Prologue: In Every Life
There was once a world held together by song.
Not a song you could hum, or play on strings. This music lived in everything—the wind, the fire, the memory of the moon. It hummed in hearts and trembled through time. It was the breath between souls, the silence between stars.
Long ago, before the skies broke into floating islands, before the academies rose to train the gifted and the cursed, there were two.
Ashara and Rael.
One born of moonlight, calm and quiet as snowfall.
The other of flame and rhythm, wild as a storm in bloom.
Together, they were a song that no world had ever heard before.
They loved.
Not in whispers. Not in secret. But boldly—in defiance of what was allowed, what was written, what the world feared. Their bond was dangerous not because of what they were, but because of what they could be together.
So the world tore them apart.
And from that broken love, everything shattered.
The skies cracked. Islands drifted. Magic turned strange. Love turned brittle. War became the only language people remembered. And the music?
The music died.
But not completely.
In the silence left behind, a promise echoed.
“In every life, I will find you.”
Now, centuries later, the world of Alunara floats in pieces. An academy trains the next generation to harness what remains of the ancient power. Music is a novelty, a relic of another age. And no one remembers Ashara and Rael.
No one...
Except two boys.
One with silver eyes and midnight in his soul.
One with fire in his laugh and a melody in his bones.
They do not know each other yet.
But the void inside them aches with a name they can’t remember.
And when their eyes meet for the first time, the music—long buried—will begin again.
