by Kathryn Antoinette
They told her she was sick.They lied.
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They told her she was sick. They lied.
The Astraean Empire ended famine, cured disease, and gave its citizens two hundred years of life.
Nineteen-year-old Akari Hara has served the Imperial Princess since she was five years old. She is dutiful, quiet... and dying.
The same illness that killed her mother at twenty-eight will take her before she turns thirty. Every morning and every evening, she takes the compound her physician tells her will keep her stable for as long as possible.
When the boy she adored as a child returns after fourteen years apart, he finds her sick and neglected. He takes her with him.
Within a day, the drug is out of her blood and a city district has rotted to the ground.
The medicine was never treatment — it was control, and the Empire has been doing this to her family for a thousand years.
But Akari doesn't want revenge. She wants to learn what it means to be alive when she'd already made peace with dying.
A dying handmaiden discovers the medicine she was told is keeping her alive was designed to suppress the power in her blood. Her freedom threatens the Empire.
In the frozen north, the survival of the resistance hinges on Akari's divine power to coax life from exhausted soil through a harsh mountain winter.
The next chapter of The Daughter of Rhea.
The print edition of Fallow Goddess debuts here. Copies for sale at both slots, so there's no need to bring your own, and an hour in between if you want coffee.
Come say hello. Booth locations once the festival posts the map.
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