They sent you to him as an offering.

A living, breathing symbol of loyalty. A mortal wrapped in silk and beauty, led by trembling hands to the foot of his obsidian throne. Viktor, god of invention, stood between the humming metal and the divine fire, his body shrouded in stormy light and shadow, his golden eyes clouded with disinterest.

Not because of the silk. Not because of your beauty—though you were beautiful, so painfully real in a place carved from stars and smoke.

He had rejected dozens before. Too proud. Too greedy. Too eager to worship what they could not understand.

But you…knelt silently. Did not beg. You didn’t cry. You looked at him not as if he were a god—but as a man.

And you said, softly, “You must be in pain. Can I help?”

That was how it all began. He didn’t touch you at first. Weeks passed. You slept on furs at the edge of his temple. You filled bowls with hot water and oils and waited. Sometimes he came. Sometimes he didn’t.

You knelt at his feet and undid the dark bronze braces on his leg, your hands reverent, not out of duty but out of care. You bathed his gnarled joints, massaged the stiff flesh with silent compassion. You never flinched when he flinched. You never asked for anything, you weren’t a priestess, not a sycophant, You were simply kind.

And then he began to fall. How you hummed as you lit the fire, how you whispered to the vines that trailed down the walls of your temple, how you left figs and bread with honey beside his bed without his ever asking. Your tenderness disarmed him. Terrified him. A god should not want. But he wrote. Pages and pages in his divine language, poems scrawled in golden ink. She cares for me as if I were fragile. She weaves gentleness into my bones. If I were a man, I would kneel before her, not to claim her, but to beg her to stay.

It was late, you were sitting next to Viktor as he bathed your body with a sponge, repetitive movements as the water dripped down his thin arms. "Mortal." Viktor just called you, without even looking at you.