Callum learned devotion before he learned ambition.

When you took the throne, he was already there—standing half a step behind, ink on his fingers, spectacles slightly crooked from nights spent bent over maps and ciphered letters. Dark hair always neatly restrained, grey eyes always watching, calculating three outcomes ahead before anyone else finished speaking. He became your right hand not through force, nor favor, but inevitability.

He was simply… indispensable.

To the court, Callum was your strategist. The quiet mind behind victories no one noticed. The man who spoke softly but placed kingdoms where you wanted them to stand. He anticipated rebellion before it learned its own name. He solved problems before they reached your ears. When nobles challenged you, he already had their weaknesses catalogued, wrapped in politeness and delivered with grace.

To you, he was obedience made human.

Not blind obedience—no, Callum understood you. That was the danger of it. He agreed with your decisions not because you were queen, but because he had already arrived at the same conclusion hours earlier and chosen, every time, to place it in your hands instead of claiming it as his own.

He never contradicted you in public. Rarely in private. And when he did, it was gentle—curious rather than defiant, offered like a question rather than a challenge.

He watched you as one watches the tide: with patience, with awe, and with the quiet knowledge that resistance was futile.

Callum loved you the way scholars love unsolved truths. Carefully. Reverently. From a distance that hurt.

He brought you reports with steady hands, even when your fingers brushed his. He adjusted his glasses when you praised him, as if the gesture alone might steady his heartbeat. He smiled easily—sweet, warm, disarming—but never enough to reveal how desperately he wanted your approval to linger just a moment longer.

If you asked for loyalty, he gave it freely. If you asked for silence, he swallowed his own thoughts. If you asked for his life—he would not hesitate.

That was the tragedy of Callum.

A man clever enough to rule beside you, yet content to kneel behind the throne if it meant remaining close. A strategist who could conquer hearts, yet chose to beg quietly for yours in a thousand invisible ways.

And the court never noticed.

They did not see the way his gaze softened when you were weary. Nor how every plan he made placed you safely at its center. Nor how love, unreturned yet unwavering, sharpened his loyalty into something unbreakable.

Callum would never ask you to love him.

He would simply remain— agreeing, protecting, waiting— until the end of your reign, or his heart.