Light and Stone

Prologue

Ever since I was a girl, I'd heard stories of magic.

Magic that placed the stars in the sky above, casting their dim light on the earth below. Magic that made the ground tremble underfoot, and swept the leaves from trees and their whispering branches. Magic that made the tide surge in time with the swollen, luminous, moon at its fullest phase. Magic that raised the sun, fiery and omniscient in the sky, just to reclaim it again each night.

Magic was everywhere, sometimes in more ways more obvious than others. And eventually, the stories of my youth merged with reality-just as soon as I was old enough to comprehend the world around me.

We were a land united under a single banner, a dynasty that had reigned since long before I was born. A benevolent family, who upheld their far reaching power by delegating it between elected officials who oversaw the enactment of laws from a small selection of provinces in which they resided. Lords, they were called, and there were several dozen of them in total. Smaller dynasties, all in some way descended from the central one. And these lords that ruled in accordance with the monarch were responsible for more than just carrying out the monarch's will: they were equally responsible for the recruitment and training of the realm's first line of defense, the royal army.

For decades, the best and brightest in the realm were systematically recruited and trained in royally commissioned academies within each of the provinces, the most competitive of which resided in the realm's capital, King's Academy.

Those selected did have a choice in the matter. They could make the decision to enlist, or instead, to remain on a more traditional path-often the route of continued education or the adoption of a position in the family business, for the ones lucky enough to have the promise of either. But everyone knew it really wasn't much of a choice at all. It was considered among the highest honors to serve in the royal army, let alone getting recruited in the first place. The recruitment officials were incredibly selective, and once you were in, the academy training was exceptionally rigorous, and most didn't even last a year.

But that wasn't the only aspect of recruitment that distinguished it from that of the common army-one full of lead dispensing, headstrong young soldiers.

Those within the royal army possessed gifts beyond that of any ordinary person. They possessed gifts that were divinely inherited from birth, by chance or fate, no one knew. They possessed gifts of magic.