The Wattys Boot Camp Mentorship Program is back for 2023! Have you written a story that you plan to submit to the Wattys? If the answer is yes, you've come to the right place. This program helps you prepare your submission to make it the best it can...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Logline
Aurora crosses into another realm to save her sister, heedless that she is being hunted for her unexplainable powers. To avenge his brother's murder, Tezaro must deliver Aurora to Armindia and end the war.
Blurb
Aurora's world is turned upside down the day her mother dies. The day she discovers she has magical powers. Years later, she is still learning to cope with her guilt and grief when her sister is kidnapped. To save the only family she has left, Aurora must cross into another realm, trust an exiled knight, make a bargain with a thief, and fulfill a prophecy. If she isn't killed first.
Tezaro is on a quest to find his brother's killer, but before he can get any answers, he is forced to bring a war-ending prophecy to the Steward of Armindia. Should he fail, not only will his brother's murder go unsolved, but it will lead to a genocide across the continent and reduce Armindia to smoldering ashes.
Bound by fate and torn apart by circumstance, Aurora will let no one, including Tezaro, prevent her from rescuing her sister. Tezaro will not rest until Aurora, like it or not, is delivered to Armindia.
Neither is willing to bend, at odds with what they want and what fate has written.
~Chapter One~
Tezaro
Every time Tezaro stepped into Anthonias' private study it cost him a piece of himself, and the price kept getting higher.
Nothing good ever comes out of being in this place.
His gaze focused on the man, Anthonias Malden, sitting behind the massive desk in the center of the room. Or perhaps, it only appeared massive in comparison to Anthonias' thin frame. A praying mantis came to mind every time Tezaro saw him.
Although late into the night, Anthonias still wore his official robes with the Armindian emblem of a pronounced keystone over an arch outlined above his heart. Thinning white hair crowned his square face, a face that had more wrinkles than a weathered map.
Books penned with the changing events of Armindia's recent history, personally written by the Steward himself, lined the curved walls from the door to the balcony of arched windows which were never opened. When Tezaro inhaled, the smell of ink, leather, and musk was suffocating. Far beneath the closed balcony, lost to the glittering star-filled darkness lay the city of Crown Guard, once Tezaro's home.
Everything was just as he remembered. Tezaro frowned.
"Why am I here?" Like the sword that hung from his waist, his voice had a sharp edge. Unperturbed by his entrance, Anthonias continued his meticulous writing, quill in hand, finalizing the newest entry into the book. The elder man's brown hand drifted across the page slowly, methodically. Each delicate stroke was purposeful, if the purpose was to annoy him which Tezaro was certain.
