Read Avalyne Series 01: The Queen of Carleon for Free Online

product of an elf maid and the Celestial Enphilim. To the elves, he wasn’t just the High King but a demigod and Lylea inherited that reputation. Her position as High Queen was never challenged. Not even when she chose to take mortals as her consort for the brief duration of their lives. While most attributed this to Lylea having no desire to rule with a king who might claim lordship over her, Tamsyn knew she had other reasons.
    The city of Eden Taryn was not as lavish as Eden Ardhen which had stood for thousands of years before its destruction by Balfure’s Berserkers. It was an infant thirty-five years old and although the elves had constructed a beautiful city amongst the woods, it had none of the grandeur of its predecessor. The city was built upon the branches of the Great Tree, nurtured by the elves to achieve its immense size so that it could take the weight required to bear it.
    Tamsyn ascended the great winding staircase that coiled around the tree, leaving behind the forest floor. Its branches were thicker than most tree trunks and it spread across the sky until only a single stream of light could penetrate the dense canopy of leaves. He had been greeted by the Queen’s guard and suspected that by now Lylea would be awaiting him. This would be the first time they had seen each other since the wedding of the Queen Lylea’s only daughter, Arianne.
    He wasn’t sure how he would be received now that they would face each other alone.
    *****
    When Tamsyn had first met Lylea, her father had died fighting a Primordial. The young woman was called on to lead her people as High Queen and it was a role she had not expected to take so soon. Not even betrothed, Lylea was expected to lead a war that saw the elves as foot soldiers to the gods. Their immortality was granted to them as a way for the Gods to keep as many of them as possible alive for the battles ahead.
    It was longevity that had come with a bloody price.
    The war against Mael and his Primordials had already raged for two thousand years by the time Lylea became High Queen. Even with her prescience, she was young and unsure, certainly impressionable enough to take the guidance of a mage who as was as new to his role as liaison as she was to being queen. While he was far older than she, he had the appearance of a man in his fiftieth year, with dark hair and equally dark eyes and while he never considered it, he might be thought of as handsome.
    Certainly Lylea had found him so , and while he should have known better, he indulged the attraction, even consummating it. So much so that by the time he realised the folly of what he had done, she was deeply in love with him. His realisation coincided with Mael’s banishment to the Aether and the destruction of his Primordial army. The surviving elves, and there were not many of them, were weary of battle. Choosing to retreat behind the Veil where they could rebuild their civilisation without any interference from the new races the Gods were preparing to inflict upon them, Lylea had asked him to go with her.
    While Tamsyn cared for her deeply, he was conscious that she was a young woman even for an elf, and probably would be better off sharing a life with her own kind, as opposed to a mage who could be called on to serve his masters at any given time. There was also a part of him that feared what it meant to become a husband and a father so he had taken the coward’s way out. Instead of telling her any of his fears, he retreated to his tower in the mountain of the Jagged Teeth and there he had remained, in a deep sleep lost to the world.
    When he was awakened by the intrusion of the dwarves some two thousand years later, he learned that Lylea had never taken an elven husband. Her consorts were almost always human and usually coincided with the birth of a child, the last being Arianne. Although proposals had been made to her, she accepted none of them and Tamsyn wondered if it was because his betrayal had soured her on the