Daughter of Fire: The Darkness Rising

Karen Frost

Copyright 2019 Ylva Publishing

Other Books in the Destiny and Darkness series

Daughter of Fire: Conspiracy of the Dark

Daughter of Fire: The Darkness Rising

Destiny's Choice

Chapter 1

"When hope is lost, it takes a character of great courage to find it again."

– Author unknown

"There are no innocents. Only victims."

– Vardan Ironwill, Captain of the King's Regiment

If you're not careful, the hungry ghosts of your past will eat you alive. As the less-than-noble knight Sir Idras once told me, a drowned man always wants companions. The dead may be lonely, but only a fish can survive underwater.

Just a few months ago, I'd been a daughter of the Ice Crown, the land of snow and ice. I had parents from whom I'd never spent a night apart and brothers for whom I'd have walked the length of our kingdom Ilirya and back again. Everything I had, everything I was existed in a tiny world of its own, a single snowflake in a snowstorm. And then, like a candle blown out by careless lips, all of it had been extinguished in an instant. I had neither a home nor a family anymore. I was adrift—with only my ghosts to keep me company.

I'd have given all that I had and more to change the past, to save my family from the enemy raid that killed them, but there is no magic that can turn back time and undo what has been done; time only runs in one direction. And Death doesn't give back what he takes. With my once happy life shattered, all that remained was survival. Putting one foot in front of the other, taking my days by the hour, I had traveled to Windhall University, where I started training as a war mage. What else could I do? With my old life in ashes, I had to build a new one, however I could. As a war mage, it would one day be my fate to be the sword that cut down Ilirya's enemies, then be cut down myself in the unending circle of violence that had engulfed the kingdom's southern border for four decades. Miraculously saved from slaughter at the hands of the villainous Northmen, I was expected to die in the south for a kingdom I barely knew. Then there would be no one left to avenge the destruction of my village.

It was at this intersection of past and future, family and expectations, duty and destiny, that I found myself as I lay on the floor of Windhall's infirmary. By coincidence or fate, I had been snatched from the jaws of death by the healer Timo right before the one event I never expected could happen. The ambassador of the Northmen, those murderers of my people, had appeared in the infirmary. As weak as I was from my brush with death, this was likely the only chance I would ever get to take revenge for everything that had been taken from me. I had drawn every ounce of magic that I had with the goal of obliterating her from the earth, but then I'd been tackled to the ground. With every second I remained pinned to the floor by the healer-student Lyse, the chance to avenge my family was slipping away

"Your family lives." She whispered the words into my ear, low and urgent. Her breath tickled my skin and I could almost feel her lips as they moved. If I'd thought about those lips so near to me, it had always been in a different context, not like this. But the words made no sense. They might as well have been in another language. They had no meaning. I had to get up. I had to avenge my family.

Everything was spinning, blurring, falling as my head reeled. My body burned with my magic, which, frustrated by Lyse's tackle and the presence in the infirmary of Draks, a mage bane able to extinguish the magic of other mages, seethed angrily in my veins, looking for release. I had told Lyse a dozen times what had happened to my family. She had sat and held me while I cried for them. So why was she stopping me from doing what she herself would surely have done under similar circumstances? I gritted my teeth and tried to shimmy free.