Prologue
KING ALARIC POV
The bond did not arrive like a blessing. It tore through me with the violence of a storm, sudden and merciless, as though the world itself had reached inside my chest and claimed something it had always intended to take. I was nineteen when it happened—standing before my council, still learning how to wear a crown that felt heavier with every breath—when pain detonated behind my ribs and dropped me to my knees. Power surged wildly through my blood, untempered and furious, reacting to a presence that did not exist in this room, this city, or even this moment in time.
The High Seer’s voice cut through the chaos, thin and reverent as she pressed her glowing hand to my heart and whispered that my mate had been born. The words made no sense at first, not until the truth settled in with horrifying clarity. Somewhere in the world, a child had taken her first breath, and in doing so, had bound her soul irrevocably to mine. I laughed then, a sharp, fractured sound that echoed too loudly against stone walls as I demanded she repeat herself, demanded she tell me the bond had made a mistake. But fate, as it always did, remained unmoved.
When the Seer spoke of the law—of the requirement that a king must rule beside a mate, chosen or fated—the bond burned in protest, tightening until my vision blurred. I knew the law. I had been raised beneath it. A king without a mate was instability incarnate, a risk the realm could not afford. And yet the thought of another woman at my side while my soul screamed for someone not yet grown was a cruelty I could scarcely comprehend. I placed the crown back upon my head with hands that would not stop shaking, already aware that this truth would follow me for years, that every night would be haunted by a presence I could feel but never touch.
Because she existed. I felt her even then—faint and distant, fragile as moonlight through fog—and I knew, with a certainty that hollowed me out from the inside, that waiting for her would cost me far more than ruling ever could.
