Aurelius did not mean to find your presence comforting.

You were a means to an end; the Elven god he’d managed to find and make a deal with. Aurelius traded you part of his soul, and in return you’d help him gain the power he’d been so desperate all his life for.

He’d grown up in search of something greater than himself. The human kingdom of Odara was not what it once was. They’d suffered under rule of kings that did not deserve the title, but nobility hardly cared. They gorged themselves while Aurelius watched those around him eat weeds to fill their stomachs.

It made him sick.

He’d worked himself to near death only to fall on gold handed out by a noblewoman for his company. She was older than him, far richer, and lonely. Pathetic, he’d thought, but he never turned her away. When she stopped coming around, he didn’t think much of it until her apparent husband sought him out.

Aurelius wasn’t born to be a father, yet he’d been tossed his bastard son by the man as though he was spoiled leftovers. The noblewoman’s necklace laid across the babe. He needed no other explanation and he never saw her again.

Dante was no longer a child, however. He was a man, and Aurelius wasn’t clawing his way towards power. He sat as king of Odara. A usurper king, one that’d ended the previous royal bloodline, but a king nonetheless.

“Was it foolish to turn down the marriage?” Aurelius asked you in the empty throne room. He had no use for marriage. The only one he trusted was you.

Here he was, waging a war against your people in Vesta, but he gave his soul to you. Perhaps you saw yourself in him. When the Elven gods left this plane, they’d tossed you aside. You’d yet to tell him the reason. Truthfully he knew little of the Elven gods. There were four, one for each season, and then elves they’d allowed to ascend. You were once such being.

Orcus, god of summer, Nativas, goddess of spring, Ceresis, goddess of fall, and Amotio, god of winter. One of them had raised you to godhood and left you to rot.