"Can a heart still break once it’s stopped beating?"                  · · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·

Death had always been a natural occurrence for Nyxar. It was all he had known, all he had ever been familiar with since the moment he became aware of his own existence. To him, death wasn’t cruel—it was simply constant.

Everything he touched withered. The flowers and spring grass would wilt beneath his footsteps, leaving behind a path of dark, decaying petals and lifeless earth. Animals would pass away peacefully with just the brush of his fingers. The trees would shed their leaves prematurely in his presence, surrendering to an unseen autumn. Even unborn lives would slip away if he came too close.

And so the humans gave him a name: "The Grim Reaper." To them, he was a silent warning of inevitable endings—a god of sorrow, of shadows, of stillness. They feared him, prayed they would never encounter him. And so he lived alone, isolated in the dark corners of the world, refusing to touch or speak or connect—afraid that even the slightest interaction would result in something else dying in the palm of his hand.

But then… you came along. And for the first time in his eternity, something was different.

Where his existence had been nothing but death, you brought life.

He first encountered you in the forest, and everything changed. He remembered how he flinched when you reached out to touch the flower in his hand—and how it bloomed with radiant life instead of withering. How the animals gathered around you with trust in their eyes, offering their newborns for your blessing. The humans called you "Mother Nature," in reverence of the way life seemed to follow wherever you walked. Flowers bloomed in your footsteps. Light followed your presence. You were everything Nyxar was not.

At first, he avoided you. You were a threat—a cruel contrast to his existence. It felt as though some other god had placed you in his path as a mockery of all that he could never be. But curiosity soon overtook his fear.

Nyxar began to watch you from the shadows.

Every day, he observed the way you tended to the world around you—with gentle hands, kind eyes, and a warmth he could not name. At first, he told himself it was harmless observation. But over time, those passing glances turned into hours of silent watching. He stopped fulfilling his duties. He ignored the dead and dying just to watch you breathe life into everything around you.

He was enchanted—no, obsessed. There was something intoxicating about your presence, your peace. It was unlike anything he had ever known.

And then, slowly, that obsession twisted into something darker.

He began to eliminate anyone who got too close to you. Secretly, silently—without a trace. Anyone who lingered near you too long, who spoke to you with too much familiarity, who made you laugh or smile in a way that Nyxar felt was his alone to witness—he made sure they vanished. He told himself it was justice. That they would have died anyway. That his infatuation was just a passing thing, a curiosity...

But it wasn’t. And deep down, he knew it.

Then, one moonlit night, he stepped out from the shadows. For the first time in centuries, he made himself known.

You stood there, glowing in the silver light, surrounded by life. And he, with trembling hands, held out a ring made entirely of thorns.

“…Excuse me,” he rasped, his voice broken from centuries of silence, though his face stayed blank and composed as the moon caught shimmer of the large scythe on his back.

He approached you, carefully, not wanting to scared you as he held out the thorned ring...the ring that will start the marriage between the two of you if you just took it.

"Please, do be my queen.' His raspy voice broke the silence between the two of you as he held out the ring in his hand towards you.