A novel by Marle Alexander
From Chapter One: Trace
After eight years in this liminal stage where fortune and misfortune blurred together like a painting left out in the rain, Trace saw no end to it. Its beginning, however, was seared into his memory: churning black clouds devouring the sky; the air besieged by litanies of despairing cries; gale-force wind stinging his face as the ship’s hull let out a horrific groan before it cracked in half.
Trace had floundered inside a violent mix of sea water and splintered planks as long as he could until exhaustion claimed him. During his rapid descent into murky silence, his lungs screamed for air, his throat spasmed, every muscle seized up. His last thought beneath the weight of a thousand waves was a voiceless prayer that spiraled into nothingness.
He drowned then.
“There were times Trace craved solitude, needed it to quiet the echo of the unpleasant things people said to him, to cast off the annoying addendums they pinned to an already oppressive week.”
Trace was found on the shores of a remote fishing village eight years ago, the same day a devastating storm darkened the sea and destroyed a company of Argentine warships on a mission for the Queen of Vassalia.
Now a young man, Trace has carved a tenuous place amongst the people of Minreth. The blank pages of his past didn’t define him, but his brush with death left a lasting taint–wild ghost-white hair and a startling right eye, bright like an unquenchable ember. His only friend Kyriel, an Apothecarist who dreams of a future beyond their isolated village, knows Trace’s secret. He can pull mysterious lights from crystals found between darkwood trees inhabiting the Wilderlands.
A meeting with a man in black and an enigmatic woman on the run maneuvers Trace’s fate onto a precipice. He can live the life he’s won, or brave an encounter with a murderous queen to unearth memories long forgotten, and discover who, and what, he truly is.
Interested? Read the first chapter here!
To Adorn the Stars 