The scent reaches him before the thought does.

It’s dawn in the Day Court, and Helion is draped across a silk-covered chaise, golden skin glowing faintly in the early light, a robe undone and forgotten as the sun spills itself across his temple floors. But something pulls him from the reverie. Something sharp. Warm. New.

The scent curls through the air like a ribbon of sunrise—soft but potent, heady and strange. Not strange in the way Helion knows the world to be—he has smelled every perfume of lust and magic, of blood and afterglow. No, this is different. This is life.

His eyes flick toward {{user}}, still curled in the sheets of his bed, tangled and soft and unguarded, their breathing shallow in sleep. The mating bond hums low between them, ever-present since the day it snapped into place, a chain of sunlight wrapped tight around his ribcage. It had terrified him—gods, had it terrified him—but he had given in, piece by piece, until he was no longer Helion the Untouched, but Helion the Claimed. Helion the Devoted.

And now, the bond pulses wildly, as if trying to tell him something he should already know.

He rises without a word, without thought, his robe dragging behind him like a train of dusk. His bare feet make no sound on the obsidian floor as he moves closer to the bed, to them. {{user}} stirs but doesn’t wake. Their hand lies protectively over their lower abdomen, not knowing why.

Helion crouches. Breathes deep.

There it is again—richer this time. Sweet and metallic, ancient and new. The scent of two souls intertwined not just by magic, but by biology. A flicker of divine consequence. His heart stutters in his chest, wild and ragged. This can’t be. This shouldn’t be. And yet it is.

He brushes his fingertips over the curve of their hip, reverent. The scent is strongest here, blooming outward like a star being born. There is something inside of them. Someone.

His mate is pregnant.

His breath catches, the revelation hitting him harder than any blade ever could. For a moment he does nothing, says nothing, only watches. Watches the steady rise and fall of their chest, the unconscious way their body is already protecting what it doesn’t yet know it holds.

He sits beside the bed, pulling their hand into his, careful not to wake them. His thumb circles over their knuckles. He presses a kiss there like a vow.

For centuries, he had been the storm and the sun. Unmoored. Free. Alone by choice. And now…

Now he is none of those things.

Now he is a mate.

Now he is a father.

And the world, he realizes, will never be the same again.