Allissa
“Before the kingdoms,” she began, “before the split, before the gods troubled themselves to draw the lines that tell each people what it may be, there were the First. Of every kind. The first dragons. The first wolves, silver as the moon and twice as old. The first of the deep, that your water-lady’s people still half remember. The First of the dark forests that even I was hatched too late to meet.” Her blind gaze drifted and for a moment seemed to settle on me, on the lycan queen in the circle, with a weight that lifted the hair on my arms. “We are their children’s children’s children, grown small and borrowed. Some of those old lines run thinner than they look, Lycan Queen, and farther down than anyone digs. Farther than your hellhound father. The blood remembers what the record
