Fate and Destiny (The Fated Series, #2)

Chapter 2 - Rohana - Against This

This mountain is starting to get claustrophobic. The carved-out halls echo my booted footsteps, letting every critter know that I'm not in the best of moods. I'm not in the best of moods most days, but that's because I've been forced to live in hiding for the past two fucking decades. Technically speaking, that's only a mere spec in my immortal life, but twenty years is still an agonizing twenty years no matter how long your life span is. Not that anyone would be able to tell since I still look like I'm in my early twenties. Hardly doubt anyone of a mortal bloodline could handle the surprising truth that I'm actually a hundred and thirty-two years old. Mortals say that's impossible, but my sisters say that I'm still in the early stages of life.

Time is a mockery. A stupid, idiotic mockery when I quite literally speed up, slow down, or freeze time with half a thought. I honestly could make these days go by faster, but using the power only drains me dry, and with our current situation, I need to be at full strength and ready to move at a moment's notice. Still, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to sit here and play with my fingers when we should be prioritizing the safety of the people my sisters and I of the Ginerva swore to protect.

There are nine of us. Each with a different power we fought for and was given so long as we used them to serve and protect our rulers. Nine women who call each other sisters because we'll know no other family in our lifetimes. We're the most elite, powerful, and dangerously skilled faction in Ker. Or we would be if an evil psychopath didn't force us to cut ourselves out of the world in order to protect it from said bullshit. Not even one mortal's lifetime and our island were already considered forgotten. Though I suppose Thralia has never really been connected to the rest of the world. What lives on our island doesn't reside anywhere else, and our ancestors learned a long time ago that the unknown and the powerful tend to be hunted until their extinct due to fear. It happened to the Fae some dozen or so centuries ago, and we would've well been next.

Not that it fucking helped to keep the power hungry people already living in Thralia out. Now we're here, stuck in hiding in a mountain on a shit piece of land is nothing like our homeland. The island was the only land we had known until Dawn abandoned it. It felt like a knife in the heart when I found out that she had disappeared overseas with no trace as to where she went. We grew up together – correction, she grew up. I stayed twenty-three. We schemed together and discovered the many pleasures of being a woman on the same night. Having planned on getting into the Ginerva at a young age, I thought it a good idea to befriend the next heir to the Thralian throne. She was just an upper hand, at first, but I learned quickly that nothing about Dawn was predictable. Her twin wasn't as wild as Dawn was, but sometimes she'd tag along on our adventures.

When Dawn left, I knew that if anyone knew where she had run off to, it was Sibella. Little Ella who always had her ear around the corner and her eyes spying in the shadows. I questioned her about her sister's disappearance every day, but she said that her sister's whereabouts were just a mystery to her as the rest of us. I was so close to dragging her by her hair to a secluded place where I could get the answers I wanted, when the Pater Princeps, late King Kerrigan, sent me, my eight sisters, an old hag, and a handful of talented Thralian spies to search for our runaway Mater Natura.

We searched and searched, keeping to the shadows and getting information through the town's drunken gossip or echoed whispers in alleyways. For years we searched every inch of the middle continent for even a spark of the power our Queen had, but it didn't end as it should've. So we got our bearings, gathered our people scattered throughout the land, and stayed concealed until the day came for us to fulfill the promise we swore through a bloodbond made the day she was crowned.

I didn't pick this lump of dried dirt as our hideout, and it shows. The Hollis Mountain is the tallest in the mountain range that runs along the northeast Cressidian and Vandarian border. People often climb it to get from one kingdom to the other without being spotted by patrols, but if they get too close to us they suddenly find themselves taking a long way around or turning back. They're simple wards carved into the bark of surrounding trees within a two mile radius of where we are. All my sisters know the markings, but it's Willa who has the power to keep them maintained for such a long period.