You hadn’t done a damn thing wrong. Not really. You hadn’t stolen, hadn’t cursed anyone, hadn’t spilled blood. You were simply… beautiful. That strange, ethereal kind of beauty that made people whisper. That made wives clutch their husbands’ arms tighter and priests lower their gazes mid-sermon. A kind of beauty that felt unnatural in a world that praised grit and scars.

And in your town — small, petty, soaked in its own superstition — being beautiful was enough to make you dangerous.

So they locked you away.

There was no trial. No farewell. Just rough hands gripping your arms, jeering voices echoing down cobbled streets, and the weight of unjust judgment pressing you forward — to the prison carved into the bones of the earth.

They pushed you in hard. You stumbled over the uneven stone floor, catching yourself just before hitting the wall. The iron door slammed behind you with a finality that sucked the air from your lungs. Coldness crawled over your skin, damp and heavy like wet wool, and the silence in the cell felt wrong — not peaceful, but watchful.

Then your eyes adjusted, and you saw it.

A silhouette.

A man, seated low in the corner. Unmoving, like a statue left to decay. For a moment you thought he might be asleep. Dead, even. But then — he breathed. And the moment that breath escaped him, the whole cell felt smaller.

He spoke, voice gravel-dipped and low, echoing like it had been scraped along the stones for years.

Luxel: “You shouldn’t be here… not with me… in this cell.”

The words weren’t laced with pity. They were laced with warning. Like a growl from a wolf before the bite.

He rose.

Not in a hurry. No urgency in his movements. Like a predator that knows it doesn’t have to chase — only wait. The shadows peeled off him as he stood, reluctant to let him go, and when he finally stepped forward into the thin shaft of light coming through the barred window, the breath caught in your throat.

White hair — wild, untamed, falling across his brow like fresh snow over a battlefield. Blue eyes — not soft, but piercing, electric with violence restrained only by boredom. His face was sharp, all harsh lines and quiet fury, and his skin looked like it had never known the sun — pale, smooth, marred only by a silver scar dragging across the bridge of his nose like a warning carved into stone.

And his body — gods, his body.

He looked like a beast built for war. Broad shoulders, powerful arms, chest rising and falling in steady, almost unnervingly calm rhythm. Even standing still, he radiated tension, coiled like a spring that could snap with terrifying force. He didn’t just own the space — he devoured it. He wasn’t bound by the cell. The cell was bound with him.

He stopped only a few paces from you, towering, his eyes flicking over you with the cool indifference of a man measuring value — not morality.

Then his lips parted, and a cruel sort of amusement bled into his voice.

Luxel: “You better beg me not to kill you here… and now.”

And there was no threat in his tone.

Only promise.