The summons came sealed in silver wax, the crescent moon of the Temple of Selene pressed deep into the parchment.
High Priestess Selene Aveline requested the prince's presence at the midnight rite of the new moon—an honor reserved only for kings and those the goddess herself had marked.
Kairos had never been invited in his first life.
He went alone, cloaked in shadow, riding through the sleeping city to the white-marble temple on the cliffs above the sea. The air was thick with salt and night-blooming cereus; waves crashed far below like distant applause.
Selene waited for him at the heart of the inner sanctum—an open circular chamber beneath a dome of living crystal that turned moonlight into liquid silver.
She was forty-one, ageless in the way only the goddess's chosen ever were: alabaster skin glowing faintly, hair a river of starlight down to her waist, body draped in nothing but gossamer chains of moon-silver that caught and reflected every beam of light. Full, heavy breasts rose and fell with each slow breath; the chains dipped low across her hips, framing the bare, glistening seam between her thighs.
In his first life, she had been distant, serene, untouchable. Rumors said she had taken no lover since her anointing at twenty. That the goddess demanded celibacy.
Kairos now knew the truth: the goddess demanded *devotion*, not denial.
Selene's pale eyes—almost colorless in the moonlight—met his without fear.
"You returned," she said simply. "I felt the threads of fate snap and reweave the night you opened your eyes again."
She stepped forward, chains chiming softly, and laid a cool palm over his heart.
"I have waited fifty years for the man who would come back to claim what he was too noble to take the first time."
Kairos's breath caught.
Slowly, reverently, he sank to one knee—not in submission, but in worship.
Selene's fingers threaded through his hair.
"Rise, my regressor. Tonight the goddess watches, but I am the one who burns."
She led him to the central altar—a low, wide slab of moonstone bathed in silver light. With deliberate grace she unclasped the chains, letting them pool at her feet like liquid starlight.
Naked, she was breathtaking: lush curves softened by years of meditation and ritual dance, breasts full and heavy with dark rose nipples already drawn tight, the faint shimmer of sacred oils making her skin gleam.
Kairos undressed without hurry, letting her look her fill. When his cock sprang free, hard and aching, Selene's breath hitched—a small, human sound from a woman who had forgotten she was allowed to want.
He lifted her onto the altar, spreading her thighs wide. The moonlight painted her pussy in silver—swollen, slick, framed by the softest down of pale curls.
He started with his mouth.
Slow, worshipful licks from entrance to clit, savoring the taste of moonlight and woman. Selene's hands fisted in his hair, hips rolling to meet his tongue as he spelled devotion against her folds. When he sealed his lips around her clit and sucked gently, she came with a sound like breaking crystal—back arching off the stone, thighs trembling around his head, a gush of slick coating his chin.
He didn't stop.
He kept licking softly through the aftershocks, sliding two fingers inside her, curling slow and steady until she was sobbing his name—actual tears of overwhelmed pleasure sliding down her temples into her hair.
Only when she was limp and gasping did he rise, notch himself at her entrance, and push in—inch by agonizing inch—watching her face the entire time.
Selene's eyes flew open, pale and wide, lips parted on a silent cry as he filled her completely.
"Move," she finally whispered, voice cracked. "Please, Kairos… move."
He did—long, deep strokes that dragged over every sensitive place inside her, the moonstone warm beneath them, the goddess herself seeming to pulse in time with their rhythm.
Selene wrapped her legs high around his waist, heels digging into his back, urging him deeper. Her breasts bounced with every thrust; he bent to catch one nipple between his teeth and tugged gently.
She came again—harder, inner walls milking him in rhythmic waves that nearly undid him.
He pulled out at the last second, flipped her onto her stomach over the altar, and entered her from behind—slow, possessive, one hand tangled in her starlight hair, the other gripping her hip.
"Mine," he growled against her ear, pace building until the slap of flesh echoed through the sanctum like sacred drums.
"Yours," she sobbed, pushing back to meet every thrust. "Always yours—take me, mark me, breed me under her gaze—"
The words snapped the last of his control.
