Prologue: The Girl in the Mountains
Seven years earlier:
She stood on the misty cliff above the ocean, biting back bitter tears.
Moss covered the jagged rocks high above the icy roaring waves below. Cold damp air whistled loudly, a cacophony with the sound of crashing water against the rocks. A cliff overlooked the waves in the cove below. On the other side of the cove were more rocky cliffs that stuck out from the vast Rionan Mountains – a tiny piece of the treachery the mountains concealed.
The Rionan Mountains had been a refuge to hide many before. Today, they would conceal yet another secret.
Breathing in the salty air was a young girl. She stared down the cliff at the gray sea as the wind tangled her loose strands of blond hair that had refused to twist into her braid. Her pale blue cloak billowed behind her; one of her hands rubbed its blue tassels between her fingers, while she grasped a book in her other hand. It was a thin, red volume decorated beautifully with curved lines and diamonds. A book that declared, simply by the cover, that its owner had been wealthy.
She pulled her hand away from her cloak. Flipping the book open to the front page, she read the words scrawled there one last time. The Journal of King Lloyd, king of Sorndra. My life, story, and the truth.
“Fool,” she muttered under her breath. She shut the cover and gripped it tightly in both hands, biting her lip. The words underneath the cover hurt every time she read them. She’d kept the volume until she couldn’t bear to see it any longer. It was time for the book to sink into the cold water where the truth would die with it. Finally, and forever.
She held the book out over the edge of the cliff, careful of her footing, and took a breath. Her fingers loosened their grip on the volume. It slipped out of her grasp and plummeted down into the wind and the sea and the salt, hitting the water and sinking to the sand as the water sunk into the paper and black ink bled and blurred across the pages.
She’d done it. It was gone. Finally.
She had thought that when the words hit the water and the sea enveloped the truth, the weight and bitterness on her shoulders would ease, but that didn’t happen. It was still there, clutching her heart, reminding her of those she had loved who had lied to her and died in cold blood.
“It’s time to move on,” she breathed into the wind. She wanted to move on. Desperately.
She’d found a new life, and she loved it, but the old life still clung to her.
Why couldn’t she let go?
Tugging her cloak tighter around her shoulders to fight the whipping wind, she stepped back from the edge and walked carefully across the ledge, pressing herself between a narrow space in the rock mountain and finding herself on a stone path on the other side. Here, the mountain slanted up as a rock wall separated her from the rest of the world – a separation she needed like others had before her.
Laughter met her ears.
She strode down the path, away from the wall, and turned a bend, her eyes finding the small but bustling colony before her, emerging from their stone houses and beginning the day.
She ran her fingers across the cold stone mountain as she walked, remembering that these people had been here in the Rionan Mountains for generations, hidden from the outside world, concealed from war.
She had joined the colony, and she would become a part of their society and their ways. Enter their family.
It was time to leave her past behind and enter into a new life. The journal was gone – the last piece of her past – and nothing was stopping her from leaving the past behind.
The only thing restraining her from completely letting go was herself. But she hoped that with the colony, peace, and concealment from the outside world she would be able to help her let go and settle into her new life.
She breathed in the damp air and entered the village.
It was time to let go.
End of Sample