69. SANDS OF IMMORTALITY – Adult Fantasy

Mentor Name: Mina Vaughn

Mentee Name: Gina Denny

Title: SANDS OF IMMORTALITY

Category: Adult

Genre: Fantasy

Word Count: 98,000

Pitch:

Sorceress Merila’s daughter marches closer to death every day, and her prodigious spells have done nothing to save the girl. Now she’ll do the unthinkable – return to the palace, trade a princess’s life for her daughter’s, and sink the kingdom into ruins.

Excerpt:

I pressed the cool poultice to Nadina’s forehead, the sixth time in as many hours. Between the heat of her body and the dry air, the cloths kept drying out and I could not keep up with them. She moaned as I pressed it against her skin, letting the cool water trickle down her hairline to the pillow beneath her head. Her rest was no longer peaceful – she breathed shallowly and with a rasp, twitching as if experiencing a nightmare. Who knew? Maybe she was. When she was younger, she would come to me to calm her nighttime fears. Now she was grown, eighteen years old, and for the first time in her life, there was nothing I could do or say to make the nightmare stop.

For the first time in her life, we shared the same nightmare, only this time she was asleep and I was forced to live through it fully conscious.

A knock sounded on the front door. “Merila? Are you here?”

“Back here,” I called softly.

Jasmine, a hefty woman who lived across the dusty little street, poked her head into the back bedroom Nadina slept in. “I brought you the ingredients you needed.”

“Oh, good,” I said, rising. With a long look back at Nadina, I followed Jasmine out into the front rooms. The little apartment looked as though it had been ransacked – just as it had looked for the last few months. No matter how much I tried to tidy up, it managed to look cluttered and disorganized right away.