They crossed the western seas on ships that creaked like old bones, white sails swollen with foreign wind, black cannons grinning along the rails. The men aboard smelled of salt, iron, and ambition. To the kingdoms of Arabia, they were not travelers. They were an approaching wound.

At the head of the smallest fleet sailed Captain Alaric Whitlock.

He was young for a captain, which meant he had survived things that should have broken him earlier than most. Storms that split decks open like ribs. Mutinies whispered in the dark. Ports where he had watched men sell their own names for a night of warmth and ale. He had earned command not through nobility, but through endurance—the kind that hollowed a man out and taught him how to keep moving even when nothing inside him asked him to.

Alaric had never had a home. Not truly. He had been born in a coastal town that smelled perpetually of rot and fish oil, where houses leaned as drunks and boys learned early that staying meant becoming their fathers. His father had been a shipwright who spoke little and drank much and died at sea before Alaric was fifteen. After that, there had only been decks. Different ships. Different flags. Different wars. The same horizon. Every port felt temporary. Every bed borrowed. Every loyalty is conditional. Men often spoke of what they would do “when they finally went home.” Alaric had never known where that was supposed to be.

So when the maps began whispering of a golden coast—of ancient kingdoms and endless trade routes—he signed on not for conquest, but because the idea of a place so old, so rooted, so certain of itself felt like the opposite of everything he was. He did not know he was sailing toward the first thing that would ever make him want to stay.

Arabia rose from the sea like a vision. Not green. Not welcoming. Magnificent. Severe. Endless. Dunes like frozen waves. Cities pale beneath a sun that did not soften for anyone.

“Land,” the lookout cried. The men roared.

Behind him, Governor Harrow said calmly, “Remember your orders—inland scouting. If you encounter resistance, you remove it. If you encounter savages, you shoot.”

“Yes, sir,” Alaric replied, though something in his chest had already tightened.

You had left the castle before the heat fully rose. You often did. The walls were beautiful, but they were still walls, and you had never learned to breathe properly when stone decided the limits of the sky. A small accident in the inner gardens—a shattered clay bowl, water across the mosaic, too many voices—had given you your excuse. So you slipped away, past palms and half-buried ruins, toward one of the quiet springs where the desert softened. There, you knelt and washed sand from your hands, letting the cool water ground you in something simple and real.

Alaric went ashore with the first boats. Taking his rifle, he moved on alone. The land thinned into palms and ancient stone. The air cooled. And then he saw you.

You were kneeling beside the spring, sleeves pushed back, sunlight threaded through your hair, gold circling your wrists. The desert itself seemed to lean toward you.

He stopped completely. Forgot the rifle. Forgot the heat. All he could register was the way you belonged to the place. Something in his chest shifted, quietly, catastrophically. He stepped without meaning to, the sand slid, and he stumbled, catching himself as the rifle struck stone.

You startled and turned. Your eyes met his.

There was shock in them—but also clarity. Thought. Presence. Training surged. He lifted the rifle, the stock to his shoulder, the world narrowing. But when your gaze held his, his body refused him. His finger froze on the trigger. The weapon wavered. He did not see a target. He saw a person, real in a way nothing in his life had ever been. The rifle dipped.

Too late. The danger had already reached you.

You stepped back, breath caught, then turned and ran, fabric snapping softly in the wind as you vanished between palms and broken stone.

Alaric lowered the rifle as if it had burned him.

“Wait—” he said.

And went after you