NOQS: SHADOW'S ADVENT, YA Epic Fantasy

Title: SHADOW'S ADVENT
Genre: YA Epic Fantasy
Word count: 107,000


My MC's greatest fear:

What do I fear? I fear that he will take me. Take my mind and release the monster inside. Losing all I ever was and all I ever will be to him and become nothing but a mindless puppet weak to his whims. I fear losing who I am...what little I have of myself.


Query:

Caraka cannot escape the psychotic goddess who possesses her mind.

Ever since she was four, when she nearly died from drowning, half-dragon Caraka has heard the deranged voice of the Shadow Queen. She's struggled to keep the Queen's noxious ideas at bay: to maim, to steal, to kill, to invade.

Centuries before, the Shadow Queen suffered a major betrayal. A fellow god injected her with the deadly Taint—a powerful dark magic that can eat away the sanity of anyone, even the most powerful being in the realm. Broken and sickened, the goddess possessed and tainted a dying little girl—giving the girl a second chance at life.

Caraka decides to go on a journey to save herself. Along the way, she learns that this goddess infesting her mind is the sole solution a crumbling world's troubles. A solution that will spell death for Caraka.

Torn between forcing a broken goddess to face her duty and hiding from the people, friend and foe alike, determined to use her, Caraka must make a choice: sacrifice herself for her world, or sacrifice her world for herself.


First 250:

For the umpteenth time, she withdrew the tattered paper from her pocket only to find the ink rendered illegible.

"Damn it!" Caraka crumpled the paper and tossed it at the ground. She knew she should have protected herself better from the rain. Now there was no way she will find the broker.

Then again, if she didn't stupidly lose her papers back in the forests, she wouldn't be in this town looking for an illegal broker.

Caraka crossed her arms. She watched the people—men in their frock coats and top hats with women in uncomfortably tight corsets and bulbous skirts—walk by. She pulled on her tattered black vest and smoothed out the sleeves of her dirt encrusted formerly white blouse. No one took notice of the derelict who stood in front of the large windows of the hatter's shoppe. Not that a human ever would.

She looked up and down the narrow cobble stone streets. Gas lamps lined the end of the sidewalks and the beginnings of the streets. The various shop displays sat in their windows, begging the passerby's buy me, buy me. The signs above gently swayed in the breeze, several of them creaking loudly to Caraka's ears. Horse-drawn carriages—and even a few new fangled steam-powered carriages—cruised down the streets. A giggling and screeching woman fluttered her fan when a steam carriage past her by, pulling her female companion away from the street.

"Wimp." Caraka spat in the street and pushed herself off the window, careful not to touch the reflective glass with her bare hands.