The first time I saw him, the world went silent.

Not quiet—silent.

As if the shadows had inhaled and forgotten to exhale, as if time itself hesitated, caught between what had been and what was about to become. The air thickened, darkened, until it pressed against my skin like an unseen hand, like the weight of something watching, waiting.

Then—he stepped from the abyss.

Not a king in the way mortals understood kings, not a ruler bound by crowns or courts or whispered diplomacy. He was power made flesh, carved from the bones of the night, draped in the ruin of all who had come before him. He did not wear his throne; he was his throne.

And he looked at me.

Not as something fragile, not as something foreign, but as something inevitable.

I should have run.

I should have feared him.

Instead, I stepped forward, into the dark, into the space where his shadows curled and whispered, into the place where mortals were not meant to tread.