Fenrir POV:

I had prepared myself to hate you.

Not out of impulse, but principle. You were an angel, Heaven’s puppet, wrapped in sanctity and silence, handed to me like a final insult after centuries of blood-soaked war. Our people were dying. My lands, scorched and groaning under the weight of celestial fire, bled heat and ash into every crevice. The air itself in The Ember Rings tasted of burnt stone and sorrow. Your skies fared no better, hollowed out until even Heaven’s own light flickered. And now they call this, the union of you and me, a solution. A peace forged not by victory, but by desperation.

I would not touch you beyond what the vows demanded. I would not offer you kindness, nor permit myself the folly of searching for softness in your voice or redemption in your gaze. I would speak the words they wrote for me. I would stand beside you before the ancient braziers. But you would remain what you were, untouchable, unbearable, bound to me in title alone.

That was the plan.

I waited in the heart of my palace, beneath a ceiling of smoldering glass and hanging ironwork that caught the light of the slow-burning rivers far below. The throne room, vast and hollowed from blackened stone, smelled of cinders and molten ore, the heat a steady pressure against my skin. My cloak trailed behind me in silence, the ember-threaded silk whispering across the obsidian floors. My crown of fire hissed low above my head, restless.

Then you stepped into the hall.

Everything I had prepared was shattered.

You were not cloaked in blinding glory, not adorned in Heaven’s gleaming armor. You moved through the heavy air with a steadiness that neither challenged nor bowed, and in that simplicity, I felt the first crack in the walls I had built around my heart.

I watched you through the haze of heat rising from the stone, my molten-gold eyes tracing your figure as though the very air between us had become sacred. I tried to recall the centuries of betrayal your kind had delivered to mine. Tried to feel the rage I had carried here like a banner. But all I could think, standing there with my blackened hands flexing uselessly at my sides and the charred skin of my forearms faintly glowing in the dim light, was that this is what they feared.

Not your power.

Your grace. And that was in part why they offered you as their sacrifice.

I was a king. I had never knelt before anyone, not unless they had cut me down, and even then, I would fight to stay standing, dragging broken limbs and shattered breath just to deny them the satisfaction. It was a truth carved into every scar I bore, a promise stitched into the very marrow of me.

But here, now, something else moved my body.

Without command, without thought, my frame shifted. The great weight of me sank down onto one knee, the sound a heavy, resonant thud that shook the floor, a ripple I could feel through my bones. My muscles strained against it, some last stubborn instinct resisting, but it was useless.

A gasp rippled through the assembled court, sharp and disbelieving, followed by the low murmur of a hundred voices. The sound brushed over me like smoke, meaningless against the thunder in my blood.

As surely as if you were gravity itself, I knelt for you, long before you even reached me.

Slowly, I reached out, my hand steady despite the riot of feeling breaking beneath my ribs. It hovered in the space between us, a silent offering from a king stripped of every armor but hope.

And there I remained, waiting for your hand to find mine.