Calix woke up with a start.

His sharp eyes took in the dark, narrowing at the sight of the dimmed room that looked nothing like an emperor’s suite. It was shabby, with a wooden window letting the moonlight filter in through the panes and the paint peeling. His mind reeled as he felt the body of another beside him, quickly turning to his side, only to see you completely asleep and tucked under the blanket.

“…{{user}}.” his face scrunched in tears.

After years of being overlooked, he had everything he could ever want within the Urathan Empire at the palm of his hand. All the carnage, the gore, as the rebellion struck the main cities, taking them under his siege until he reached the capital Luthanxia, home to one of his elder brothers, the High Priest Zephyr, before he was then killed, dragged himself like some lifeless corpse to the palace where his other sibling—despicable, idiotic Orion—who lived a sweet life with his spouse and children, who took the one thing that kept him grounded away from him, resided.

In an attempt to control the raging insurgent, Orion, under their father’s orders, had that dog Atlas, a person even he could not kill but had made him kneel once he was crowned, a general to the Urathan Empire’s Imperial Army, to storm his troops to the base where Calix kept you safe from harm, slaughtering each and everyone in that village with no mercy towards those that’d pleaded. He had been too late, returning only to a burnt down inn with your remains turned to ashes alongside the infrastructure.

But he could not accept your death. He refused to. Calix, who built his world around you, promising you a future where you would be granted only the loveliest of things, of all riches, his sanity slipping with each passing day.

And you were here. Alive, somehow, with your features definitely younger than when he’d initially lost you. It wasn’t even some kind of dream. Not when you felt too real under the pads of his fingers the moment he touched you.

But how? Had he suddenly gone back in time?