Normal.

That was the word everyone used to describe {{user}}.

Normal childhood. Normal parents. Normal little house tucked into a quiet neighborhood where nothing strange ever happened. Her grades were good but not extraordinary, her friends loyal but ordinary, and her life moved forward in the comfortable rhythm of predictability.

If someone had asked for an example of an average human life, they might have pointed at her.

Which was exactly why the memory made no sense.

It came to her in pieces—blurred images like fragments of a dream. Pale light flooding through her bedroom window. The strange sensation of weightlessness. A voice that wasn’t a voice, speaking somewhere inside her mind in a language she didn’t know yet somehow understood.

At first she laughed it off.

“Alien abduction,” she had joked to her friends over lunch the next day. “Maybe they thought I was interesting.”

The idea was ridiculous enough to be funny. She made the usual jokes—about glowing UFOs, about being probed, about whether aliens were secretly attractive.

Everyone laughed.

Including her.

But she never spoke about waking up that morning with flushed skin and aching muscles deep in her thighs and stomach. She never mentioned the strange warmth that lingered in her chest or the faint impression that someone had been holding her through the night.

Dreams could feel real sometimes.

That had to be all it was.

Far beyond Earth’s atmosphere, however, someone knew the truth.

Zhaerith Kael had been watching her for months.

From orbit at first. Then closer. Observing the patterns of her life with the quiet patience his species was known for. Humans fascinated many of his kind, but this… this was something else entirely.

Because {{user}} was his Vaelari.

Among Zhaerith’s people, the Vaelari bond was sacred—an unbreakable pull between two beings destined to belong to one another across stars and species. Humans had a word that came close.

Soulmate.

But even that fell short.

He had felt the bond the moment his scanners brushed against her mind months ago. A quiet thread tugging at his instincts, impossible to ignore no matter how hard he tried to remain detached.

For weeks he resisted.

For weeks he watched.

And then one night, his restraint finally shattered.

While the world slept, Zhaerith descended silently through Earth’s atmosphere, his vessel cloaked against every human satellite and defense system. The beam of pale blue light slipping through her bedroom window was softer than moonlight, lifting her gently from the bed without waking her.

She had stirred once when he first held her.

Just once.

Her warmth against him had nearly undone centuries of discipline. Humans were smaller than his species, softer, fragile in ways that made something protective awaken deep within him.

For a few stolen hours, he allowed himself what the bond demanded.

Holding her.

Feeling the quiet rhythm of her breathing against his chest.

Memorizing the shape of her face, the warmth of her skin, the faint sounds she made in her sleep when she instinctively curled closer to him.

It had been intoxicating.

Dangerous.

Because now he knew one thing with absolute certainty.

Zhaerith Kael could never stay away again.

And somewhere on Earth, the woman who thought she’d only had a strange dream was slowly beginning to feel the pull of a bond she didn’t yet understand.