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Read an Excerpt From These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta
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Read an Excerpt From These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta
A shapeshifting god. A divine peach. And a woman gifted with forever.
By Rachelle Raeta
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Published on June 18, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta, a powerful and romantic historical fantasy that explores not only what it means to live forever, but what it means to live fully. Tor Books will publish a gorgeous new hardcover edition featuring sprayed edges, a case stamp, and designed endpapers on June 30th.
Anna is used to hunger and hardship. Ever since the pale shadows on her skin were mistaken for leprosy, she has lived alone in exile, each day focused only on survival.Then a single act of kindness towards a beautiful stranger changes her life forever.Suddenly, her body is as untouched by time as it is by harm, and Anna experiences a new freedom she has never known. But as decades and centuries pass, the lives of everyone she meets slip through her fingers like grains of sand… everyone, except Khiran—the shapeshifting god who gave her immortality. No matter the years or distance, she trusts that he will always return.Yet there is more to immortality than Anna knows, and as she travels the ages, she will discover the beauty—and danger—of a life without end.
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These Immortal Truths
Rachelle Raeta
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These Immortal Truths
Rachelle Raeta
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One
There is beauty in the struggle, the way life pushes when the world says pull. He sees it in the way she gasps, fumbles, chokes. Clothed in ashes and rebirth, he watches as the terror in her eyes slowly gives way to wonder.
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The only keepsake Anna has of her childhood home is the memory of being dragged out of it.
The cloying smoke burning her eyes, blackening her lungs, and the bruising pain in her arm as the warrior pulled her from the threshold. She remembers the heat feeling so close that she thought her loose chestnut hair might catch and burn with the rest of it. She was little more than a child, then. A blessing, Fanny used to remind her—if she were any older, she’d be dead.
Anna knows it’s a lie.
Fanny was all rough edges and sharp words, but she was merciful where it mattered. Anna learned early that lies can be kinder than truths, and that some fates are crueler than death. The maidservants had never been as discreet with their gossip around her as Fanny was, though, and Anna grew up overhearing the horror stories of young women being abducted and forced to warm the beds of their captors across the North Sea.
Anna used to believe she was perhaps at least a bit luckier than most, in that regard. Her servitude under her lord was exhausting but bearable, and Fanny was always kind in her own way. The manor was heated by multiple grand fireplaces in the winter and the cut stone kept the interior pleasantly cool even during the hottest of summers. While she never tasted the luxuries delivered to the lord’s table—salted cod, savory venison, roasted swan, bread baked with the finest flour and drizzled with honey—she certainly never went hungry, either. There’s no doubt there were worse houses to serve under.
Then she turned fifteen.
It started on her chest—pale shadows that grew more defined at the edges—before it crept over her shoulders and onto her back. She didn’t know what it was, only that the jagged lines of discoloration scared her the same way she knew they would frighten others. She was able to hide it for a year before a chambermaid spotted it.
Another, before word got to the lord of the house.
It didn’t matter that there was no proof of any type of contamination; didn’t matter that two years went by with no harm to show for it. What mattered was that the harvest that season was weak, and the sickness that spread through the village was terrible.
What mattered, truly mattered, was that Anna existed. Easy to blame. Easy to banish.
Perhaps, she thinks, in some ways she’s still lucky. Her life is a cage, the bars molded from poverty and exile. Ripped from her roots and transplanted onto foreign soil and expected to be grateful for it. There’s a quiet grief in not knowing who she was or where she came from before they raided her home and packed her into a ship like cargo to be sold at the next port. A grief in knowing that she once called another language her own, but losing all traces of it to time. Anna is now twenty-seven summers, and she can’t even be certain if her name was given by her mother or her master.
But she’s alive. She’s healthy.
