I was born with a curse that spun a violent storm around me, seizing every beautiful and fragile thing that flittered into my life, tearing it all from my grasp as effortlessly as the wings of a butterfly are torn from its body.

Or so I thought, anyway.
It all changed when they came for me, when they dragged me to trial for my crimes. I should have faced execution, but fate is a fickle and funny thing, taunting me with the knowledge that I was always destined to be so much more.
They know it: the five great masters who took control of my life, and now fight for control over my soul.
He knows it, as well. The golden-eyed warrior whose fate is tied horribly and inexplicably with mine.
From the great cliffs to the wide, violent ocean, they shadow my steps. From the perfumed halls to the quiet, dusty rooms, they push my every limit in cruel and unrelenting ways.
Because we all know… There is something evil taking root deep beneath the earth, a horror growing behind every shadow, a disease clawing into our midst, the end of the world as we know it drawing close enough to spot on the horizon. The darkness is coming.

And I might be the only one who can stop it.

“The relentless clock of fate was groaning over to the next hour, ringing the arrival of a battle as old as time, sounding the final alarm, the final chance to fall to our blades or lift them high. It was repeating infernal hours that grew hungrier with each turn, more vicious than the day, the year, the century before.”

The end was here.

The great war had begun.

I had been torn apart and remade, a marionette to dance over the coals of this world, stitched together by my tormentors. The great masters thought they could break me down and own me. They were wrong. I had won my freedom, my place in this world, my golden-eyed protector by my side. Until it happened again; the grim call of fate looking out at me through eyes of darkness, the great masters waiting with the power I needed, curses and promises in their hands. It was time to make another deal. It was time to play their game in earnest.

“I had dreams of the sun dying like hot coal smothered by sand, suffocating in a world where darkness hunted light … but then I woke and saw that it had risen again, and I knew we would be no different. From this battle to the next, we would endure.”

What began as a war of force had turned to one of secrets and strategies. An army was amassing in the shadows, hidden from our eyes, slipping into our ranks until there was nowhere safe to turn, and nobody left to trust.
To win the war, I would be forced to forget the man I trusted, and to bind myself to the men I hated.
Forever.
Since the first day, the great masters have fought for control over me, fought to claim me in marriage and seize my power for themselves. Every step of the way, they’ve asked me to choose. They’ve attempted to deal and swindle the decision out of me, but I’ve managed to out-manoeuvre them at every turn, bringing me to this moment.
The moment I finally choose.
If they can take my power, I can take theirs, and if marriage is how they want to do it, then so be it.
I’ll marry all five of them, and choose myself.

“This world has fallen to sickness and shadow. It has bound my hands and blinded me, picking away at the things I love until even my conscience has slipped off to some forlorn cage within my mind, locked away as a traitor. I once feared the storm inside me. Now I would give anything to have it back.”

To prove the purity of my soul, I sacrificed everything. I lost my magic, my best friend, and tied myself to the five kings of the afterworld in unholy matrimony. Now, every day is torture at their hands. I am their final hope, a perfect weapon to wield in the ultimate war still looming ahead of us. They will push me as far as it takes, no matter what.

Every day, I give a little more of myself away, and they’re snapping up each piece as though they have a right.

Every day, the Darkness takes another victim, picking off people all around me until those of us who fight for light and life are outnumbered in a world we’re no longer sure is our own.

The end is drawing near, but the closer it gets, the more impossible our victory seems.

Even after everything I’ve sacrificed … I fear it won’t be enough.

I was born with a shadow inside me, a beast clawing and ripping its way to freedom. I was born with a clock inside me, the tick-ticking of my heartbeat drawing us all closer to the inevitable, the inescapable. The end of everything.

And now, finally, it has arrived.

The world is burning, the souls are screaming, the castles are crumbling. Death is here for us all, but I am a warrior of light, a conqueror of worlds, a protector of souls. I have seen the face of death, and it is only one face in a sea of many, one name in a language so vast, most of the words have been forgotten … but languages can be learned.

In a world of lost words, even death has a name.

In the forgotten places full of forgotten whispers, magic can always be found. Even by the weakest of us. Even the cursed and condemned, the stewards or sectorians, the warriors or maidens, the gods or mortals.

Even someone like me.