When Lucien first came to Izamere, he thought he’d found the edge of the sky.

Lucien was raised beneath palm trees and the summer sun, ocean salt beneath his fingernails, embedded in the cracks of his skin, and the marrow of his bones. This place was as foreign to him as the desert to the ocean, yet the imprint of Izamere — dust and corn and crumbling cobblestone — was grafted deep into the fabric of his soul. Somehow, he knew this place. Somehow, this place knew him.

They played soccer until their legs gave out and they ended up tangled together in the grass, breathless laughter rising with the heat waves. A leg shifted over Lucien’s stomach. Someone’s elbow pressed into his side. They were as much a part of the earth below them as the sky above, these boys of the Midwestern fields, their bones molded from dust and danger and the touch of wind. They ran with their feet on the ground and their hearts in the clouds. They bled with the thrill of being alive.

The pile shifted as Ezra’s hand stretched up, up, up, reaching for the faded sun.

“I love us,” he gasped, a statement and a declaration and a battle cry all at once.

Lucien’s heart throbbed. He could no longer tell if he was proud or jealous, happy or heartbroken – pain and awe twisted together so tightly they molded into a single feeling bruising the inside of his chest, swelling against his ribs and under his skin.

“I love us,” Ezra said again, quieter. “I love Izamere.”

And for a moment, Lucien let himself imagine he did too.

[a super cool blurb that I will totally think of at some point]

Lucien was not a monster. There wasn’t a point in his life where he thought, hey, tricking people is easy, I should do it for a living! But here’s the thing — tricking people is easy. And Lucien was good at it.