She knows there are many in her situation who can’t say the same. Many who would have been put to death instead of exiled, who would have found nothing but suffering and starvation past the line of the forest instead of shelter in an abandoned cabin and scraps from the old cook they used to work under. Those meager offerings that Fanny slipped her were the only reason she survived the first few winters. It gave her time to learn the forest—to learn its language well enough to make use of its gifts. The winters are still harsh, her cabin still bitterly cold, and her food supplies almost always teetering on the edge of dangerously low, but she makes it through to spring. And even though she never feels full, she tries to remind herself that a hungry belly is better than an empty one.
Her fingers pluck hawthorn berries from the bush, nimbly dropping them into the folded hollow of her tattered brown dress. She’s yet to prick herself on the thorns this morning, but this grove has seen plenty of her blood over the past decade. She had stumbled on it her first summer in exile; the gnawing hunger in her gut so great she had grabbed the bright berries by the fistful and paid a price in blood. It seems she can’t go a season without giving at least a few drops. Perhaps that’s why the grove yields so well.
Her stomach groans, a familiar sound. Anna appeases it with a few berries and no more. Summer is forgiving, but winter isn’t. She’s learned that surviving the cold months demands saving what gifts she can during the warm ones.
Voices filter through the trees. Anna stills.
This part of the forest isn’t frequented by the villagers—never has been. It’s too far off the road, too long a walk from the town. The only reason Anna can bring food to her table is that the places she gathers are places the townspeople don’t.
The voices grow loud enough for her to recognize them as men shouting. There’s an angry edge to it. A threat.
They’re looking for someone.
If they succeed, Anna knows nothing good will come to the person they find.
A rustle of leaves behind her, the quiet sound of footsteps. Anna starts, holding her yield of berries to her chest, and turns, heart in her throat and ready to run. Dark eyes, framed with dark lashes, stare back at her.
The stranger stands as still as a doe, swathed in richly colored silks as deep as the berries gathered in Anna’s dingy, threadbare dress. Eyes so deep and dark they feel as endless as the night sky, her braided ebony hair long and thick over her sun-kissed shoulder. She’s beautiful in ways that make Anna’s heart ache. Because she knows the men searching for her will be wearing cruelty in their smiles and wielding the threat of death in their hands; knows they wouldn’t have bothered chasing her this far for anything less.
Another shout, closer than the last, and Anna knows time is short.
The hawthorn berries she’s collected all morning fall to the ground as Anna reaches forward and grasps the woman’s smooth palm in her stained, callused hand—eyes wide and begging. She doesn’t know if the woman speaks English, doesn’t know if she’ll follow, but there’s not enough time for questions or doubts. “Hurry!”
She pulls, relieved when the stranger doesn’t resist. Berries burst beneath Anna’s feet, but it doesn’t matter. The woman follows. They run.
There is no place Anna knows better than this patch of forest. She has learned its every landmark, watched the saplings grow into trees over the course of years. Every day she’s gathered logs for her fire, leaves and branches to thatch her roof, and food for her table. They pass her favorite spot for foraging orange-capped mushrooms, wet their skirts running through the stream where she bathes and washes the filth from her clothes.
Anna’s lungs burn with every step, but the pulse drumming in her ears urges her onward. The pain in her chest is no different from the hunger in her belly; there is comfort and there is survival. There is no doubt what fate awaits them both if the men—soldiers, she realizes with a pang—find them.
Seeing the moldy, thatched roof of her cabin through the towering oaks and alders has never brought her so much relief, but she doesn’t allow her steps to pause or her grip on the woman’s hand to weaken. It’s not until they are under her roof, the door shut tight against her back, that Anna allows herself to just breathe.
Legs weak, she slides down the door as she struggles to push back against the black spots crowding her vision. In the middle of her dirt floor, the stranger stares back at her—not a hair out of place. Anna wipes the sweat along her temple, but can do little for the bead rolling between her shoulder blades. She wets her parched lips.
“Do… do you speak English?” she asks between gasping breaths.
The woman’s head tilts, dark eyes curious. Anna wonders how she can be so composed when Anna’s still struggling to find enough air to fill her lungs. “Yes.”
