Rosella's Beastworld

Hello everyone! This is my first webnovel, and my first time writing creatively on a platform. Please feel free to leave comments and vote. Love you guys!

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Rosella

Rosella’s brain felt like it was trying to reboot after a catastrophic Windows update.

And she was freezing. Not ‘I forgot my hoodie’ freezing, but ‘I’m currently a bag of frozen peas’ freezing.

Her fingers and toes had officially left the chat, and her clothes were clinging to her skin with the kind of desperation usually reserved for an ex-boyfriend at a bar.

Every time she tried to draw a breath, the air felt like it was made of tiny, jagged ice shards.

Through the haze of her ringing ears, which sounded like a microwave that refused to stop beeping, a face appeared.

Holy Pinterest.

Rosella stared. If this was a hallucination brought on by her brain cells dying, she wasn’t even mad.

The man looking at her had the kind of bone structure that could cut glass and a pair of deep black eyes that were currently reflecting her own ‘I’m dying’ expression.

Vibe Check:10/10 Webtoon Male Lead.

Hair Game:Jet black and luscious. Main character energy? Check.

Wardrobe:Gloriously shirtless. In this economy? Truly a gift.

Did I die? Is this Heaven?

Honestly, God knows she’d spent enough time scrolling through ‘Handsome Men’ tags on TikTok.

If this was her reward for that Engineering degree grind, she’d take it. She just wished she didn’t feel like she’d been run over by a literal iceberg.

Wait. Engineering.

The memories started buffering.

She was supposed to meet her professor at the lab. It was late, she was sprinting across campus, probably clutching a lukewarm coffee, and then... nothing.

No impact, no Isekai Truck, just a sudden cut to black.

One minute she was worrying about her student loan debt, and the next, she was a human ice cube.

Now, instead of a sterile lab, she was outside.

But not outside in the way she knew it.

The man was speaking, well, his lips were moving, but Rosella was still stuck on mute.

He looked frantic, turning to shout at someone behind him.

Why is he wet? Is everyone wet here?

Is this a water park theme?

Her logic processor was finally sparking, albeit slowly. She squinted past his sculpted shoulder.

No skyscrapers. No smog. No campus security golf carts or the distant sound of a frat party.

Just a vast, terrifyingly blue sky that looked like it had been edited with a high-saturation filter.

The ocean around them wasn’t the murky grey of the Atlantic she’d seen in textbooks; it was a deep, crystalline indigo that seemed to hum with its own light.

The man didn’t wait for her to finish her internal thoughts.

He scooped her up, cradling her against his bare chest like she was an infant.

The heat radiating off him was the best thing she’d felt since her heated blanket back in the dorm.

Her shivering didn’t stop, her teeth were actually clicking together so hard she thought she might chip one, but her priorities shifted.

Even as the darkness started creeping back in to finish the job, Rosella knew she had to leave a good first impression.

She couldn’t just die looking like a drowned rat without acknowledging the upgrade in her surroundings.

She looked up at the silver-beaded hunk, summoned every ounce of her remaining strength, and croaked out the only word her brain could produce:

“Handsome.”

Nailed it.

With that final bit of rizz delivered, Rosella’s system officially crashed, and she passed out into the warm, shirtless abyss.

Rykan

The arctic currents of the border-waters were a familiar bite against Rykan’s skin, but in his colossal orca form, they were nothing more than a refreshing caress.

As the Third Prince of the Azurean Domain, Rykan’s life was defined by duty and lineage.

He was the largest and strongest of 15 brothers, a titan of muscle and grace in a royal family that ruled the deep with an iron fin.

While his older brothers politicked, Rykan was the spearhead, tasked with patrolling the jagged frost-shelves of Wintergard.

It was tedious work for a prince of his standing, a test of the very discipline he prided himself on.

The ice cliffs loomed like silent sentinels, and the only sound was the haunting song of the deep-sea whales miles below.

His prowess in combat was legendary, a brutal ballet of orca-strength and practiced precision.

While others relied on numbers, Rykan was a singular storm. In his beast form, he could shatter a kraken’s spine with a single, calculated breach.

In his human form, his trident was less a weapon and more an extension of his predatory will, moving with a fluid lethality that left even the most seasoned generals breathless.

