I practically worship the ground this woman walks on. Very few words in any language describe what I feel for this goddess, but I’ll try anyway.

We were born from great power because our family line dates all the way back to the first woman on earth, Lilith. This is why the Kersh line of family witches is so strong and deeply rooted in alchemy magic. 

Our love story begins in 300 BC when Skye, known as Aset in that lifetime, first came to me. All of Egypt’s eligible daughters were brought to me when it was time to have a wife. At first, the attention of the women fawning over me was fun. I’ll admit that. I was lonely as the crown prince. Growing up in the palace wasn’t as much fun for me as it was for my ten brothers and sisters. 

I had a sense of duty. I needed to carry out the wishes of the king, my father. There was little time for me to engage with anyone my own age. And only because, as the crown prince, I was isolated from everyone but my father and his trusted advisors. 

We were living in tumultuous times. Many wanted my progressive father, a man of great honor and dignity, dead. He was kind to all his people, including the servants who cared for us. That was a very progressive and radical way of thinking at the time. However, his people loved him for it. I adopted that very same way of thinking once my father caught pneumonia and passed away at the age of thirty. 

I was eighteen when I took the throne, and because it was law, I had to be married within the first six months of my coronation. The women were all pretty, but none of them seemed to have a strong enough character to become my consort. In fact, many of them were more interested in the wealth and prosperity that comes with being a royal. The more the parents paraded their daughters in front of me, the wearier I grew in finding true love. 

Sure, my father had always told me to marry for Egypt, but I’d grown up seeing how he looked at my mother with nothing but adoration in his eyes. I wanted that for myself. And just when my time was running out, just as I was about to give up and marry a princess I did not love, Aset walked through the palace doors. 

She was a princess in the City of Petra and the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes upon. Her strength and beauty, both inside and out, convinced me that she was the one who’d be my forever. 

It took some time to convince her I was worthy of her love. She thought I was only after her beauty. Who could blame her since my reputation was more about compromising a woman’s purity rather than engaging in more righteous behaviors? Still, once I built trust between us, we fell in love and were married soon after. 

We reigned for thirty glorious years, adopting much of my father’s radical beliefs. I’d added a few, like paying my servants a fair wage for the services they provided us. I even had them living in the palace with their families—something completely unheard of at the time.

Once the Romans caught wind of my radical ideas, they came to my palace to stage a royal coup d’é·tat. And the rest? Well, you’ll have to wait for Forever Loved to find out more about my forever, the love of my entire being, my sweetness, Skye.” 

Raine has been a character I've had stuck in my head since my early twenties. The idea came when I was at a bar and tapped a guy on the shoulder that looked really familiar to me. I'd sworn I'd met him before. He at first thought I was hitting on him so was trying to blow me off, but I insisted I never forget a face and I started rattling off places where we could have run into each other. Turned out I sold him spray paint while we were both working at the same local mall.

We became best friends after that and Raine is really developed because of that one conversation I had with my bestie. That one conversation lead me down a rabbit hole of "what ifs", as in, what if she recognized her lover from a past life? What if her lover was trying to get her to remember because he's a witch. And finally, what if he was trying to protect her from a vampire--hell-bent on killing them both! 

Yeah... That's where my mind races to when I come up with a story like Forever Friends.

Happy Reading,

Amanda