Sovereign to the Skies

Prologue

PROLOGUE

Once, in the kingdom of Valador, there lived a small and bitter boy. Dark-haired and plain, he was foul of temper and had a face like a civet. His one redeeming feature was his royal blood—but even that was in name only. Sorex Calumni was mere cousin to the royal family. His mother, the youngest Oroae, had married one of her father's soldiers at the cost of her title and inheritance. They had been in love, or thought they had been, but love did not put food on the table, nor did it put the breath back in one's lungs.

When both of Sorex's parents breathed their last, King Neran Oroae had brought the boy to court to be raised with his Oroae grandchildren. He ate at their table, learned at their schoolroom, and slept in their nursery; but despite their proximity, Sorex and the Oroae children would never be close. He was vindictive and selfish, quick to anger, and savagely, bitterly jealous of the magic that his cousins could do, but that he could not.

Rhea, the youngest, was an elemental of air. Solen, the middle child, was an elemental of earth. And Amarus, the oldest, and heir to the throne, was an elemental of both fire and water. All three of them were incredibly power and gifted in their various arts. To have the four elements gathered in one family was said to be a stroke of fortune, a blessing of the gods.

Years and years later, when the Oroae died at the same table where they had all supped together as children, every eye in the court went to Sorex. Everyone knew how he felt about his beautiful golden cousins, the god-blessed: Rhea, Solen, and Amarus.

But if they had been poisoned by Sorex's hand, as everyone suspected was the case, he had hidden the evidence well enough that his right of ascension could not properly be challenged without casting shadow on the nation's reputation.

Sorex was thirty-two years of age.

At his coronation, he told his people that he was not their king, but their emperor. The nation of Valador would become the Dominion Empire, and Rothmora was theirs for the conquest. For too long, he said, they had been reliant on magic instead of might. Magic corrupted, because it provided an easy source of power to individuals who had never been properly vetted. Might had to be strived for, painstakingly earned. Why, he asked, should they toil and suffer for the same things that came so easily to someone else by accident of birth? No laws exist to govern magic, he pointed out. And each nation specialized in a different kind of magic—magic, the Emperor cautioned with dark mien, that might one day be used against them. Nations beyond their control and their laws. What was to stop the Southern Island weather mages from casting a blight on their crops for spite? Or the mind-reading kognitas from Kartanya from stealing their state secrets? Even the elementals from Valador and its neighboring Ravenna could flood the streets or set fire to their neighbors' barn if the whim possessed them. And it might, Sorex cautioned, it might.

Such rhetoric had been spoken before, but usually in mutinous whispers to a sympathetic ear. Not in such a public forum. Sorex's impassioned fervor resonated with hundreds. Nearly everyone attending the coronation could think of one mage by whom they had once felt slighted. But since King Oroae's children had been mages, and because magic was taught in the schoolrooms at his insistence, they had never truly felt comfortable giving voice to their unfashionable opinions. Not when it felt so close to treason. Now, for the first time, they could stand up freely and express that prejudice; those individuals cheered the loudest and stamped their feet the hardest, to their new Emperor's approbation. It was thrilling.

As the mood of the crowd tipped, many of the attendant mages quietly slipped out of the hall, their robes hissing against the tiles as though poisonous snakes were nipping at their heels. A few who had been particularly close to the Oroae family even left the country.

"They flee because they are cowards, and because they know that we are right. Only the guilty-conscienced would refuse to face judgment," Sorex said, as the absences mounted and various foundations began to wither and crumble without their carefully tended wards. When this was pointed out, he had another response at the ready. "Is it tending, when they rig the land to be poisoned and blighted in their absence? Or is it spite?"

Six months later, Emperor Sorex put his words to paper, an edict he had decided to call "The Indentured Mage Act." All Rothmoran mages would either ally themselves with the nascent Dominion Empire or else be regarded as traitors. The ink on the Indentured Mage Act had scarcely dried before Emperor Sorex sent out the first wave of his soldiers to enforce it.

They started in the Southern Islands. For centuries, they had been a hub for trade, and a place for sailors and journeymen to resupply. Their many ports, and their inexperience with battle, had made them quick to fall. Desperately, they had worked together in a final effort to ward off the invading armies. They sheathed their islands in a veil of storms. Waves hundreds of feet high had driven off the ships and held invaders at bay. Powerful winds plucked airships from the sky as if they were no more than a pesky, oversized gnat. Their reefs became a graveyard of wrecked ships and drowned sailors, and the unearthly green waters at their heart soon became known as The Devil's Mirror, because to look into them was to be damned.

Ravenna surrendered; like the Southern Islands, they were also a point of trade, but they did not wish to be crushed. They surrendered their mages—if the mages didn't surrender themselves first—and became the first nation to ally itself with the Dominion Empire.

Kartanya treated the Mage Act as the overture of war it was and responded accordingly, quickly becoming a festering thorn in the Emperor's side. They were not just hard to get to, cordoned off as they were by the mountainous Shadow Pass, and blocked off on two other sides by frozen wasteland and desert; they had also allied with Sorstraga, a small nation who was only too happy to lend them their elemental mages in exchange for protection.

The mage wars, as they came to be called, appeared to have reached a stalemate—

And then, Emperor Sorex found a golden-eyed man named Ilarion Velas.