Prologue

The torrential rain and violent winds battered the buildings of the city terribly. Wood creaked and window panes moaned in wake of the fierce coastal storm that had blown over the city of Trolberg that late evening. Luckily for its citizens, it had been seen forming over the ocean days in advance, so nobody was outside in the awful weather conditions. 

Thunder roared, competing with the winds for acoustic supremacy in the sky and shaking the very foundations of a certain apartment building. Within that certain building, within the third floor apartment aptly labeled “3”, a blue-haired teenager slumbered fitfully within her bed. She tossed and turned, a cold sweat staining her pillow as her tumultuous dreams swirled stormily in her mind’s eye.

Next door to the young girl’s room, her mother fared similarly. The brown-haired woman was tangled in her bedsheets, breathing heavily and crying out occasionally in terror. Her dreams were violent and disturbing, far more extreme in nature than even a marra’s doing. 

In her mind’s eye seas flooded the streets, scores of bodies following the current as it swept up debris. The floods gave way to earthquakes and tremors so severe that even trolls were fleeing, yet they were still caught in the bottomless fissures. Wildfires raged and burned everything to char and ash in their wake, not even bones left behind in the aftermath. In a stormy sky, two thunderbirds screeched as lightning rained down upon a world consumed by porous mushrooms and vines. An eye with a sclera as red as an erupting volcano and irises as white as snow glared down from the clouds, and the storm overwhelmed the dream. Thunder roared, and roared, overlapping each boom with another and another…

Silence reigned at last, then a soft ocean breeze caressed their cheeks, coaxing them both into wakefulness…