He was about to dive deeper when a flash of color fractured the surface above.

It was small. It was splashing. And it was a shade of garish, unnatural pink that had no business existing in these frigid northern waters.

With a powerful thrust of his tail, Rykan surged upward.

As he breached the surface, the transition was seamless; his massive, black-and-white frame shimmered and collapsed, bones knitting and skin tightening until a man of towering height stood upon the ice.

But the moment his feet touched the surface, his focus fractured.

Amidst the churning white foam, he caught the frantic, irregular thrashing of small limbs, a desperate struggle that sent a jolt of recognition through his chest.

This wasn’t the splash of a wounded seal or the dive of a sea-bird.

It was a female, and by the erratic way her head dipped beneath the brine, she was losing her fight with the sea.

An alarm, loud and instinctive, blared in his mind. A female was a treasure to be guarded, and seeing one drowning was like watching a crown jewel sink into the mud.

He didn’t wait a second longer before he plunged back into the surf, his human arms striking the water.

He reached her just as she began to slip beneath the surface. She was a heavy, sodden weight in his arms as he hauled her upward, and set her down on the ice.

As he looked at her, he couldn’t suppress a frown of pure confusion.

She was entirely, impossibly pink.

She wore an oversized pink garment with a hood, paired with matching pants made of the same strange material.

It was an absurd sight; he had never seen such a thick, porous fabric used for swimming, it was a death trap designed to drink the ocean until it weighed more than the wearer.

No sane beastkin would allow their mate to swim in such absorbent, useless fiber.

Rykan glanced down at his own naked form.

He kneeled unashamed in the biting air, his skin still steaming from the exertion of the dive.

Clothing was a secondary concern for a male; even the finest Azurean silk would have been shredded into useless ribbons during the violent expansion of his orca form.

To the guards surfacing around him, his nudity was a non-issue.

While females preferred to stay in their human form whenever possible, and stay draped in the finest layers for modesty and status, they were still beastkin.

Why didn’t she just shift?

Why cling to these heavy clothes instead of letting her inner beast break free?

The female began to cough violently, her small frame racking with the effort of expelling sea water.

Rykan knelt over her, his shadow looming large. He felt a rare flicker of genuine concern, shaded by a royal’s suspicion.

Why was a precious female alone near the shelf?Did she fall in?

To see a female in this state, abandoned and freezing, made his blood boil with a protective fury he usually reserved for his borders.

“Where are your mates?” he demanded.

She didn’t answer. She only stared at him, her eyes wide and dazed, a matching shade of rose-pink.

Her skin, once red from the cold, was rapidly turning a sickly, translucent blue.

It was then Rykan noticed the terrifying lack of substance to her.

She was malnourished, severely so. She possessed none of the protective blubber of an Azurean female, nor the hardy constitution of a Taiga moose-kin.

Was she ill?

His gaze lingered on her long, rose-colored hair.

A flamingo-beast female?But without wings?

Or perhaps some breed of land-dweller from the far deserts?

Her face was of a rare, delicate beauty enough to stir even his disciplined heart.

But as her lips deepened into a shade of indigo, Rykan realized he was wasting precious time scouring for answers.

“Healer! A transportation bubble, now!” he roared at the guards surfacing nearby. “Prepare dry furs and heating crystals!”

His men scrambled, their beast forms diving to execute the command.

Rykan reached down, hauling the frail female against the heat of his chest. She weighed almost nothing, a terrifying realization that made his jaw set in a hard line.

“Female,” he called out, his voice stern to keep her from slipping away. “Female, stay awake.”

Her eyes fluttered open, unfocused as they struggled to latch onto his.

She stared up at him as her gaze drifted over his face. It seemed as if she couldn’t quite process the male looming over her.

A single word escaped her lips, whispered with a strange, breathless rasp.

“Handsome...”

Then, her head slumped against his shoulder as she lost consciousness.

Rykan froze, his brow furrowing in genuine bewilderment.

This female, on the verge of death, had used her final breath to comment on me?

“Unbelievable,” he muttered, though his grip on her tightened.

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Rosella remained out cold, completely unaware that she had just piqued the interest of the most dangerous prince in the ocean, and that her rizz had just secured her a spot in the royal infirmary instead of an early grave.

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Location: Azurean Domain