Beyond the ordinary

BEFORE THE WORLD FORGOT is an adult romantic fantasy set in Aurevale, the glittering heart of an enormous magical world where witches travel on flying books, dragons carry passengers between distant realms, elves serve beside royalty, goblins conduct business in the capital, merfolk inhabit magnificent cities beneath the sea, and magic is woven into everyday life. Among all these peoples live humans—the only beings born entirely without magic.

At the center of Aurevale is Crown Prince Evander, heir to an ancient Fae royal bloodline. Beautiful, powerful, and raised within a palace of gemstones, Evander has everything his world considers enviable except the freedom to exist without being treated as a prince. His future has already been planned around duty, court expectations, and a politically suitable marriage.

Everything changes when Evander discovers an ancient silver ring whose inscription and origins are unknown. Turning it three times transforms not Evander himself, but what the world believes it sees. His unmistakably Fae appearance becomes human, allowing him to leave the palace unnoticed and experience his kingdom without titles, guards, or bows.

In Capital Square, Evander meets Roseline, the human daughter of a dressmaker. She knows him only as the ordinary young man he pretends to be. For the first time, Evander forms a relationship with someone who does not know his bloodline, his wealth, or his future throne. His initial fascination with Roseline deepens into love, but maintaining the deception requires increasingly elaborate excuses.

When an opportunity arises to remain close to her, Evander purchases a storefront and creates Sweet Enchantments, a magical confectionery unlike anything in Aurevale. With the help of his goblin and elven friends, the shop becomes a place of impossible sweets, living enchantments, and wonder. Roseline and her mother begin supplying enchanted children's clothing to the shop, giving Roseline reason to visit regularly. Evander divides his life between royal obligations at the palace and the ordinary existence he has created in Capital Square.

Their relationship carries them beyond the shop and through the extraordinary world Evander has always taken for granted. Together they experience Aurevale without the barriers of royalty, including a journey to the merfolk's underwater city through glass-walled tunnels beneath the sea. To Roseline, these are adventures shared with the man she is beginning to love. To Evander, they are glimpses of the life he desperately wishes were truly his.

But something impossible happens whenever Evander is with her.

His magic disappears.

At first, Evander hides the phenomenon. A Fae prince losing his magic in the presence of a human contradicts everything Aurevale understands about magic. As his feelings for Roseline deepen, however, the effect becomes impossible to dismiss. Love is not strengthening Evander's extraordinary power. It is stripping it away.

Eventually, Evander's two lives collide. Roseline discovers that the man she loves is not an ordinary human but Aurevale's Crown Prince and that their relationship has existed beneath an elaborate magical disguise. During a great royal gathering, Evander is forced to make the choice he has avoided: preserve the life, magic, and future expected of him or publicly choose Roseline.

He chooses Roseline.

And the magic of Aurevale vanishes.

The catastrophe reaches far beyond Evander. A civilization that has depended upon magic for generations is suddenly forced to function without it. The royal court blames Evander for what has happened, while Roseline, devastated by the revelation of his identity and believing herself responsible for the destruction of an entire way of life, runs from the palace. She and her mother leave the capital.

Evander loses everything he was born to inherit. Without magic, his disguise is meaningless, and without the privileges of his former life, he is cast away from the palace and left with the little confectionery he originally created as an excuse to see Roseline.

Years pass.

The former prince learns to survive as an ordinary man in a world learning to do the same. Sweet Enchantments can no longer depend upon spells to enchant its customers. Evander struggles to keep the shop alive through human effort, ingenuity, and persistence as Aurevale slowly rebuilds itself without the power that once defined it.

Then, one day, Roseline returns.

When she enters the shop after years away, the tiny enchanted bell that once announced her arrival rings again.

The sound proves that magic was never truly destroyed.

What Aurevale believed to be magic had only been one expression of something much older and greater. Magic does not belong exclusively to Fae blood, witches, enchanted objects, or royal families. It exists within the ordinary as well—in love, imagination, creation, sacrifice, and the connections people forge with one another.

Evander's choice did not end magic.

It forced the world to discover where magic had been hiding all along.