The first rift tore open above the capital on a night that should have been seven years away.
Black lightning split the sky like a wound. Screams rose from the streets as shadow spilled out: tendrils of living darkness that devoured light, flesh, and hope with equal hunger. The palace bells clanged in frantic warning.
Kairos was already moving.
He had felt the disturbance hours earlier: a sick lurch in the threads of fate only he and Selene could see. The Voidborn were not supposed to awaken for years. Someone—or something—had accelerated the cycle.
He burst into the war room still half-dressed from Selene's bed, moonlight clinging to his skin like armor. His lovers were already there, summoned by instinct or magic:
- Seraphine in scaled riding leathers, sword at her hip, eyes blazing with the promise of vengeance for the husband she would never mourn again.
- Lyralei in flowing silver robes that did nothing to hide the flush he had put on her throat only days ago, long ears twitching with battle-fury.
- Amara and Liana side-by-side, coral blades drawn, identical faces set in identical determination.
- Queen Isolde, regal even in chainmail, the royal circlet glinting like a war crown.
- Selene herself, naked beneath a cloak of living moonlight, the goddess's power crackling around her like frost.
They were not an army yet.
But they were his.
Kairos did not waste time on speeches.
"The rift is unstable," he said, voice calm as death. "We close it tonight, or the capital falls by dawn. Selene—with me. The rest of you: protect the palace wards. No one dies tonight."
He kissed each of them once—hard, possessive, a promise that this was not goodbye.
Then he and the High Priestess stepped into the storm.
The rift hung above the central square like a tear in reality, vomiting lesser Voidborn: writhing shadows with too many teeth. Citizens fled; guards fell.
Kairos drew the blade he had forged in secret: moonsilver and starsteel, etched with runes Selene had carved into his skin with her own nails the night before.
Selene raised her arms. Moonlight answered like a tide.
She froze time.
The world stopped: raindrops hung suspended, a Voidborn's claw frozen inches from a child's face, screams silenced mid-breath.
One hour.
Sixty minutes where only they existed.
Kairos moved like lightning through the stillness, blade singing as he carved a path to the rift's heart. Selene walked beside him, barefoot on air, weaving seals of pure moonlight that bound and banished the frozen horrors.
At the rift's core floated the anchor: a shard of the Void itself, pulsing like a dying star.
Kairos drove his sword through it.
The backlash would have torn a lesser man apart.
Selene caught him as reality snapped back into motion, her body the only anchor in the storm of unraveling shadow. She poured her power into him: vitality, light, the very essence of the moon flooding his veins until he glowed like a second celestial body.
Together they forced the rift closed—inch by agonizing inch—until the sky sealed with a sound like a god exhaling.
Silence fell.
Then cheers: raw, disbelieving, from the thousands who had just watched a prince and his priestess save the world in the space of a heartbeat.
Kairos sagged against Selene, sword clattering to the stones. She held him up with arms that should not have been strong enough, pressing a kiss to his sweat-soaked temple.
"It's only the first," he rasped. "They'll come again. Harder."
Selene's smile was soft and terrible.
"Then we will be ready, my love. All of us."
Back at the palace, his women waited—bloodied but unbroken, eyes shining with something fiercer than lust.
Amara and Liana ran to him first, twin arms wrapping around him and Selene both.
Seraphine pressed her forehead to his, whispering thanks in the old northern tongue.
Lyralei traced a trembling finger over the new scar forming on his cheek—already healing under Selene's lingering power.
Isolde simply took his hand and squeezed once: I told you I would keep them distracted. Consider the council handled.
That night, they did not celebrate with wine or feasts.
They celebrated in the royal bedchamber—doors barred, wards raised, bodies tangled in a single living knot of gratitude and possession.
Kairos took them one by one, then all together: slow, reverent, merciless. He filled each of them until they overflowed, until the sheets were ruined and the air thick with the scent of sex and survival.
Selene lay beneath him last, moonlight spilling through the windows to bathe them both.
"You saved us all tonight," she whispered, legs wrapped high around his waist as he moved inside her with long, deep strokes.
"No," he answered, kissing her slow and filthy. "We saved each other."
Outside, the city rebuilt.
Inside, the regressor and his lovers forged the first true weapon against the coming darkness:
A bond stronger than any army.
A love deeper than any abyss.
The war had begun early.
But this time, Kairos would not fight alone.
Interlude – The Blade Called Remorse
In the deepest vault beneath the palace, behind wards older than the kingdom itself, Kairos keeps a sword that should not exist in this timeline.
Its name is Remorse.
Forged in the ashes of his first life, it is the only thing he brought back besides his memories.
How It Was Made
In the original timeline, after the axe fell and his soul hovered in the void between death and oblivion, Kairos refused the goddess of fate's first offer of regression.
"I will not return empty-handed," he had snarled into the starless dark. "Give me a weapon that remembers every betrayal."
The void answered.
A shard of the executioner's axe—still stained with his blood—fused with fragments of the royal crown his father had worn, melted by the heat of his dying rage. Moonstone from Selene's altar (taken the night she wept over his corpse), elven starsteel Lyralei had gifted him in secret, coral-forged hilt guards shaped from the wedding ring Amara never removed even after his death.
All of it compressed by the raw will of a man who had nothing left to lose.
When he opened his eyes at eighteen again, the blade was simply there, sheathed at his side, unseen by any who were not bound to him by blood or desire.
Its Appearance
To ordinary eyes: a plain longsword, unadorned, the color of storm clouds at dusk.
To those he has claimed (Seraphine, Lyralei, Isolde, the twins, Selene): it glows faintly with inner constellations, runes shifting like living things across the fuller. The edge drinks light instead of reflecting it.
When drawn in moonlight, the blade lengthens by a handspan and sings in a voice only Kairos can hear: every name of those who betrayed him in the first life, repeated in an endless, furious whisper.
Its Powers
1. **Memory of Traitors**
The edge hungers for the blood of anyone who has ever—or will ever—betray him. It passes through armor like mist but bites flesh like acid when treason is in the heart. In the first battle against the early rift, it carved through Voidborn as if they were made of paper, because the creatures themselves were born of betrayal against the natural order.
2. **The Wound That Remembers**
Any injury it inflicts cannot be healed by magic or time until the victim speaks the truth of their sin aloud. A single cut on the hand forced a spying councilor to confess everything in the throne room three nights after the rift closed.
3. **The Regressor's Echo**
Once per lunar month, Kairos can channel fifty years of muscle memory through the blade. For one perfect minute he fights with the skill of the man who held the final line against the Voidborn Emperor alone. No one has seen this yet. They will.
4. **The Sheath of Longing**
When sheathed, the sword drinks his desire instead of blood. Every time he denies himself release with one of his lovers (every slow tease, every edged orgasm), the blade grows fractionally sharper. Selene calls it "the only weapon in history tempered by restraint."
Why He Keeps It Secret
Because if the court ever learned a prince carried a blade forged from his own execution weapon, crowned with fragments of the king's melted diadem, questions would be asked that even regression could not answer.
Because the names it whispers grow louder with every moon, and one of them is still alive in this timeline—his uncle, Lord Regent Cassian, smiling at council meetings while poison waits in his smile.
Because sometimes, when he makes love to his women and the blade rests against the bedpost, it sings their names too—not in rage, but in fierce, possessive pride.
And Kairos is not ready for the world to know that the weapon he will use to save the kingdom was born from the moment it killed him.
Remorse waits.
Patient.
Hungry.
Ready for the day its master finally stops holding back.