SapphirePeter


Winters upon winters have drifted by, and still, the North remains without its destined sovereign. One by one, pretenders have fallen, claimed by the death that guards the empty throne. 
As despair consumes the realm - people dying, their purpose withering - a whispered prophecy stirs the ashes — the one they seek walks among the South.

While the Heavens remain without the offer of an heir to the North, a Southern Princess drinks to excess at a Royal Event and exposes royal rot.
She is ordered to be killed, steel drawn... when a certain Prince Commander claims her to be his wife.
Marriage was never her fate. Certainly not to him,  but desperation writes its own vows. There were no promises, no expectations, but love came, slow and certain. 
It seemed the sun had broken through the clouds, but something superiorly vital is then taken from this Princess, and she is sent to the worst of dungeons when her husband is at war. He returns, thinking she left him, and he falls into the deepest of despair.


The Princess’s heart is heavily marked in this strange new world where unfamiliar souls shape her. They teach her, harden her, and rebirth her into something nearly unrecognizable.
She flees with them as a circumstance exposes her to be the ruler they have been in search of.
Through hardship and pain, she ascends—not only to lead the North but to stir the balance of the universe itself.
But at what price? What must be given?
Follow her odyssey - a journey of life, of love, betrayal, revenge, of war and transformation, and of staggering power that shakes worlds.
Her name is Nadezhda. 
Nadezhda means hope. She is our hope.




QUEEN OF THE NORTH (THE WILL OF THE HEAVENS)

I am not a queen because I rule, I rule because I am THE QUEEN. 


Birthed in my heart. Alive in my veins… 


Nadezhda’s eyes peeled open with extra energy than required to open one’s eyes, slow and ever gradually retreating. 


Ache, born from the throes of hell, echoed behind both sockets and in her skull, and she tried not to imagine the bruised swells that must have bloomed around them. Her body hung at an awkward, cruel angle since both her hands were suspended, and she had been chained standing while she was unconscious. 


The darkened iron chains - each link a whisper of time and of those who had once been ensnared and died by it- extended from above the dark space she was in and extended to her wrists, clamping her in its bitter grasp. 


PATIENCE