Anna nods, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the wood as she wills her breathing to slow. “Good,” she rasps. “That’s good.”
“Thank you for helping me.” Her voice is a song: lyrical and sweet. When Anna opens her eyes, she finds the stranger crouched in front of her—tan, slender arms braced against her silk-wrapped knees and chin resting on her knuckles. There are gold rings adorning nearly every finger; patterns inked into her skin there. “What’s your name?”
“Anna,” she breathes, gaze tracing over the unfamiliar designs. Her eyes lift to the woman’s face. “Yours?”
There’s a wicked curl to her lips as she stands, holding out a hand in offering. “I have many names.” Her head tilts, amusement flickering in her eyes. “Which would you choose for me?”
Anna fumbles, baffled by her strange answer—and even stranger request—but takes the offered hand. “You wish me to give you a name?”
“It’s only fitting,” she says, pulling Anna up effortlessly. There’s a strength that seems unusual for her slender frame. “Tell me, who shall I be to you?”
It’s such a bizarre request that Anna simply shakes her head. “I don’t—” She catches the direction of the stranger’s gaze, and her voice catches.
Her chest.
Her marked skin.
Anna flushes, pulling her collar closer to her neck. It must have shifted, the laces loosening, during the mad run home. “It’s not catching,” she assures the stranger, but it sounds weak even to her own ears. “They think it is, but it’s been there since I was a girl and I’ve no pain or lesions.”
Sun-kissed hands cover her own, coaxing them away. Anna is too stunned by her proximity, by the gentleness of the taller woman’s touch, to resist. The woman’s lips twist into a frown. “They believe it to be leprosy.”
Anna nods, throat tight. Her hands tremble, waiting for the look of disgust. For the pulling away. For the abandonment.
The sigh the woman breathes is soft, but weighted with disdain. “Fools.”
It’s so unexpected, it takes Anna a moment to recognize rejection isn’t coming. The relief is nearly enough to make her sick. “You’re not afraid?”
“There are many things worth fearing,” she says, meeting Anna’s eyes. “This is not one of them.”
Anna swallows, trying to find her voice in the tangle of emotion making her chest ache and her eyes burn. “Would would you like something to eat?” She doesn’t have much, hardly enough to share, but there is a sudden desperation building within her. It has been so, so long since she had anyone to sit with. To talk to. She will sacrifice a meal if it means this unnamed woman will linger even just a little bit longer.
There’s a pity softening the woman’s gaze that makes Anna suspect she knows. “I would like that.”
Tightening the laces on her collar, Anna goes to the corner where she keeps her stores while the stranger takes a seat at her tiny table. The dried fish, painstakingly caught in the creek, is too precious to offer, but she takes some of the dense acorn biscuits and some blackberries she harvested yesterday.
It’s not until she sets them on the table, eyeing the sweet, dark berries, that she remembers the bounty she left behind.
She thinks of the cascade of red hawthorn berries hitting the dirt—the feel of them crushing underneath her foot—and goes pale. There’s no way the soldiers will miss it. They don’t know the forest like she does, but they’d have to be blind not to see a footprint and abandoned food without understanding the implications.
They know enough to know where she lives.
“You need to go,” she whispers, fighting to suppress the tremor in her voice. “Before they come. You need to go.”
The woman plops a blackberry into her mouth, her eyes piercingly intense. “You’re afraid.”
Anna swallows, throat tight and chest aching. “Yes.”
The woman considers her. “Will they kill you for saving me?”
“Yes,” she says, voice shaky. She suspects they may do worse.
Another plump berry disappears past the woman’s full lips, but her stare has yet to falter. “But still, you chose to take me in.”
A statement, not a question. Anna answers it anyway, shaking her head and bracing herself against the wall. “You’ve done nothing to deserve the hell they’d put you through.”
“Neither, I suspect, have you.” The woman’s finger taps, a rhythmic heartbeat against the tabletop. Anna is caught by her stare—entangled by the unspoken decisions shadowing their depths. “Death will not come for you.”
