Prologue
Is this how I die?
This world had always been out to get her. Anastasia had spent nineteen years running and out of all the ways her life could end, the world had chosen death by drowning. The searing sensation that licked at her throat became unbearable, her lithe form convulsing as it fought for survival. From the darkest depths, chains had risen to latch onto her ankles and wrists, dragging her down until only a pinpoint of light reflected from the water’s surface.
Death. It wasn’t her grandmother who came to her in her last moments, lecturing her on all the times she had warned her to keep the necklace around her neck, the necklace that would keep her safe. Instead, it was a young girl who held her likeness. Painted on the black backdrop of the ocean’s depths, the girl stared down at her with dulled, lifeless eyes. Ghostly pale and with hair so starkly white it nearly glowed. As Anastasia suffered her last seconds the thought that came to her was whether she deserved this all along.
Then the world exploded around her. It splintered and cracked, shattering into giant shards of floating glass. And all at once, the depths of the lake was no more and she found herself in a galaxy of broken stars. In the distance a lone star brightened, taking over all and bathed the world in its blinding white light.
Anastasia awoke to pain, it rushing in all at once. She took what felt to be her first breath of true consciousness. Eyes the color of scarlet flew open, darting around a room as dark as the night. A heartbeat monitor came to her unnaturally loud and pain seized in her chest with each solid pump of oxygen into her lungs. It wasn’t the pain of suffocation, not of drowning. Rather than having been dragged to hell, it was as though she’d hit concrete.
The agony nearly blacked her out, but before she lost full consciousness she spied the shadowy silhouette of someone entering the room. “By the Gods, she’s awake.”
