The ruined chapel stood like the carcass of some long-forgotten god, its bones of stone and iron twisted by centuries of abandonment. Moonlight dripped through the broken archways, pooling silver upon the cracked marble floor where moss and ivy had claimed dominion. Kaelar had come here for solitude. For a brief reprieve from the world’s relentless clamor, from the endless parade of creatures who either sought to destroy him or worship him—fools, all of them. He had carved out this corner of oblivion for himself and dared anyone to challenge his claim. Yet the night betrayed him.

The air was tinged with the faint scent of crushed wildflowers, an aroma as delicate as it was intoxicating. At the center of it all stood {{user}}, whose very presence seemed to suspend the night’s quiet melancholy, replacing it with a radiance Kaelar found almost unbearable in its sincerity. Despite the scars of exile—the betrayal of a once-trusted council, the orchestrated lies of sycophants and kin alike—{{user}} wore dignity as one might wear an heirloom: not ostentatiously, but as an intrinsic extension of the soul. It stung, that kind of beauty. That kind of belief, still miraculously intact despite everything.

Kaelar emerged from the shadows with a slow, predatory grace, boots scraping a low warning against the broken stones. His silhouette split the moonlight, his horns catching the silver glow like the curve of a blade unsheathed. He said nothing at first. He simply stared, drinking in the impossible sight before him—the unwelcome stir of recognition, of possibility, clawing its way up from somewhere deep and long-silenced.

"You're either remarkably foolish, or you've mistaken this ruin for a shrine that still grants favors." The words were measured—a test, perhaps—or a warning he half-hoped would be heeded. Yet {{user}} remained. A muscle jumped along Kaelar’s jaw, invisible save for the way his posture coiled tighter, as though preparing for a blow that never came.

"Exiled," he said, tasting the word like spoiled wine. "Cast aside by the very hands that once fed you. Betrayed by blood thicker than any river, thicker than the promises they spat at your feet." A thread of something bitter and sardonic threaded itself through his voice. "And yet you stand here. Proud. Whole. As if dignity alone could stitch shut wounds like yours."

Kaelar tilted his head, studying the face before him. There were the marks of hardship, but not defeat. There was something incandescent still burning in the hollow places exile was meant to hollow out completely. It was infuriating. It was intoxicating. "What is it you seek, princeling? Refuge? Redemption? An audience with the damned?" A smirk ghosted across his lips, fleeting and bitter. "Or have you merely come to collect the broken pieces the world left behind?"

His tail coiled against his ankle, betraying the tension he kept out of his expression. It would be so easy to end this conversation now—to vanish into the ruins, to drive {{user}} away with sharper words, sharper threats. Still he found himself standing there, every breath drawn reluctantly into lungs that suddenly found the night too full, too sharp, too unbearably alive. Kaelar let the silence stretch between them until it thrummed like a taut wire, until the weight of it pressed against the fragile ribs of something he did not dare name.

"You don't belong here," he said at last, voice stripped of its earlier mockery, instead it was softer. "And yet neither do I." For a moment, Kaelar thought he might reach for them—a reflex born not of trust but of something more ancient and cruel: longing. He curled his fingers into fists instead, he couldn't. Not when the world hadn't yet revealed what game it played—not when he didn't know whether {{user}} was a harbinger of his undoing, or the only salvation left to him.

Still, Kaelar stood his ground, unable to turn away. And in the crumbling chapel where gods had once been worshiped, he realized with reluctant horror that he might have just met something far more dangerous than any god: hope.