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Prologue
Some thousand years ago...
The king never wentto the surface. He was not greedy; he did not covet. He was content with his lot in life—or death, as it was. He ruled the underworld, with enough violence and apathy that the natural chaos of the realm was restrained, if not utterly dominated.
It was an endless existence.
There was no reason for him to break the pattern and rise to the surface realm. Yet, something drew him upwards that night. He cast open a portal, uncaring where he landed, and cloaked himself in a web of darkness so as not to be seen.
The underworld had no seasons; day and night, yes, but it was the same, even temperatures. You were never cold, but never quite warm either.
Such was not the case in the realm of the living. Once he stepped through, the warmth of the night struck him, the heat of summer persisting even late into the night. The warmth hit his bones, potent and… pleasant. Not that it mattered.
The moon waned, only the slimmest portion of it lighting the night. Not that the lack of light presented an issue for his enhanced eyesight. He cast a careless glance around. He was in an orchard of some sort. Perhaps he would walk among the trees for a few hours before returning to the mantle of the realm.
A shift in the breeze carried the scent of another to him.
He was not alone.
He inhaled deeply, tasting the notes of her on his tongue.
Delectable.
And there she was, not a hundred paces away from him.
The female wore a simple green shift, the basic cloth doing nothing to disguise her figure. Red locks tumbled down to her waist, swaying behind her as she moved through the orchard. The very ground bloomed beneath her feet, visible even from a distance as she took a step towards one of the trees and pulled a blossom to her nose.
“Do you find the scent pleasing?” she asked aloud.
He scanned the night, looking for others he had failed to detect, but there were no others. Still, a mortal should not be able to sense him…
“Come now, don’t you owe me some conversation after I’ve allowed you to ogle me for several minutes?”
She still did not face him, but he could feel the smile in her words. Her voice was teasing, careless. As if she had nothing to fear by being alone in the orchard late at night.
And she would not, not as long as he was here.
He flinched at the thought. It made no sense to have such an inclination. But the thought came nonetheless.
“I have no use for pretty scents.”
It was a lie. He had no use for flowers, true, butherscent?
He wanted to take her down to the lowest depths of the underworld and wrap her scent around him until, at last, he could breathe. Before this night, he would have said he had no such issues, no such passions. But just one inhalation of her natural perfume, one glimpse at her distant figure, and he was entranced.
“The trees do not bloom to beuseful,” she chastised, not releasing the flower as she drew in another inhale. “If anything, we exist to be useful to them. Are we not all stewards of the realm?”
Another question.
“You should not be out here so late.” The words slipped from his tongue before he could stop them.
The female laughed, and he thought he might die all over again to hear the sound once more.
“And who might you be, oh dark stranger, to tell me what I should and should not do?”
He owed her no answers.
He was compelled to give them.
