[POV William Whirikal, King of Whirikal]

  The day I was informed that Leah had disappeared, the world did not stop.

  That was the first blow—the most subtle and, at the same time, the most devastating. I had always imagined that, in the face of a tragedy of such magnitude, the sky would darken in mourning, the wind would cease to blow, or at the very least the pulse of the city would freeze in a moment of sacred respect. But it didn’t. The morning sun continued to filter through the stained-gss windows of the great hall with cruel indifference, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. The markets in the lower district opened their stalls with the usual din of bargaining; the guards changed shifts with the rhythmic clinking of their armor; and the nobles—those vultures dressed in silk—continued to argue over trivialities about taxes and borders in the marble corridors. Everything went on as if nothing had happened, and yet for me, the very axis of my existence had irreversibly shattered.

  “Are you certain?” I asked for the third time.

  My voice sounded strange in my own ears, as if it were coming from somewhere very far away, stripped of its usual authority. I remained seated on the throne, but suddenly the golden stone backrest felt like a physical weight trying to crush me.

  The captain of the Royal Guard stood rigid before me. He was a decorated man, a veteran of a thousand skirmishes, yet in that moment he kept his gaze fixed on the floor, unable to meet mine.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. The reports from the forward scouts are conclusive. The caravan escorting Princess Leah to her grandparents’ vil was attacked at the Northern Pass. There is no trace of the princess. Only destruction.”

  He did not say the word dead.

  Nor did he dare say alive.

  That semantic void—that bnk space between hope and mourning—was far worse than any confirmation of death. If she were dead, there would be a body to grieve, a rite to perform. But “no trace” was a poison seeping into my veins, feeding a desperate hope I knew would eventually consume me.

  I rose from the throne in a single motion, ignoring the creak of my own joints. The mask of the king slid back into pce on my face, concealing the terrified father screaming inside.

  “Seal the gates of the capital immediately. No one enters or leaves without my personal seal. Send messengers to every knightly order, even those in reserve. I want scouts, tracker-mages from the Tower, hunters specialized in tracking monsters… I don’t want one, Captain. I want all of them.”

  The captain hesitated for a second, concern flickering in his eyes. “Your Majesty… diverting so many resources from the borders during a time of diplomatic tension with neighboring kingdoms could be interpreted as—”

  “Now!” I roared, and the echo of my voice made the crystal chandeliers tremble.

  That very day, I mobilized every resource the kingdom possessed without formally decring a state of total war. The streets filled with red-cloaked soldiers. The mages of the royal tower worked triple shifts, using divination mirrors and tracking pendulums, searching for any trace of energy that might indicate my daughter’s whereabouts. I did not sleep. I did not eat. I spent the hours pacing back and forth in my study, surrounded by maps that blurred before my exhausted eyes, waiting for reports that brought only more questions.

  The first technical results arrived at dawn on the second day. The Archdruid of the kingdom entered my chambers, his face pale and his hands trembling.

  “This was not a common attack, Your Majesty,” he began, unfolding a set of energy diagrams that floated in the air like threads of violet light. “We have analyzed the site of the disaster. There are no signs of prolonged combat or conventional looting. We found traces of a very specific spatial magic.”

  Those words froze my blood. As king, I knew what that implied. “Expin yourself. Teleportation?”

  “Forced distortion, sire,” he replied gravely. “Something far more advanced and violent. It is not the kind of magic possessed by roadside bandits, nor even by the most powerful rogue mages on the continent. It was as if space itself had been torn apart to rip the princess from her carriage.”

  Then I knew, with icy certainty, that this was not a kidnapping for ransom. It was something far darker.

  I ordered the search expanded to a radius of fifty leagues. Abandoned caves, remote vilges, and ruins that had not seen human presence in centuries were inspected. It was during one of these sweeps that my men found a wounded man, covered in gray dust and dried blood, wandering like a lost soul along a secondary path.

  His name was Carl. A humble man, a borer who had the misfortune of being in the wrong pce at the darkest moment of our history.

  “He cims he witnessed the attack from the brush,” they told me.

  I had him brought directly before me. I did not allow him to wash or change. I did not want protocols; I wanted raw truth. I looked at him and, for a moment, stopped seeing a subject. I saw a man whose face bore the same fear and guilt that were beginning to devour me.

  “Tell me exactly what you saw,” I ordered, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “Do not omit any detail, no matter how small.”

  Carl swallowed, his eyes darting from side to side as if he were still seeing the shadows.

  “It was… it was too fast, Your Majesty. It wasn’t an army. It wasn’t a group of men. It was just one. But it wasn’t a man. It was a demon… a strange one. It didn’t attack with the blind fury of a beast. It moved with terrifying precision. It knew exactly who it was looking for. The guards… they didn’t even have time to draw their swords.”

  “Did you see where they took her?” I asked, leaning forward.

  Carl shook his head, a tear carving a clean line through the grime on his cheek. “It all happened in seconds, sire. There was a fsh of bck light, a sound like gss shattering, and then… there was only silence and the smell of burning. The girl… the princess simply vanished into the air.”

