Books
Ravenous Hunger
Six babes taken To hide the true king’s heir Six children hidden To possibly the crown bare No son nor daughter identities be known For all of the six are nameless And were taken from their home In the kingdom of Ainar the next monarch has always been determined by power over blood. With every generation came the possible change in the ruling family-until the next generation was taken. Now, years later all hope of finding the missing heirs has been abandoned, and only one Keeper continues the search. Against all reason, Raoul continues to search for the girl he met as a child. Believing that their connection would be severed if she were dead, he’s continued the hunt into far away lands. Daciana doesn’t remember a time when she wasn’t caged, so when her escape crosses paths with Raoul’s search, she’s thought to be one of the missing heirs, and brought into the succession trials. Forced to fight for a bloodline Daciana doesn’t know, Raoul can only watch and pray that she survives the fate he forced on her, and as both of them struggle to reconcile with the way their fates have become intrinsically intertwined.
Preface
Daciana There's always been a presence that lingers at the back of my mind. It was not always there, but I could not tell you when it came. As a child it would have frightened me, if not for the world around me being...
Daciana
There's always been a presence that lingers at the back of my mind.
It was not always there, but I could not tell you when it came. As a child it would have frightened me, if not for the world around me being far more frightening. The shadow became a reassurance. A promise. A writhing mass of emotion that called for blood and vengeance without words.
It was comforting.
As I grew older the shadow seemed to become more dense. Like, if I could reach into the corners of my mind I would find that the space it occupied thicker than fog, but thinner than mist. It never spoke to me. I dare say that it could not speak, though I understood it well. While I lay in my dank cell I could almost imagine that the reason it was so angry because it knew what I had yet to understand, that we had been caged.
Eventually the shadow became so imperceivably a part of myself that when I grew into womanhood, I forgot that it existed as anything other than a part my of myself. It belonged to me as I belonged to it. Its rage which I used to mark it as other, had turned to bitterness until it had begun to fade altogether. I could no longer find the line that divided me from the shadow, and sometimes I wondered if I had imagined that it had been anything other than me at all.
After years of loneliness and frustration, torment and misery, the solitude I’d come to know intimately stripped away memories until there were none left to recall. Memories that I once held tightly to comfort me through the night, were lost to time. Even my very name—if I ever had one, was bargained away to prove that the bite I'd suffered would not cause the mutation they feared so greatly.
My captors acted as though they were saints for my imprisonment. For protecting against the infection of the blood that cursed the soul. That my confinement had been necessary to ensure my own salvation. I used to dream of running away to dance beneath the warm sun, and the pale moonlight, yet what I knew of both had long been reduced to nothing more than scripted words on the pages of pale parchment.
Years passed, and the door never opened for more than a brief moment as I was kept alive. I began to wonder if this would be my life. Given enough to survive, but never to thrive. To exist until death finally came, after I had grown into womanhood and my muscles had long atrophied.
That was until the day that the foundation cracked, and the shadow made its presence known again.