A unit of over fifty mortals killed almost every creature in sight. They’d then decimated our seaside city before setting up camp in preparation to march farther inland.

Beyond the window I laid my head against, beyond the ever-stretching miles of greenery containing villages and farmland, laid a wasteland of valleys and homes and a fallen city that had been so aptly named. Upon seeing it for the first time after the human soldiers who’d destroyed it had been defeated, I remembered thinking that perhaps someone had known.

Perhaps our ancestors, upon giving portions of the isle life in the form of names, had been warned of what all those once spacious streets and crowded shops would eventually become.

And so they’d named it Graveyard City.

For it was now scorched earth and sand-swept debris, the bones of many souls forever trapped beneath the ruins.

Warned indeed, I had thought as I’d stood upon a sandy knoll at the young age of eighteen. Freshly wed and so perilously in love, I’d soaked in all the destruction mere weeks after Helvectus’ passing, shaken to my core.

A prophecy wrapped within a name.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry or surrender to both. For it had been at that same jewel ball where I’d first laid eyes on my prince turned king that I’d been given a warning myself.

Not once had I looked at his older brother, King Helvectus, when the sorceress with eyes and hair of pure crimson had warned me that my true love would be a faerie king.

My heart had known. It could only have been Rorn. So I embraced her warning as magical fate, and I’d welcomed it with all I had to give.

In return, I’d been handed everything, only to eventually rot with nothing.

I’d foolishly believed we would live as we’d wanted. Two souls free to adventure and hide and love. I’d thought if Rorn would one day become king, then that day would only arrive when we were both ready.

Raised a dreamer by a warrior who so often had to leave me with nothing but my stories and paintings and wild imagination for guardianship—I’d never felt more naïve for letting my heart run so far away from me.

Rorn and his most trusted returned at nightfall, catching me unawares in the throne room.

Their footsteps ceased as three sets of eyes fell upon me.

“Majesty,” Rollins said with a swift bow. “Good to see you.” I forced a small smile, and the captain gestured over his shoulder. “I was just heading for the barracks.”

Halthorne, our mapmaker and a longtime friend of Rorn’s, was slow to follow. Finally sensing the rising tension between his king and queen, he wisely excused himself.

The doors closed.

“Hello, husband.”