Elyseans are so wise… Elyseans are so beautiful…. Elyseans are divine…

Elyseans are power-hungry a-----es with a god complex.

Yes, I said it. Sue me and bring out your pitchforks.

Unfortunately for me, the deadly Elysean Trials are right around the corner. Despite my unpopular opinion of them and anything Olympian-gods related, when they unleash their strange blue birds to select mortals around the country as candidates, one of them chooses me.

Naturally, I politely tell them to shove it, but that's the thing about Elyseans: they're not used to taking no for an answer. So, together with my legal guardian, they force me to go to their trials just two days shy of my eighteenth birthday—and for what?

A chance to attend the Academy of Divine Light and Beauty. A chance to become Elysean… What a joke.

They can keep their Academy and their magic, but I will finish their trials because I have no other choice. I will survive these monsters disguised as gods because my freedom has never been closer.

My own kind can't stand me, but that's nothing new. The Elyseans despise me—especially Shade, a descendant of Hades, who commands darkness with a wave of his hand and is sinfully beautiful, even when he's reminding me of how perfectly powerless against them I am.

But the more I get to know him, the harder it gets to ignore who he really is, and the more impossible it gets not to give in to my attraction for him.

The deeper into the trails I go, the more I learn, and the more I realize that Elyseans are not the perfect god-like people the world paints them to be.

Worst of all, my past might not be quite like I remember, either…

Intended for mature listeners.