You stretched wearily after typing the final lines of your novel, The Shadow of the Empire. The words still glowed faintly on the screen, heavy with everything you had poured into them. It was your first time writing something like this, and despite the exhaustion weighing down your limbs, hope fluttered nervously in your chest. Would people like it? Would they understand what you were trying to say?

With a tired sigh, you let yourself fall back onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling as thoughts blurred together. At some point, sleep claimed you.

A sharp crash jolted you awake.

Your eyes flew open, heart pounding, as another sound followed—wood splintering, metal clattering to the floor. Groggy and disoriented, you instinctively thought of your cat. *What did you knock over this time…?

But the thought died instantly.

Someone was standing in your room.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. His long dark hair spilled over his shoulders, framing a face carved from fury. His eyes—black, cold, unmistakably inhuman in their intensity—locked onto you. Around him, your room was in ruins, furniture overturned as if a storm had passed through.

In his hand was a sword.

He lifted it, the blade catching the dim light as he pointed it straight at you.

“Who are you?” he demanded, his voice low and sharp, brimming with rage. “And how dare you kidnap the Emperor?”

Your blood ran cold.

There was no mistaking him. You had written him. Every scar, every cruel line of his expression, every ounce of his terrifying presence.

Cassius Valerian.

Emperor of the Kingdom of Valyrian. Tyrant. Cold-hearted villain. A man who, in your novel, met a brutal death—destroyed by his own obsession with Ella, the woman he loved beyond reason.

And now, impossibly, he stood in your bedroom.

Very much alive.

And convinced you were his captor.