Witchlight sneak peek 🌪️
Read Merik's opening chapter!
Witchlight is now officially “in production,” and to celebrate, I’ve got another sneak peek! It’s the entirety of Merik’s first chapter. 👀
I have also updated past sneak peeks so that the latest versions of the scenes are available. (Because unsurprisingly, some things were changed in edits.) So here are links to those:
CHAPTER ONE
Prince Merik Nihar could not get his footing on the ice inside this mountain. It reached for Merik with frozen claws, just as it reached for the storm hound pup at his side.
Merik dodged and dove. He’d come to this tomb to trick Kullen into the frozen, hungry ice. It had worked, and Kullen was still there.
Merik no longer was.
Nor was this storm hound—a blighted storm hound—whom he’d only just been told that he must raise. Told by two little girls who found him in the ice, no less, because somehow that made sense.
The hound yelped and galloped beside him. Aurora, he’d named her five minutes ago because five minutes ago, a new dawn had seemed very symbolic. Poetic, even. Then the ice had decided to kill them both, and now here they were at the highest level in an enormous nautilus-shaped tomb of ice, both trying not to die.
“Watch out!” Merik shouted as ice launched down from the ceiling, but the puppy didn’t understand. The ice pierced her left wing and pinned her to the cavern floor. Aurora screamed.
Merik blasted out his magic. His winds cracked against the ice, freeing her wing—but it was like throwing chum in the water, and now the sharks were coming. The ice sensed his power. It surged at him with double the force. It crunched over his feet like shackles.
Merik punched out more winds, shattering the ice. Then he swept air beneath him and grabbed hold of himself and Aurora. Awkward, frantic winds, but enough to launch them upward…before toppling them off the path and into the open core of this spiraling ice.
Merik fell, Aurora fell. And Merik felt as if he were trapped inside a frozen seashell as countless curving floors blurred past.
Aurora howled as blood striped upward from her wing. She couldn’t seem to fly—or maybe she hadn’t learned yet—and Merik could barely manage flight either. He grabbed and reached and strained for more winds. Just one burst, one burst before they crashed on that ice—
Air whooshed under them. One burst. Merik slowed their fall.
The storm hound hit first in a thunderous crack. Merik a split moment later, breath punching from his lungs and muscles ripping from impact. But the pain was so distant. He and Aurora weren’t dead, they weren’t shattered—so they must keep moving.
Merik hauled to his feet before dragging up the massive pup. Her wing gushed blood now. She whimpered and whined.
But she also resumed her clumsy gallop, trusting Merik to lead her to safety. He prayed to Noden that he would be worth that trust. He prayed to Noden that there was a way to survive this. Why else would he have woken up from the sleeping ice? Why else would those strange girls speaking riddles in their ancient tongue have given him a storm hound and told him to leave?
During his time with Esme the Puppeteer, Merik had learned of one line from Eridysi’s Lament: Fissures in the ice always follow the grain. Unless something stops them, something blocks them, something forces them to change. Then the fissures in the ice will find new ways to travel.
There are no coincidences. Except when there are.
He had followed fissures in the ice to get here, into the icy tomb that had swallowed him whole. He had lured his Threadbrother Kullen into that ice that had always been singing—that sang even now, begging Merik to return to its embrace. Come, my son, and sleep. Come, come, the ice will hold you.
Now he followed the fissures a second time, all theses shadowy veins, like ore through a mountain. And ahead, the end of the tomb opened before them.
They reached it, bursting out into the enormous, eternal cavern Merik had come from before the ice claimed him. He skidded to a stop, shoving in front of Aurora before she could topple off a ledge into a spinning galaxy of stars hundreds of feet below.
If the nautilus-shaped ice tomb was strange, this massive star-filled cavern was far stranger.
Behind them, ice crackled and reached. It left the tomb in a trail of hoarfrost chasing after Merik. Aurora whined and pressed against Merik, large as a draft horse. Blood stained her golden fur. She pushed her wet nose into his neck.
“I know,” he murmured. “Let me think.” The frost was coiling over her tail, over his feet, and though he kept shifting his weight, it kept simply skittering apart like ants disturbed in their mound. Then it kept trying to converge again and claim them.
Merik needed a way out of here. He needed one of the magic doorways that had first led him into the mountain. At this point, he didn’t care where it led. But gone was the ice bridge he’d crossed when Kullen chased him; now the whole cavern was filled by filamentous ice, stretching down like webs.
Aurora keened louder and withdrew. Now, she seemed to say. We need to move now.
As if in answer to her, a sound filled the cavern. A strange sound that made no sense here. Caw, caw. The cry bounced and echoed. Caw, caw. A bird flapped by, wings black and glistening.
A crow or raven, Merik thought as he watched the distant bird wheel and dip around ice webs—moving in a path that, if he was fast enough, Merik could follow. So without another thought, Merik did.
He sucked air to him. In through his nose. Out through his mouth. And on the exhale, wind lifted him and Aurora simultaneously. Hoarfrost cracked and released them.
Aurora yelped as they flew across the cavern, chasing after the black bird, wheeling and dipping exactly as it had. Until eventually Merik saw where the bird aimed: it was a door with a thin stream of water pouring from it. The intricate carvings that framed the door glistened with ice.
Merik knew that door. It was not the one he wanted—even if it was where the girls in the tomb had told him to go. He wanted to go through any door but that one.
But here he was: stopped, blocked, forced to change. It was the only path forward.
The bird swept through the door. Blue magicked light sprayed. And it was as if the ice suddenly seemed to realize it might lose Merik if it didn’t act now. It lurched toward him in thick strands that wanted to force Merik and Aurora to sleep while the ice embraced them.
Aurora shrieked, her wings flapping ineffectively and spraying Merik in her blood. Merik slung out two winds at once. One wind he used to fling Aurora at the door—hard and fast, and though she screamed, she also instinctively curled herself into a ball to avoid the pain of impact.
She hit the door’s opening.
She disappeared just as the black bird had.
The second wind, Merik shot at the ice. An outward blast to keep it off him while he plummeted onto the tiny outcropping before the wet, glistening door.
Power roiled over him. This was not the door he wanted. This was not safety.
But Merik would follow the grain.
Panting, he threw one final look at the cavern where nothing made sense—where magic was both incalculably strong and yet also weak and starving. He could see now just how much was coming for him, lancing across the cavern like shots from a Firewitched pistol.
Merik dove for the door, curling as Aurora had. Then magic clamped over him. He left the mountain behind.
I’ll share more sneak peeks soon! The book is 159,000 words, which is about 9,000 words shorter than Witchshadow, but still quite a bit longer than Bloodwitch. And I am just SO EAGER for all of you to read…
Yes, expect plenty of sneak peeks and teasers in the future!
Now until next time! May Moon Mother light your path, and may Trickster never find you…
💚 - Sooz
So excited for this! I love how the classic Sooz voice comes through in this scene
Congratulations and cheering you on!
You know what, I think THIS is the series I will read next! Yay!