The Alpha Rejected Me, So I Built My Own Kingdom

PROLOGUE — THE SEALINGU

(Three hundred years ago)

They came for the King under a full moon, because they were afraid of the dark.

Vael stood alone on the white steps of a palace that no longer exists, and watched the armies of three kingdoms kneel — not in worship, but in aim. Ten thousand spears. A hundred witches with salt on their tongues. Three crowns he had once called friends.

He could have burned them all. That was the trouble. That was always the trouble.

"You swore," he said, and his voice rolled across the valley like a tide. "You swore the Celestials would be your shield."

"You were our shield," said the Lycan king, the one whose grandson's grandson would one day rule a fortress in the north. His hands shook on the hilt of his sword. "Until you became the thing we needed shielding from."

The witches began to sing.

Vael felt the moon — his moon, the silver mother of his blood — being turned against him, knot by knot, like a noose woven out of light. He did not fight it. That surprised them. They had expected the sky to crack.

Instead he laughed, soft and terrible, and looked up at the great pale face above them all.

"You cannot kill what the moon made," he told them. "You can only bury it. And buried things"— the light closed over him like water, and his eyes were the last to go, two coals of silver fire dimming into the white — "always, always claw their way back to the surface."

The seal took him.

The Celestials they hunted to the last child, salted their kingdom so nothing would grow, and called it mercy.

But seals are not graves. And three hundred years is not so long, to a man made of moonlight.

In a far valley, decades later, a woman named Liora held a newborn to her chest, pressed her lips to the infant's silver-downed crown, and wept — because she had felt it too. The crack. The first, hairline crack in the dark behind the moon.

"Not you," she whispered to her daughter. "I'll hide you so deep the moon herself forgets your name. You'll never have to carry this. I swear it."

She was wrong about almost everything.

But she was right about how much it would cost.