Addison Moore [Moore - All Hail the King (Celestra Forever After Book 6)

Prologue

Skyla

D arkness has enveloped me.

The world, once young and bright, has lost its vigor, the borders of which have become grievous and tenebrous. There is no greater ache, no sharper deception than to see the one who holds your heartholds the blade with which to kill you. It is a nightmare within a nightmare to learn the soul you melded over your own is the one who looks to destroy everything you hold near and dear. There is no greater agony than to have the scales fall from your eyes and reveal the one you grafted your life to has been the one to fear all along.

Heartbreak. It comes in acres when the blade delivered to your chest was thrust by the one you love the most.

Heartbreak brings you to your knees, forcing you to worship at the foot of its throne. It presses over you with its sword and demands you bow your head in submission. It lances open your chest. It steals your beating heart before pressing your nose in a pool of your own blood in an effort to extinguish the breath from your lungs.

Heartbreak is a dangerous game that never lets you win.

But I will find the strength to lift my head one last time. I will see the world around me for what it is, scrubbed free of lifes grand illusions, nothing but the stark-naked truth. I will rise to my feet, snatch back my heart, wipe the blood from my face, and step out into an unknowable future with or without you.

Time, death, and heartbreak have braided themselves into a noose that you lovingly slipped around my neck. You placed me on the pedestal of your heart, then kicked the chair out from underneath me when I least expected it.

It was born from love, this unending ache youve gifted me. It was because you loved me that you burned my world to cinder. It was all of your affection poured over my head, scalding and blistering, that caused me to lose my grasp on what I needed to hold onto most. It was from the deepest chamber of your heart from which you drew the sharpest sword. Your love proved potent and dangerousa toxin in my midst, slowly administered into my veins through each one of your kisses. Your love fell over my world like the blackest night, the hottest flame that hell could ever offer.

You love me. You do.

I have incinerated under the careful supervision of your all-consuming affection.

You may have cut the world from underneath me, but I will never let you win.

My wish come true has become my biggest curse.

Your wish come true, your greatest horror.

But you are not the savior our people need. That role was filled long ago.

You wear a paper crown. He wears one made of gold.

You lead our people to everlasting destruction.

He leads us to everlasting life.

He paid. He reigns. We win.

He is robed in majesty.

Resurrection awaits those who dare to believe.

All hail the King.

1

Hell on Earth

Skyla

T here have been moments in my life when it felt as if I were dying. There have been moments in my life where I wish I could have plunged the knife into my own chest. Death has never been a stranger to me. The Grim Reaper never farther than a breath. The certainty of the afterlife has never done much to quell the feeling of doom and dread that comes with the fact a loved one has been disconnected from their body. Who would have thought that the reversea resurrection of the agescould have brought me such mortal grief?

The water rides up over my white gossamer gown as I sit tucked among the jagged rocks at the base of Devils Peak. My mother took my wings but left the ethereal accoutrement as a reminder I suppose. No sooner did I float safely to the bottom of this hellish cliff side I so daringly dove off of, than my wings evaporated, along with those electric blue butterflies surrounding me like illuminated confetti. It was a magical scene, my powers so quickly restored after a drought of almost a year. The more I bedded the enemy, the faster they diminished.

But thats all in the past, I think to myself as I stare vacantly into the ocean as the waves bathe in a river of moonlight.

Skyla! Logan calls to me from a distance as he makes his way down the rocky cliff. But theres not one part of me that has the strength to answer him, to turn and greet him like the old me would have done. Every last part of who I was prior to this demonic evening has dissolved along with the illusion of everything I thought I knewit dissolved right along with the people I believed I could trust with my living soul.

I take in a deep lungful of ozone-rich Paragon fog while doing my best to usher from my mind the events that have transpired earlier this evening. Its too painful, too incomprehensible to believe anything that has happened in the last few months, let alone the last few hours. I dont want to think about the horrors of what my new reality brings.

Gage and his wicked transformation feel soluble in every sense. Who hes become and what hes done are nothing more than the esoteric rantings of a madman. His new reality is nothing but an echo of a demons voice without a tangible vessel to produce the sound. It is smoke and mirrors. It has to be.

This new version of Gage is nothing at all like the solid, fire over stone, palpable, warm-bodied, warm-hearted version he once was. This new rendition is nothing more than a puff of smoke ready to choke out the world. He already choked mine. This new adaptation, the one born of a wicked nobility, is nothing more than what Logan suspected Fems were from the beginninga ball of hate-filled air. That is what Gage Oliver has reduced himself to, perhaps what hes been all alonga ball of hate-filled air.