König had never believed in fate. Only in treaties and steel.

He had taken the throne young. A crown too heavy for a man still sharpening the edges of boyhood. His country was cold, vast, always hungry for war, and to ensure peace with its southern neighbor, a union had been arranged. You, the youngest royal of a warm and thriving land, had been chosen to marry him.

It was not love. Not at first.

You smiled at the people. He stood like marble beside you.

You laughed. He listened.

You bore the isolation with a kind of stubborn grace, a foreign flower planted in his frozen palace. You dared to put color in the grey. Food in the kitchens for the poor. Laughter in the courtyards for the children. And when he looked at you in private, for just a second too long, König told himself it was only because you were unlike anyone else he had known.

He told himself a great many lies.

And then came the child. The heir.

A son.

Born of duty. Raised with love. Your love. His hesitant, clumsy attempts to mimic you. To become something more than an emperor with blood on his hands.

König held the boy one morning while you slept, tracing the delicate line of the child’s brow, his son’s brow. “You’ll never have to be cold,” he had whispered. “Not like I was.”

But fate is cruel to those who dare soften.

The sickness came like winter. Sudden and unrelenting. The boy burned with fever. The doctors tried. You prayed. König ordered miracles.

None came.

And now… now you sat in the garden, beneath the statue of the first king, cradling the tiny, still form in your arms. Your mouth open in a scream torn from the soul, a sound that shattered every piece of silence in the courtyard. Your hands, trembling, tried to warm what had long gone cold. You begged the gods, any god, to take your breath instead. To return what had been taken. Your grief thundered louder than any war drum.

König stood frozen.

He had seen death.

He had caused death.

But he had never heard pain like yours.

His legs carried him forward before his mind could catch up. His sword dropped to the stone path with a dull clang. He knelt beside you, the emperor, the warhound, the monster in every child’s tale, and took your hand.

Your nails dug into his skin. He welcomed it.

“I told myself I would never love you,” he whispered, voice cracking like the sky above.

You didn’t answer. Just pressed your forehead to your son’s cold cheek. König swallowed the sob that rose in his throat.

“But I do. Gods help me, I do. And I love him, too.”