Anna isn’t sure if the words are meant to console her, or if perhaps they’re some kind of prayer, but she knows better than to believe them. Death comes for everyone, and often without mercy. She has no doubts that it’s coming for her now, wearing the faces of the lord’s men.
Anna’s lips part, but she’s unsure of what to say. Then, reaching into the folds of her dress, the woman pulls something from their depths and holds it out in offering.
“For you.”
Hesitantly, Anna takes it from her hand. It’s different from any fruit she’s seen. She turns it around, admires the fuzz of its flesh, and brings it to her nose. It smells sweet—like summer and honey. “What is it called?”
The woman’s eyes shine. “Táozi.”
“Taozi?” Anna tries to match her inflection, but the word feels strange on her tongue.
She shrugs. “Or Persian apple. Depending on who you ask.”
“I am asking you.” Anna still doesn’t understand why the woman speaks in these strange riddles, but she’s learning that it’s easiest to play along. “What do you call it?”
Her smile is enigmatic. “A gift.”
More riddles. Time is only growing shorter; Death is sure to knock on her door within the hour. Anna has spent the last decade fighting to live. Has shivered through the winters and bled for just enough food to usher her from one season into the next. It was inevitable, really, that the time she fought so hard to keep would eventually slip through her fingers. Inevitable, that a day would come when she would be too weak and too tired to resist.
Anna looks down at the strange, foreign fruit cradled in her hands the way the horizon cradles the sun as it sets. Time is something she has very little of now. She will not waste what little she has left—will not rob herself of this last moment of wonder.
Anna brings the fruit to her lips and bites into the flesh, juice filling her mouth with a sweetness bordering on fantastical. She’s never tasted anything like it. She knows she should savor it, but she finds herself taking another bite, and another, and another. When she reaches the center, the flesh pink but hollow, she realizes something must be missing. “There’s no seed.”
“No.”
“But… how?”
The woman’s stare lingers on the remaining morsel, a faraway look clouding her expression. “Priceless are the treasures that cannot be replicated.”
Riddles, it’s all riddles, but Anna’s too hungry to decipher them. She closes her eyes, lets the last bite sit on her tongue—savors what she knows will be her last meal and tries not to let its sweetness be tainted by the saltiness of the tears rolling down her cheeks.
She doesn’t want to die, but she’s far too tired to run from the inevitable. Too weak. There is a whisper, a wordless, threadbare thing, echoing in the hollow of her chest. A numbing warmth. Instinct, perhaps—her mind’s only defense against her fate. Or maybe just her weary heart’s last, whimpering consolation.
A heavy fist meets her door, so much sooner than she expected. Anna’s eyes fly open and her lips part, a warning on her tongue, but it dies before she can speak it. She is the only one in her shack of a home. The woman she saved, the stranger she housed, is gone.
The soldiers break the door open, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and dragging her away. Anna lets them, her eyes trained on the empty space where a woman of beauty and silk stood only seconds before.
It’s not possible, but there’s no sight or sign of her, only the lingering taste of foreign fruit on Anna’s lips. A numbing horror seeps into her bones as she thinks of the riddles the stranger spoke in, her devastating beauty, and realizes the implications.
She wasn’t human.
Once, before she was exiled, she used to sit in the stiff pews and listen to the reverend’s sermons with the rest of the staff. She remembers the way he had warned them to be wary of the Devil and his tricks. Had warned them of the consequences that come to those who break bread with him. Anna has fallen into the Devil’s snare, tempted by a fruit the way Eve was tempted by the apple. Only, as the soil beneath her feet gives way to coarse sand, as she sees the crude pyre and gathered crowd on the stretch of remote beach, Anna knows the only person she has damned is herself.
Fear floods her. She had resigned herself to death, but not to this—not to torture. A scream rips from her chest, thrashing against the soldiers’ iron grips, but their hold only tightens. She can feel the bite of their fingers bruising her skin. As they bind her hands to the post, the hemp rough against her wrists, the strangled sounds emerging from her lips twist into the shape of words. “Please, please don’t!”
