The Epic of Nouriana and the Eleven Kingdoms

BOOK TWO: BIRTH OF LUMINOUS AWAKENING Between the Jinn Realm and the Wolf Kingdom She was born between life and death. She came back carrying something the world did not yet have a name for. Her mother named her Nouriana with her last breath. Her guardian calls her Eilanor — small light — because the world is not yet ready for her true name. She is three months old and already hunted. A million gold pieces for the child — alive or dead. The nine queens do not care which. But the nine queens did not account for an ancient Jinn who spent eight hundred years in chains learning what she was willing to fight for. They did not account for a wolf queen who looked at a white-haired infant and chose. They did not account for three wolf brothers who decided, without being asked, that this was their sister now. Nouriana grows up between two worlds — the Hundred Jinn Realms with their ten great thrones and their thousand-year politics, and the Wolf Kingdom with its silver-eyed queens and its ancient, wordless laws. She learns from both. She belongs to neither. She is something the world has not seen before. And the world, which tried to kill her before she drew her first breath, is about to discover what it made when it failed. This is the story of the years between birth and becoming. Between the girl and the storm.