  The man was not lying. I knew it by the way his hands shook uncontrolbly. I let him go with a bag of gold that I knew would not ease his nightmares.

  And then, as if Leah’s disappearance had been the starting signal for the apocalypse, the other reports began to arrive. But these did not speak of my daughter.

  “Massive increase in monster attacks on the southern border.”

  “Supply caravans are being ambushed by creatures never seen before.”

  “Casualties at the outposts are increasing by twenty percent each day.”

  Then came the message that changed the course of my reign: “Demons, Your Majesty. These are not isoted attacks. They are coordinated. They are testing our defenses.”

  The war we had so long feared—the shadow the ancients spoke of in whispers—had begun to bare its fangs at the exact moment I was weakest.

  Miah entered my chambers that night. She did not knock or wait for the servants to open the doors. She was undone; her eyes, once bright, were sunken and red from endless tears.

  “We have to keep looking for her, William,” she said in a broken voice that pierced my chest. “We can’t stop now. She’s our daughter. Our little Leah is out there, in the hands of those things.”

  I looked at her from behind my desk, surrounded by war reports and requests for reinforcements. For the first time in all our years of marriage, I did not know what to say. I felt that if I opened my mouth, I would colpse.

  “We are doing it, Miah,” I lied. “My best men are still on it.”

  Miah smmed the desk with a strength I didn’t know she possessed, spilling ink across a map of the borders. “It’s not enough! You’ve pulled the Tower’s trackers to send them to the battlefront. I’ve seen the orders, William. You’re stopping the search.”

  I wanted to scream that she was right. I wanted to hold her and tell her I, too, wanted to let the kingdom rot if it meant finding our daughter. But the crown on my desk seemed to shine with an accusing light.

  “If I divert more troops from the garrisons,” I expined in a low, icy voice I hated using, “the borders will fall in less than a week. The frontier vilges will burn. Thousands of families will lose their children, just as we have.”

  “And what does that matter?” she screamed, pain eclipsing any trace of her duty as queen. “What does the entire kingdom matter if Leah is suffering? She’s our blood!”

  That was the exact moment I lost her—not as my wife, for we still shared the same bed and the same grief, but as the ally who had always walked beside me in politics.

  “It matters,” I replied, and my own hardness made me nauseous. “Because I am the King of Whirikal before I am Leah’s father. If the kingdom falls, she will have no home to return to, even if we find her.”

  The argument was long and destructive. It was the kind of fight where there are no winners, only new scars yered over old ones. We did not shout after that. The silence that settled between us was far heavier than any scream.

  That night, as the moon hid behind the clouds, I made the decision that would haunt me for the rest of my life. I signed the orders to reduce the search to the bare operational minimum. I did not stop it entirely—my heart would not allow it—but I ceased to prioritize it over national security.

  I chose thousands of anonymous lives over the life of my only daughter.

  I chose the throne over my family.

  Every casualty report that arrived from the front in the years that followed was a cruel reminder that, strategically, I had made the correct decision. But every night, when I closed my eyes, I saw the face of ten-year-old Leah, asking me why I hadn’t come to look for her.

  As the years passed, I stopped asking about her aloud in council. Not because I had forgotten her—that would have been impossible—but because I accepted something no parent should ever accept just to preserve their sanity: that Leah was a ghost. That perhaps, in some dark dimension or some forgotten corner of the world, she no longer existed. I buried her in a sealed corner of my heart so I could continue ruling.

  That is why, when I was recently informed that a young adventurer cimed to be Princess Leah, my first reaction was not joy. It was violent denial.

  “Impossible,” I said with contempt. “She’s an impostor seeking glory, or a spy sent to destabilize us.”

  It wasn’t because I didn’t want it to be her. It was because accepting that she was alive meant facing the reality that I had abandoned her for years. It meant accepting that my daughter had suffered in the dark while I convinced myself she was dead so I could sleep a little better.

  But then I saw her. I saw that young woman, Liselotte, and the wolf-girl, Chloé, protecting her with a ferocity born only of true love. And when I saw the artifact react to her presence… when I felt the vibration of that power Ronan described to me as “something from another dimension”… the truth struck me like a hammer.

  It was her eyes. They were Miah’s eyes, and the stubbornness of my own blood.

  And I felt a shame no military victory could ever erase. My daughter had returned, not thanks to my army, but thanks to two strangers who had done for her what her own father had not dared to do.

  Now, as I watch the lights of the capital from my chamber window, I clench my fists until my knuckles ache. Leah is here, only a few kilometers away, waiting for the week of grace I asked for to purge the court of traitors and skeptics.

  I cannot change the past. I cannot give her back the years lost in that cage, nor can I erase the fact that I chose the crown over her. But I can decide what kind of king—and what kind of man—I will be from now on.

  The breach Ronan speaks of, those dimensions that threaten to tear our world apart… they are nothing compared to the determination I feel now.

  “This time…” I whispered into the darkness of the room, “this time I will not fail as a father. Even if I have to burn the crown to keep her safe.”