Chapter 16
A Choice of Worlds
Lucien is forced to confront his deepest fears. He must choose between the absolute power he commands and the burgeoning, dangerous emotion he feels for Evan.
The chill in the throne room was not of this world. It seeped from the obsidian walls, from the very stone beneath my feet, a testament to the eternal winter of my reign. I sat upon the Obsidian Throne, a monument to my power, to the dominion I had carved from chaos. My gaze, usually as sharp and unforgiving as a shard of frozen lava, was fixed on the figure before me. Evan Aris. A human, plucked from the oblivious mortal realm and deposited into the heart of Hell. He was a dissonance, a splash of vibrant, fragile color in a landscape of eternal twilight.
He knelt, head bowed, the roughspun tunic doing little to conceal the lean strength of his frame. There was an earthiness about him, a scent of rain-washed soil and something else… something that pricked at the edges of my awareness, a phantom limb of memory I couldn't quite grasp. He was a riddle, and I, Lucien Vale, ruler of Hell, dealt in truths, however brutal.
"Look at me," I commanded, my voice a low growl that echoed in the cavernous space.
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