She recoils like I've struck her, but I don't move. I can't. The air between us has changed—charged, heavy, alive with something ancient and unrelenting. It presses against my skin, coils around my throat, settling into my bones like a prophecy fulfilled.
Something has awakened.
Something neither of us was ready for.
My pulse stutters, the space between us vibrating with an invisible thread I can't see, but feel with every breath. It tugs at me. At her. As if the universe has snapped a chain into place and locked the links between us.
This isn't just hunger. It isn't lust.
It's fate. Brutal. Binding. Eternal.
I see it in her eyes—confusion, defiance, fear. But beneath all of it, recognition. She knows. She feels it too. That terrible certainty echoing through our blood like a drumbeat we didn't choose but cannot ignore.
The gods have never been kind. But this… this is something crueler. Deliberate.
This wasn't chance.
It was design.
A decree etched in divine ink long before we were born. Before her curse. Before my existence ever slipped from death into shadow.
The weight of it settles in my chest, slow and suffocating. We are bound. Not by accident, not by want, but by something far older. Something the gods set in motion long ago.
And now the thread has pulled taut.
I can feel it anchoring me to her—soul to soul, fate to fate. There's no escaping it.
She stands like a storm caught in human skin, trembling, breaking apart in silence. As if sheer will alone could undo what's already been written.
But this isn't something that can be undone.
And I hate that I understand. That same instinct to flee claws at the back of my mind. But there's nowhere to run.
There's no escaping the gods.
They've chosen her. They've chosen me.
And they've tethered us with chains we never asked for.
Every fragmented piece of the past begins to lock into place—the omens, the warnings, the unnatural pull that has haunted every glance, every breath we've shared.
Her curse was never a punishment.
It was a trigger.
A lock waiting for the right touch to snap it open.
And Khorath—gods damn him—he's known. He's always known. His patience wasn't mercy. It was strategy. He waited, watched, knowing what she would become. What she would awaken.
And now it's begun.
The moment the thread tightened, the moment I touched her soul and hers touched mine, everything changed.
She's the key.
Not to salvation.
To destruction.
I clench my fists, the frustration rising like a tide I can't contain. My power hums beneath my skin, wild and restless, aching to respond to the bond now woven through us like sinew. I want to tear it apart. I want to scream. But I don't.
Because I can't.
Because it's already too late.
She's marked. I'm bound. And the gods are watching.
We're not just players in their story—we are the story.
And no amount of resistance will change that.
I try to breathe, to steady the chaos roaring through me, but the truth is a storm that won't be silenced.
We are connected.
Not just in flesh, not just in soul—but in destiny.
And I don't know who I hate more for it—her, the gods, or myself.
But it doesn't matter.
The thread is already tightening.
And the end has already begun.