Excerpt from "The Kindling of GreenFyr" by Mark Freeman

As the sun slowly crept across the flagstone floor, the Queen stirred beneath her silk sheets. The thick drapes were pulled back from the window frames to allow the night sky to show its moon, stars, and planets while breathing cool night air into her chambers. As the rays crept ever closer to the slumbering figure under the silk sheets and exotic fur blankets, it seemed to hesitate. The beam of light considered the figure lying beneath the bedding; her slender, lithe form, skin the color of rich soil, face hidden beneath the cascading raven hair. The sun stopped short of touching the bedposts and seemed to retreat at the recognition of whose chamber it had entered. As the burning orb rose higher into the morning sky, the light faded from the bedroom and slowly meandered its way back to the open window facing east. It lingered at the sill, as if it considered approaching the still figure once more, tempted to bath her in light, but the figure stirred slightly and the last of the light leapt from her presence into the bright morning sky.

The body under the sheets and canopy bed moved again, and in the first moments of awakening she felt it, the presence of a human, a boy bordering on manhood to be exact, a feeling she hadn’t felt in a very long time. Her eyes remained closed, but she rolled over in bed, her smooth skin sliding easily against the slick silk sheets. Her tongue flicked out like a serpent and tasted the power the child brought to her world, and a slow smile opened across her ageless face, still hidden behind her long, rich, black hair.

Slowly sitting up in bed, her hair fell away from her face, only to envelop her shoulders, back, and breasts to become a midnight shawl of hair. She opened coal colored eyes in the still dark morning room, and the smile played across her face.

“What a glorious morning,” Lilith the Dark Queen of Illenduell said in her slightly raspy voice. She stepped from her bed, the cool morning air quickly turning her naked skin to goose flesh. Lilith approached the window sill facing East and the light seemed to shrink from her approach, the darkness enshrouded her; the light avoided her. She surveyed her Kingdom from her tower bed chamber, the highest peak in her castle, Dunkeln’Tocht in the Thorne Mountains.

“What a glorious mourning indeed…”