From there, each day of his life spun past in fast-forward, and through it, Jax and Athanasia pieced together a great deal about the Luminera.
Athanor had been the son of a duke ruling the southern region of Lux Aeterna, itself under the reign of Zeus. And with Athanor's father lying bedridden, a forced succession-war ritual had been set to take place within seven years.
In the Luminera, most of the higher noble families still clung to this ancient rite, in which the cadets of a bloodline were made to fight one another until only a single one remained standing.
You were free to refuse a seat at the table. But once you'd taken it, surrender was never again an option.
And Athanor's mother had forced him into that bloody succession purely to feed her own greed, throwing a boy of merely twelve into a pit of his twenty-odd monster cousins.
But by then, Athanor was no innocent lamb himself. He'd spent every day of those years shoved into one brutal scenario after another.
