Her blood intoned an Elysian, thalassic litany that his sepulchral heart had long since forfeited the grace to elegize.
And when the consuming abyss finally reached forth to enshroud her, it discovered that even the sovereign, immutable stillness of...
What if the vitality one woman had fought so fiercely to preserve became the first living pulse in centuries to disturb the sepulchral stillness of a man whose eternity had long since become an exquisite form of burial?
Beneath the wine-dark radiance of Lemuralia, where mortal desire moves in a blind choreography through the arms of creatures who have long forgotten the warmth of their own blood, Celestia Winfield steps unknowingly into the absolute dominion of Orion Hawthorne, an ancient sovereign who has survived centuries by mastering every primordial hunger capable of reducing lesser immortals to ash.
Yet from the suspended instant their paths entwine, something ancient and inexplicable begins to answer between them, a silent, volatile resonance beneath the skin, an impossible concord between living blood and a body abandoned by life centuries ago. Neither can fathom the gravitation that draws him toward her with a feverish devotion dangerously foreign to his own nature, nor why his chilling presence awakens within her the haunting premonition of standing at the threshold of something both forbidden and dangerously familiar.
As fascination deepens into an unyielding obsession, the delicate boundary separating what still belongs to the living from what has merely endured beyond death begins to fray, revealing that some hungers are older than memory, some covenants are written where no mortal eye can trace them, and even the dead may yet succumb to the exquisite cruelty of being alive.
—————
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
ORION HAWTHORNE
He was a temple of exquisite decay, draped in wealth and immaculate silence, while beneath his skin his doomed soul lingered as little more than a memory, until she awakened within those ruins something even eternity had failed to bury.
—————
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CELESTIA WINFIELD
She belonged as wholly to the riotous bloom of daylight as to the sacred stillness of night, carrying joy as the quiet insurrection of a soul the world had tried and failed to diminish.
