
The war began with a whisper in a language older than stone.
Three centuries before Malisa's birth, the Witch-Queen Seraphina DuMort discovered the Grimoire of Chains—a text written in the blood of the first gods, bound in dragon-hide and human skin. Within its pages lay the secret to dominion: not merely to kill supernatural beings, but to consume their essences, to harvest their power like wheat before the scythe.
She began with the merclans.
The Sirens of the Abyssal Depths had ruled the oceans since before memory, their coral cities gleaming with bioluminescent majesty. Seraphina walked into the surf at midnight, her coven of thirteen surrounding her, and sang a song of unbinding. The water turned black. The coral crumbled. And when the sun rose, the merclans were bound to her will—their voices stolen, their tails chained in enchanted iron, their warriors forced to drag themselves onto land to die in service of her conquest.
The werewolves came next.
The Pack of the Blood Moon, largest of the lycanthrope clans, fell in a single night. Seraphina didn't fight them—she became them. Using the essence of the Alpha she'd captured, she walked among them in wolf-skin, her magic disguised as fur. At the full moon's apex, she spoke the Words of Dominion, and every wolf within a hundred miles felt their souls tear. They became vessels—still conscious, still feeling, but unable to disobey the voice in their minds that wore their mother's face, their lover's voice.
The dragons were harder.
Ancient, proud, and few in number, the Draconic Houses retreated to their volcanic fortresses, their scales gleaming with elemental fire. For fifty years, Seraphina couldn't touch them. So she turned to the lesser beings—the fae with their glamour, the ghouls with their hunger, the djinn bound in their lamps—and built an army of the desperate and the damned.
The Dragon War lasted a decade. Mountains were flattened. Rivers boiled. The sky turned to ash for three years straight, blocking out the sun. When it ended, only seven dragons remained in the world, and Seraphina wore their brother's heart around her neck as a pendant, pulsing with captured flame.
By the time Malisa was born, the supernatural world had known nothing but subjugation for generations.
Werewolves patrolled the witch-territories as slave-soldiers, their golden eyes empty of everything but the compulsion to obey. Merclans served as living batteries—their water-magic drained daily to power Seraphina's spells, their bodies kept in glass tanks in her palace, slowly withering. The fae had been reduced to court jesters, their wings clipped, their immortality traded for decades of servitude. Ghouls fed only on what the witches permitted. Vampires—those few who hadn't been exterminated—lived in coffins beneath the palace, summoned only to kill.
And in the shadows, a prophecy waited.

