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PROLOGUE

The steadholt was located several miles south of the ruined wasteland that had once been Alera Ihted there in more than six centuries Furystorer than that The land, for miles about, had been a patchwork of fares, and roads for hundreds of years Wild furies had been so few and so feeble that they were all but extinct

As a result, the little steadholt had not been built with stone walls surrounding it, or with a heavy stone central hall for shelter froes and small houses, where each family had lived in its own home, separate from the others

But all that had been before the vord came

Invidia Aquitaine stood at the outskirts of the little steadholt, hidden in the shadows

Shadoere abundant these days, she reflected

The newborn volcano that stood as a gravestone for Gaius Sextus, the final First Lord of Alera, had continued to spew forth clouds of dark smoke and ash in the days and weeks after its creation Even now, the sky was covered with low clouds that would release spring rain in fitful sputters or maniacal bursts Soreen The clouds theht from the fire-mountain to the north - and in every other direction by the steady, haunting green glow of the croach, the waxy growth that covered the ground, the trees, the buildings, and every other feature of the land the vord had claimed for their own

Here the vord had driven their presence the deepest Here, at the heart of what had once been Alera, they had taken thepresence of the vord, covered everything for a hundredall other life from the land

Except here

The little steadholt was green Its kitchen gardens ell under way despite the fact that summer had not quite arrived Its rain Wind sighed in the leaves of its enorrass of a rich pasture In the darkness, if one ignored the eerily lit sky, the green glow of croach stretching to the horizon in every direction, and the occasional alien shriek of one of the vord, it looked like a normal, prosperous Aleran steadholt

Invidia shuddered

The parasite on her torso reacted to the motion with an uncos rapped around her, their sharp tips sunk inches into her flesh, it caused pain It was nothing coony she suffered as its head twisted, its eyeless face and branching mandibles sunken into the flesh between two of her ribs, burrowed invasively into her innards

Invidia loathed the creature - but it was all that kept her alive The poison upon the balest bolt that had nearly taken her life had spread all through her body It had festered there, growing, devouring her from within, so swiftly and perniciously that even her own ability to restore her body via furycraft had been overwhelht it for days as she stu pursued, barely conscious as the struggle in her body raged And when she had realized that the struggle could end in only one way, she found herself lying upon a wooded hillside and knew that she was going to die

But the vord Queen had co down at her without an ounce of pity or ehtmares

Invidia had been desperate Terrified Delirious with poison and fever Her body had been so knotted with shivering against the fever-cold that she literally had not been able to feel her ars But she could feel the vord Queen, the creature's alien presence inside her thoughts, sifting through them one by one as they tumbled and spun in the delirium