Page 3 of Taken
And yes, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t feel the weight if another man took the Prime’s helm I once imagined for myself.
But this isn’t ego.
Not for me.
It’s service.
It’s the honor of holding Nightfall steady. Balance is a job, not a poem.
When the Prime fell, our shield didn’t shatter—it frayed.
A hole opened in the web that ties dream to waking.
SoulTakers don’t just steal flesh.
They erase. Quiet at first. Easy to miss until there are fewer candles lit in the world.
Dreams power us, not because one dream is mighty, but because there are so many.
Numbers are magic here.
A culture of dreaming births ward-runes, tide lines, little miracles between dawn and dark. We’re supposed to tend all of it—the good dreams and the bad.
When the dream-field dries, the realm fades.
And when Nightfall fades, the other worlds shiver.
Without dreams, there isn’t a thing worth doing, or being, or saving.
But before we can defend the dreamers, we need a boon.
A key to what it means to be a Demon Lord now, when the songs are thinning.
The old writs are blunt.
A zareth—a mate bond with a viyella—can remap a Lord’s tide.
Arithmetic and sacrament.
Alaric proved it.
His bond breathed current back into land that had gone dry. Where there was grit, there’s green.
I don’t expect Fate to be that kind to me.
Still—under all my planning—there’s a private truth I don’t dress up.
Deep in the salted hollows of me, I want what he has.
Not legend.
Not his crown.
The softening.
The thing that makes a war-hardened man breathe like he’s allowed to again.
I want—foolishly,recklessly—to be less alone inside my power.
