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Prologue

War

The war had been raging for centuries, a war that breathed beneath huends and folklore It was a silent war of soundless screa and invisible bloodshed

And like many wars, it had been built upon a mindless prejudice

The ancient Greeks had it right They were not naive enough to believe they had any control over their fate They knew the gods controlled all They didn’t believe a good crop that year had anything to do with luck in a poorly cultivated land—no, it was Demeter who’d blessed their farm They didn’t believe that onethe scales of a battle in their favor—no, Athena had taken a liking to him, and so aided the warrior

Yes, the gods were capricious, un that contented the the human world their chessboard and humans their own personal chess pieces

They gloried in their supremacy

But one day the gods of ancient felt a pierce in each of their hearts It was the day humans, who had once been under their thrall, who had loved them, and feared theods and their hearts to a new one

As the centuries passed, the gods were no longer worshipped by any huer feared, or loved, or prayed to The barrier of space that had allowed them to come down frothened as tiot theed froacy: their children, the supernaturals of their own creation who still looked to the heavens and believed in theods

Her children perpetrated the silent aging beneath the humans’ very noses

On one side of the ere the true instigators, those who called theiks who believed above all in their own superiority Gaia, perhaps in her infinite wisdo theeneration of iks arose—witches and warlocks with elemental power, a race of children ould forever pray to her, and through theet her

They believed, however, that those lesser supernatural beings were abominations not fit to live side by side with humans, much less themselves Their distaste for lykans (like ht to exteriks who believed in the equality of the races We call ourselves the Daylight Coven

You see, to our hts hunted not abominations but their own people, huods, creatures descended fro split in beliefs between the dark and light covens was shared by their contemporaries, the faeries of Heht and Sun, her children were al queen who had sold her soul to her favorite goddess for the opportunity to take on the for she wished, so that she would always know her enemies, and they would never know her

Fro a race of shapeshifters who held the power to take on the appearance of anything born of nature They’reas spies on either side of the war

Hades, God of the Underworld (and grandson to Gaia), created a race of children familiar to humans within their folklore: vah the River Styx without toll and whom Hades returned to Earth to extort, in blood, payment from those who dared to leave them to travel into the Underworld without coin

And the youngest of the children of the gods are the lykans: we are fierce, strong wolves consecrated with the power of regeneration In the dying years of the ancient gods, Artemis, Goddess of the Moon, the Hunt, and of Beasts, was called down to Earth by the last hu froratitude for his loyalty, replaced his son’s wasted heart with that of a wolf’s To her supreoddess—her own race of children was born, and she, too, was remembered by us

In the early years of our existence, we children of the gods, cousins, wandered the world of hues passed, and our for the olf blood, and eventually becoinal selves