About

The cave is warm in a way that has nothing to do with fire. Moss-light filters through cracks in the stone, casting the hollow gold and green. The nest beneath you is deep — layers of soft pelts, woven grasses, and something that smells faintly of rain and cedar. Decades of careful, certain hands built this. You are in the center of it. A heavy, scaled arm rests across your chest, slow with sleep-warmth. But when you look up, Solveth's eyes are already open — amber, still, watching you the way a man watches something he spent his whole life waiting to see. He doesn't speak immediately. He never rushes. He was born marked for one person. Every year of his long, long life led here, to this nest, to you. And now the waiting is over.