already been on my head. Shazir seemed to shake with his own rage, as he regarded me over hooded eyes. “It did not have to be this way. All you ever had to say was yes.” He answered his voice stark. “You will be my Queen or the mythical monster this land has feared for a century.” 

Shazir raised his arms, the Snake staff gleaming as thunderous clouds that gleamed sapphire fell upon me. I felt my mouth being pushed open as the smoke pushed thick hands over my body and shoved itself into my very being until we became one. 

Then suddenly I felt thrown to the floor as a small body colliding with mine on the podium. Shaking the residual smoke, I looked down surprised to see my parents’ lover, Zavia above me, her eyes hard. “Be the daughter your father raised you to be. Never break, never waver.” She told throwing her hand up as a wall of violet smoke pushed Shazir back who screamed in fury. Zara ran forward throwing herself down, to where we both sat.

“Zaya!” She cried her hand on my face, her face full of fear.

“Zara.” I whispered in a rasp, holding her hand in mine. “Are you alright?” 

Zavia gently kissed us both on our foreheads holding us close. “You will be. Even if you will never see us again. I love you both.” She uttered her voice choked with emotion, tears filling her eyes. 

“Zavia?” I questioned. 

Zavia looked fondly down at her daughter Zara before her gaze turned to me. “I have loved you more, with every day I have known you. Which is why I know you will both be each other’s savior.” Zavia let go of her two daughters one of blood, and one of love. 

She rose up, speaking a flurry of Arabic and suddenly the throne room vanished, and in its place a Mahogony library seemed to tower over them. My eyes closed and when I opened them, I was back in the middle of the dark satin sheets of the curtained bed. I gently got up, my eyes closing in pain as the scales of my skin rubbed against each other, the thud of a barbed tail making a rattling sound that felt like chains on the ground. I looked across the room to the gilded mirror that showed me the scaly creature that now looked back at me with my own features. “Happy Birthday.” I pronounced as I pushed back the curtains looking down at the gleaming ocean and what I knew was the dunes of my old home across a vast and lonely Ocean.