Welcome back, intrepid explorers of Xeirin!

Prepare to journey deeper into the captivating world of The Queen of Xeirin. This chapter introduces Jade, a young teen from the streets of Boston. Confronting unimaginable horrors, Jade battles against forces threatening to break her. Brace yourself for suspense, pain, and the resilience of the almost-human spirit as Jade fights to survive.

Happy reading!

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Episode Three: Jade

Jade lay in a puddle of her own blood, sweat, and bile. A single ugly mar on the pristine white of the sterile exam room.  

It made her long for the small, padded cell that had been her home here for— 

How long?  

She couldn't tell, but she'd been dizzy with hunger by the time someone had come for her that first time.  

They'd been two men, doctors she'd thought, dressed in hospital scrubs and white coats. Swaying, her legs like jelly and her head filled with soft cotton, she'd demanded answers in the strongest voice she could rally. It had been pathetically weak.  

Even if she hadn't fallen flat on her ass. They'd hit her with the overpowered taser she'd now become intimately familiar with before she'd finished her breathless tirade.  

It wouldn't have mattered anyway. It wouldn't have changed a damn thing.  

The first time she'd been brought into this room, they had given her no reasons and asked her no questions. She'd waited for the questions, prayed for the questions. Prayed for answers she could give to stop the pain. Until she had caught sight of their faces, curled in on herself on the floor, trying desperately to protect herself. She'd only glanced up once. It had been enough. Enough to tell her that this was only the beginning.  

Their faces were just as stoic and immobile as they entered the room now. There would be no questions today. Not that Jade had been expecting any. It hadn't taken her long to discover what they were attempting to do anyway. 

If they were Otrokári, they would already know it wouldn't work. She was too human to shift.  

Whoever they were, they were not the Otrokári. And she'd spent enough time in the iron cages beneath the city streets to know the difference. These people were too organized, too sophisticated, and too rich.  

Freaky rich. Like government rich.  

She couldn't help but wonder if anyone was looking for her, hopeless as the thought was. She curled her arms around her torso, holding herself still as dry sobs hitched at her ribs, sore and aching from that morning's session.  

It wasn't unusual to disappear; she'd been so new to the flock. Vale would not risk the others to save her.  

Not that he could, not that he should.  

The Otrokári had had millennia to gather and excel in their brutality as they broke apart what was left of the Xier.   

Only small pockets of them still existed. Even fewer survived that knew the histories. Their elders were few and far; almost none left from the beginning. She knew only of Vale. He could not be risked. He would know that truth.  

Jade felt her chest seize. An iron cage clamped tightly around her lungs. The aftershocks of her torture still riding her, heightened by her grief. Grasping through her own filth along the hard floor, beating ineffectually at the tiles, her breath gasping, she felt hope slipping through her numb fingers.  

Movement at the door jerked her drifting mind back into the room.  

A shudder wracked her body as one of the men walked towards her, headless of the filth that stained the bottom of his white tennis shoes. The taser-like instrument in hand.  

She couldn't suppress the jagged, chirping cries that emerged from her throat, bubbling up from deep within her chest. The man loomed over her now, an excited gleam in his dark eyes.   

They think they've won. The bastards think they're getting close. Oh god, I've never been this close.  

Jade felt her muscles bunch and pull at bones incapable of shifting.  

It was always the same. The men never spoke. They'd nearly ripped out her tongue to silence the questions she'd begged of them that first day. She'd learned to keep her silence for as long as she could. That resolve ended with a jolt of electricity that gave way to pain racing along her overwrought nerve endings, and suddenly, she was screaming.  

The instrument she'd first taken for a taser was pressed into her abdomen, its sharp barb-like probes puncturing cotton and skin. The smell of burnt fabric and flesh mingling with the cloying odor of vomit that permeated the air.  

They were hurting her! They were tearing her apart! Oh God, please, I don't want to die!  

Amid her terror, it took her several moments to realize the pain had lifted. Not gone, but far away, like a dream fading into mist. The man, his hand now around her throat, his knee pressed into her sternum while he jabbed the scant meat of her arm with a dripping syringe, was like a mirage, hazy and incomplete.  

Caught up in her confusion, she almost missed the moment it happened. The touch was so gentle it sent delicate shivers racing down her weary and twisted spine. The presence poured into her like cool water. Wrapping around her soul with all the imagined comfort of a cloud. It brought to mind the stories her grandmother used to tell when she was a girl before she'd been taken by the Otrokári and forced into the fighting pits. 

Her grandmother had told stories of the Xeir, of their great home, worlds away, where they had learned to touch the sky with the power of the sun, and the earth was covered from end to end in verdant green gardens and sparkling oceans. In those stories, her grandmother had spoken of the Great Family—the Xeir-Iin—those who ruled the Xeir and the awful power that ruled them in turn.  

The connection was weak, fading in and out in a way that left her disoriented even as the brief respite from the pain grounded her. The clearer the connection became, the more she transcended her current painful existence and the more clearly her grandmother's voice whispered to her from across the ages. Thin and reedy, it joined a chorus of voices rising from the far reaches of her mind.  

And then, like a void opening in the pit of her stomach, it was gone.  

There was no breath to rip from her lungs, and yet still, the absence left her bereft, alone to face the agony. Convulsions racked her body, limbs locked in place. The acrid taste of the foam bubbling from her mouth burned her dry, cracked lips.

Tears burned eyes that had long since run dry. Unable to bear the loss of the other presence in the face of her agony, Jade did something she'd only ever heard of in the stories. She reached out with her soul and found her.  

Yes, Her. The Xeir-Iin. The Queen. 

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Step into Misa’s world and immerse yourself in the next thrilling episode of The Queen of Xeirin, coming August 31st exclusively to Kindle Vella! Discover more about Misa’s identity and the unfolding mystery of the Xeir as the story deepens.

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