Amorta: Prologue

Blurb: Aurelia Rose lives on in the hidden land of Amortal and is one of the only 17-year-olds in her class who hasn't claimed an element. Labeled an Outcast, Aurelia faces the pressure of claiming an element before her eighteenth birthday---with the inevitable fate of death if she does not. Though she faces the adolescent drama of being in love with a boy who hardly sees her (or so she thinks), the true identity of her parents reveals that he is her assigned protector, and she faces a much greater responsibility than surviving to adulthood: ruling a kingdom, and saving them from the Immortals who threaten her country.

Prologue

When an Amortal dies, their soul, a gold ball of light, floats out of their body and dissipates into the air. When a human dies, they become permanently unconscious, but we don't know where their soul goes. Their body stays—does their soul also stay? Or is it just gone?

I'm not human, so I guess I'll never know.

Cold clouds carried the tears that threatened to burst from my chest. It'd rained so much yesterday, I thought they'd all gone. But as I stared at his grave, it all came rushing back.

The blood. His blood. His heart. His soul.

I wondered if I ever loved him or if I just didn't like the thought of my life without him. It already felt off, somehow. Like every step I took was not correct, but out of place, wobbly. Guilt hung onto my heart like a hellish claw for not saving him. For being weak and foolish. I was supposed to be a Queen. Not this.

What kind of Queen lets all this death happen? What kind of Queen cries this much and cannot control how her grief shows in the skies and the earth? Though I took deep breaths to urge the clouds away, the pressure on my shoulders made me collapse onto my knees.

The weight of my tears broke out of the clouds and stormed onto the Amortal Kingdom as I kneeled on that ground, not as a Queen, but a girl with a broken heart.