Prologue

"Look around you, Deithi. Look at what you've achieved. Grand Magus, are you satisfied?" The mocking voice of his enemy asked out loud.

Deithi coughed and there was a trickle of blood that joined the several dark sticky stains of red under his lips. He had been betrayed, quartered, eviscerated, and hung up on a tree like some macabre decoration.

"Lilian, look at your sorry husband."

"Ex-husband," a beautiful woman corrected him lightly. "I am soon to be a widow."

Of all the betrayals that had hit him, Lilian's had been the worst. He had loved her like a man driven insane. Deithi had given her all that was precious under the sky - Love, loyalty, riches, comfort, everything a woman could dream of. What had he done wrong that Lilian would betray him to his worst enemy?

"Dear husband, I never loved you," her sweet voice uttered those painful words to him. Lilian with her skin as pale as the unblemished moonlight, her hair as dark as ebony; she was a gorgeous moon fairy that had descended to bless humanity. Deithi should have know that it was too good to be true. Even the light she shone on him had been as cold as the moonlight. Her plump cherry-like lips curved as her veil parted to reveal limpid violet eyes that still took his breath away.

"Lilian," he whispered with his dying breath, "why?"

The enchanting woman came closer to him and he could smell the warm perfume that wafted off her skin. "Why you ask? Because I wanted to be free of your love."

Deithi mustered all the remaining strength he had left in his body to look up into her smiling eyes. When his strength failed, Lilian pressed her lovely fingertips up to his chin so he could look at her face for one last time.

"You disgust me, husband," she whispered. "Your love was a gilded cage, and I a bird that wanted freedom."

"You never said a word-" Deithi was cut off by a rush of blood that went up his throat. He wasn't long for this world anymore.

Lilian's bird-like laughter tittered at Deithi's reply. "You could never let me go, my dear Deithi. I've seen the obsession in your eyes though you try to hide it."

"Lilian, you might catch a disease from the dirty mongrel if you linger too close," the voice of his enemy called out to his wife.

"Goodbye, husband. Burn in hell."

His heart was breaking like a glass orb shattering into a million painful jagged pieces. Lilian's cold words broke the man whose sanity was sucked into the abyss of madness. He began to silently weep tears of anguish, regret, and tears of heartbreak. How did he not realise that he was raising a venomous serpent in his own home? So blinded was he by Lilian's beauty that he had chosen to ignore all the signs that portended his end at her hands.

"Look at him cry like a baby," he heard her say. But Deithi's heart had turned to ashes. How could it hurt anymore when there was nothing left to injure? The Mage's vision swam as if he was being tossed out onto ocean currents. The darkness that crept at the edges of his vision closed in and released him from the mortal coils of the suffering world.

And thus the flame of a world-renowned mage was extinguished by the treachery of a poisonous beauty. Deithi's body was fed to stray dogs and his head stuck on a pike for the soldiers to practice their archery on. Once a powerful mage, his only legacy was his lesson to the world, a lesson told as a tale of caution to every man who loved blindly.