Gold

The world rips, and Auren is ripped from Slade.

The world rips, and Auren is ripped from Slade. She plunges through a void between realms, senses stripped away—sight, sound, touch dissolved into nothing. The tear above her stitches shut, sealing Orea behind her. Through the terror, Slade's voice cuts through: don't fall—fly. Gold gathers around her body in luminous streams, the void's lightning sparking gilt. She touches a blazing star that cracks open like an egg, its radiance sweeping her into a river of warmth. Then she's poured through earth, pushed upward, and spilled into an amethyst sky. The dark is gone. The air is sweet and ancient and alive. Something inside her opens its eyes for the first time. Her fae nature recognizes what her mind hasn't yet grasped—she's returned to the world she was stolen from as a child.

Auren lands in a fae realm she can't remember leaving

She crashes through an amethyst sky and settles into a field of glowing blue flowers without impact—the same field where the legendary Saira Turley once landed centuries ago. Twenty-four ribbons have returned to her spine, satiny and bright, but they hang lifeless, refusing to move no matter how she strains. An elderly fae named Nenet pushes through the stunned crowd of onlookers and kneels beside Auren, calling her the Lyäri Ulvêre—the golden one gone. She says Auren is home. Before she can process that claim, exhaustion drags her under. She wakes in a hidden attic above a servette in the fae town of Geisel, her burned feet partially healed by a fledgling healer named Estelia, surrounded by fae who know her name but whom she doesn't recognize at all.

Kaila's brother becomes a hostage for Auren's kidnapping

Two weeks after the Conflux, Slade descends on Third Kingdom's Gallenreef Castle. Queen Kaila orchestrated Auren's kidnapping and trial, but she has fled to Sixth Kingdom. Her advisor refuses to produce her, so Slade rots the castle's stairs, walls, and guards with barely a thought. When Kaila's brother Manu emerges to face him, Slade wraps a hand around his throat and delivers his verdict: since Kaila stole the person most important to him, he'll take hers. He knocks Manu unconscious and flies off with him draped over the saddle. Manu's earlier infiltration of Brackhill—the operation that kidnapped Auren—also left a woman named Rissa stabbed and comatose, a wound Slade's captain Osrik refuses to forgive. Behind him, Gallenreef crumbles into toxic decay.

Auren's golden skin marks a bloodline the monarchy wants extinct Nenet delivers the revelation that fractures Auren's understanding of herself: she is the last-birthed heir of the Turley line, descended from Saira Turley, the Orean woman who united Annwyn and Orea…