Prologue

Have you ever had a moment of perfect clarity? You’re wandering in darkness, confused, unfocused—and then, snap! A light penetrates the fog of uncertainty. All the pieces of the world fall into place, and your life finally makes sense.

I’ve never encountered this elusive ‘light bulb moment’ myself. Not in my journeys across the plains of monsters. Not in the great cities of Earth, nor the Frontier towns that sit at the sunset of civilization.

Honestly, I think light bulb moments are pretty much reserved for normal people. When you’re a soldier in the gods’ army, when you dance with angels and battle the forces of hell in an immortal war—you live in a different world. It’s a world where the normal rules simply don’t apply.

I’d love to proclaim that unearthing my past was the answer, that it filled a hole inside of me and made everything all right. But as you can probably guess by now, my past was just the beginning. And unlocking it was opening the biggest can of worms the universe has ever known.

After all, I’m Pandora, and chaos is my middle name.