CHAPTER ONE — THE NIGHT THE UNIVERSE TREMBLED

The sky over Kingsland was not merely dark; it was a living canopy, threaded with light and memory. The air tasted faintly of rain and iron, and the field’s grass whispered against Aryan’s ankles like a chorus of small, secret voices. She stood at the edge of the field and felt the world tilt toward a single point of inevitability. Her breath matched the slow, ancient rhythm she had carried in her bones for as long as she could remember.

She sensed him before she saw him — a presence like a tide, familiar and inexorable. The wind brought cedar and something older, a scent that tugged at the corners of memory: smoke from a distant fire, the sweetness of honey, the metallic tang of a blade. When Jd stepped into the moonlight, the air between them changed; the ordinary laws of distance and time thinned, and the night leaned in to listen.

Their eyes met and something inside Aryan unclenched. It was recognition that bypassed thought — a recognition rehearsed across centuries. In that instant she felt the echo of other skies, other names, other hands: the roughness of a warrior’s palm, the cool stone of a temple wall, the sting of salt from a cliffside wind. The world around them rearranged itself to make room for what had always been coming.

She moved toward him with a certainty that felt like destiny. He did not reach for her at first; instead he simply stood there, as if waiting for the universe to finish its breath. When he finally spoke her name, it landed like a bell in the hollow of her chest. The sound carried the weight of all the times they had called each other across lifetimes.

They did not need ceremony. The night itself was their witness: the hush of crickets, the distant hum of a town that felt very small, the way the moonlight pooled on the grass like liquid silver. Every small sensory detail — the scrape of a shoe, the rustle of fabric, the warmth of breath in the cold — became a part of the vow that was about to be born.