A Radiant Sky

Prologue

There are certain things they never tell you about love.

Fairy tales and campfire legends make it sound easy.

A Guardian falls in love with a Rebel, and their love tears the heavens apart. Their daughter isn’t light and isn’t dark, but both. Undeniably, painfully both. And no transformation from mermaid to girl, no glass slipper, no prince charming or enchanted beast can help her figure out where she truly belongs.

They’ll tell you what it’s like to fall in love. All the wonderful, terrible things. That it hurts when you’re together, and when you’re not. It hurts when you know, and the not-knowing hurts even more. They’ll tell you that no matter how strong you are, no matter how much you fight or steel yourself against it, it hurts to have your heart broken.

But what no one ever tells you is that to break your own heart—that feels even worse.

I always believed that love could only shatter you. Make you believe the impossible until the impossible is all you know. And then when the impossible is real, when you’ve forgotten who you are, forgotten everything that makes you you, only when the world is different and you are different and things are shining the way you never knew they could—that’s when love rips you open from the inside out.

I always thought I could live without it.

“Love,” Asher had once said. “The great destroyer of worlds.”

But I was wrong.