Seatonsmom

My life has been made up of gilded lies. But death has been shaped from rot. Like a phoenix caught fire, I need to rise from the ashes and learn to wield my power. My wings may have been clipped, but I am not in a cage, and I'm finally free to fly from the frozen kingdoms I've been kept in.

King Midas made me the woman I am today. Notorious. Unattainable. His. The thing about being confined is that you believe it's to keep the bad out...Until you realize it's about keeping you in. I'm now in a strange kingdom surrounded by liars, with no allies of my own, but I won't sit idly by and let myself wither. No, something's bloomed from the pit of my repression. Something dark. Something angry.

For ten years, I lived in a gilded cage inside King Midas's golden castle. One night changed everything. Now I'm here, a prisoner of Fourth Kingdom's army, and I'm not sure if I'm going to make it out of this in one piece. They're marching to battle, and I'm the bargaining chip that will either douse the fire or spark a war.

Once upon a time, my world was small and sheltered. Everything changed the moment I stepped over my Safety Line, barrelling towards a coupling with a man I hardly know. He wants me. All of me. Dunked in a charged political pit, I must secure the ships needed to quell the spill of murderous beasts still flooding the continent. But one wrong move could spur the war I’ve worked so hard to avoid.

Some moments are too painful to be endured. Some moments will break you if you let them. And yet, I can’t afford to let anything break me, because we have one chance to win this war. One chance to create a better life for everyone across the four kingdoms.

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College-Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky. Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders’ capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Aelin has risked everything to save her people - but at a tremendous cost. Locked within an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must draw upon her fiery will as she endures months of torture. Aware that yielding to Maeve will doom those she loves keeps her from breaking, though her resolve begins to unravel with each passing day....With Aelin captured, Aedion and Lysandra remain the last line of defense to protect Terrasen from utter destruction. Yet they soon realize that the many allies they've gathered to battle Erawan's hordes might not be enough to save them.

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice. For five months, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world. Lansing describes how the men survived a 1,000-mile voyage in an open boat across the stormiest ocean on the globe and an overland trek through forbidding glaciers and mountains.