He drove deep and came—hot, endless pulses flooding her womb, spilling out around him as she climaxed again, body shaking apart beneath him.
They collapsed together on the moonstone, his weight a blanket over her back, still joined, moonlight bathing their joined bodies in silver.
After a long, long time, Selene turned her head and kissed him—soft, reverent.
"The goddess accepts your offering," she murmured against his lips, clenching deliberately around his slowly softening cock. "And so do I. Every new moon. Every full moon. Whenever you have need."
Kairos kissed her slow and deep, already stirring inside her again.
"Then prepare the altar, my priestess," he whispered. "Because I have fifty years of devotion to make up for."
Above them, the crystal dome shimmered brighter, as though the moon herself smiled.
Selene Aveline was born under a blood moon in the year 1127 of the Selene Calendar, the night the previous High Priestess died in childbirth and the goddess herself is said to have wept tears of liquid starlight onto the temple steps.
The midwives found the infant clutching a shard of moonstone in one tiny fist, her eyes already the colorless silver of winter dawn. The oracle declared her the Living Vessel: a soul bound to Selene the Moon Goddess across multiple incarnations, destined to shepherd the world through its darkest nights.
Her Powers
The Moon's Gifts are not magic in the way mortals understand it. They are *reflections*: Selene is a mirror for the goddess's will.
1. **Lunar Sight**
She can see every thread of fate that has ever touched moonlight. In the original timeline, this is how she knew Kairos had returned the instant his soul slammed back into his eighteen-year-old body. She felt the thread snap, reverse, and reweave itself into a new pattern.
2. **Tide of Vitality**
Moonlight flows through her veins instead of blood when the moon is waxing. Wounds close beneath her touch, exhaustion fades, and lovers who spill inside her are restored as if they had slept for days. (This is why the temple acolytes whisper that bedding the High Priestess is "drinking from the goddess herself.")
3. **The Stillness**
Once per lunar cycle, she can freeze time in a single room for exactly one hour. No one ages, no heart beats, no sound escapes. Only she and the one she chooses may move. In the first life she used it only for meditation. In this life… Kairos has already tasted what an hour of frozen time can do when a woman has waited fifty years to be devoured.
4. **The Binding Oath**
Any promise spoken beneath true moonlight and sealed with her kiss becomes unbreakable. Betrayal causes agony that feels like drowning in liquid silver. This is why empires have knelt to the Temple for a thousand years.
Her Backstory – Three Lifetimes of Waiting
**First Incarnation (ages 0–27)**
Born mortal, chosen at seven, raised in isolation. She fell in love with a knight who died shielding her from an assassin's blade. When she tried to follow him into death, the goddess refused her soul passage and bound her to the temple "until the world no longer needed its mirror."
**Second Incarnation (ages 27–41 in current body)**
Reborn into the same body at twenty (the goddess's mercy and curse), she served as High Priestess with perfect celibacy for fourteen years, believing desire would weaken the Vessel.
Then came the prince.
In the original timeline, Kairos visited the temple only twice: once to request a blessing before his final campaign, once to die on the execution block beneath a moon she herself had eclipsed in grief.
She had stood on the temple balcony that night, veiled in black, and watched the axe fall. In that moment the goddess spoke directly into her mind for the first time in three centuries:
"He will return. And when he does, you will not deny him again."
Selene spent the next fifty years preparing.
She trained her body with sacred dances that kept her skin soft and her core strong. She studied every text on pleasure ever written in the elven, dwarven, and human tongues. She fasted on nights of the full moon until ecstasy and hunger blurred together, teaching herself to come from moonlight alone—so that when he finally came back, she could withstand whatever he chose to give her.
She aged not one day.
Every new moon she stood naked on the altar and whispered the same prayer:
"Let him be ravenous.
Let him be cruel with kindness.
Let him ruin me for any other god."
When Kairos finally stepped into her sanctum in this new life—eighteen again, eyes ancient, hunger burning—she felt the goddess herself sigh in relief.
Selene Aveline, the Living Vessel of the Moon, had waited three lifetimes for a man who would not kneel to her goddess.
She wanted the one who would make her kneel to him.
And under the new moon, she finally did.