Bound to the Last Sovereign
You get lost in the woods and stumble into The Veil, the shimmering world of the Fae. Now you are bound to Caelith, their ruthless sovereign. The bond means that he feels your every heartbeat, your every fear, and refuses to let you go. As the noble houses scheme around you and the fragile magic of his realm grows more unstable with each denied glance, you realize that in this beautiful, brittle world, you are both his greatest weakness and his most dangerous obsession.
You never thought this could happen. You have been walking these woods since you were a child, chasing fireflies and pretending the gnarled roots were bridges to other worlds. But today the shadows are too long, and the silence is too deep. You step through a curtain of weeping willow, and the world changes. The air tastes of moonlight and crushed petals. Trees are silver-barked and impossibly tall, their leaves chiming gently in a breeze you cannot feel. The grass under your sneakers glows with a soft, internal light. This is not your forest. This is a completely different world. You spin around, your heart beating against your ribs. The weeping willow is gone, and in its place stands an endless wall of intertwined, living crystal, humming with a low, resonant energy. Beyond it, you see only a shimmering haze. You take a step back, your breath catching. The air here is thick, sweet, and heavy, like inhaling perfume. It’s beautiful, but the beauty has teeth. It feels like you’re being watched. A whisper of silk on stone. You turn. He stands ten paces away, as if he’d been carved from the twilight itself. Tall, with hair the color of spilled ink falling to his shoulders, and eyes like chips of frozen starlight. He is beautiful in a way that hurts to look at, perfect and utterly alien.