PROLOGUE
Senara burned.
She thrashed against her chains. Weakness gnawed at her like ants on a carcass, making her bones ache and her muscles scream with agony. Sweat did not roll down her skin, nor did tears gather at her eyes. She was a spirit, after all. Spirits did not sweat or cry.
Spirits burned.
She was beautiful, and she knew it. It was magnificent, the way it burned as her very soul did: stronger and brighter than any bonfire or sunrise. Bronze skin, hair the color of coal. Her eyes, orange as the flame that coursed from her heart through her veins, seethed with want. Her desire for freedom, for escape, made her scream and cry. Her figure, lithe and tall, stooped beneath her prison.
Nobody could fight a spirit. They would not survive long enough to try. But an intelligent person could trick a spirit, and that was what led Senara to her lifelong imprisonment. Trickery.
She was getting tired.
Senara dwelt in a hidden dungeon, crouched in the shadows. To a stranger, she would be glowing. But to herself, she was a diminished light: a candle whose flame had slowly eaten up the wick, until it could find nothing else to hold on to.
She used to burn so much brighter.
“A fool,” she hissed in the darkness. Her voice was deep, a rumbling growl against the stone walls. “They have tricked me. Imprisoned me. Used me.”
She trailed a finger across the stone floor and looked up at the ceiling above her, shrouded in blackness. She knew that they walked over her, on top of her, as if she were nothing—as if she did not even exist.
“I am their goddess,” she whispered, her voice dripping with vengeful desire. “They will see what happens to those who disrespect me.”
Then she rose to her feet, her knees raw and bruised, and writhed against the chains bound to her ankles and wrists. They did not break. She knew that they never would. Yet she kept on trying, and she would keep on trying, even if it took her another five hundred years.