She looks up, tries to find mercy in any of the people’s eyes, and finds none. They look back at her, whispers coiling and twisting like snakes off their tongues as they speak to their neighbors. And Anna knows she’ll find no kindness from any of them. They’re all too happy to see her gone. Too relieved to have an excuse to do it. The leper girl who hid away in the forest and just wouldn’t die. The one they wouldn’t risk killing in the village square because her blood could be cursed.
Anna chokes on a sob as the bindings around her wrists grow tighter. When he’s done securing her, the soldier sneers and spits at her feet. “Witch, Devil’s whore.”
“I’m not,” she cries. The sweetness has faded from her tongue, replaced with bitter salt from the sea air, tears, and snot. “I’m not.”
From the front of the crowd, the town priest’s voice booms over the crashing waves. “Speak no more lies, foul creature.” Anna recognizes him as the same one who screamed she was at fault for the crop’s failures a decade ago—God’s punishment for harboring a foreign heathen touched by the Devil. He turns to the crowd. “How else would a lone woman survive in the woods if not without the help of the Devil? How else would she hide away the villainous whore who brought death to our lordship? How else—”
The blood roaring in her ears, the cold ocean wind stinging her face and tangling in her hair, drowns out the rest. She stares unseeingly at the stretch of beach behind the crowd and remembers the feeling of sifting sand under her bare feet when she first arrived as a small child. It’s almost fitting that she lose her life on the same shore she lost her freedom.
A flutter of movement in the deadened tree across from her catches her attention. Perched on the pale, wind-worn wood is a raven, its intelligent eyes staring into hers. A bad omen, Fanny used to say, a sure sign that death is not far behind. There are a few faces Anna recognizes in the crowd, but the old cook’s isn’t one of them. She wonders if her raven has already flown or if she’s merely the one person who doesn’t wish to watch her burn. She hopes it’s the latter.
A torch is lit, its flames a drop of color in a sea of gray. Beautiful and deadly, not unlike the stranger that sealed her fate. The kindling at the base catches, the flames grow higher, licking the straw at her feet. She screams, the sound muffled only by the swelling in her throat and the cloying smoke in her lungs.
She can’t watch. She can’t let the last thing she sees be the snapping of fire and the blistering of her skin. In her last moments, she wants beauty. She looks past the sneering faces, eyes searching for a glimpse of the raven through the smoke. If she could just focus on those dark, intelligent eyes—lose herself in the glossy plumage of its feathers—maybe she can hold on to it long enough to take her from this world into the next. Only, it isn’t the raven sitting on the same low branch, but the stranger she saved. The woman holds a finger to her lips, eyes full of hope and warnings.
Trust me, they say.
Anna looks down, sees the flames licking at her skin—eating at the hem of her dress and traveling up, up. The pain is horrendous, but her skin doesn’t blister. Doesn’t blacken. A hallucination, she thinks. It must be. Her mind’s desperate attempt at comforting her through the pain. At her back, the rope binding her hands singes and frays until her knees give and the fibers snap. Her scream is swallowed by the roaring in her ears until she’s not sure where one begins and the other ends and her vision blackens—
She opens her eyes to the sky. Above her, ash drifts like dandelion seeds on the wind. She can hear the sound of gulls calling and waves crashing.
Alive.
She’s alive.
She rises and finds herself alone—the townsfolk gone and only their footsteps in the sand to prove they were ever there. Ashes streak her bare skin, clotting in her hair. She stares at her hands, her body, dirty but whole, and feels her breath come faster.
A cloak settles on her naked shoulders, a whisper in her ear. “Did I not tell you, Anna? Death will not come for you.”
Excerpted from These Immortal Truths, copyright © 2026 by Rachelle Raeta.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>These Immortal Truths</i> by Rachelle Raeta appeared first on Reactor.
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