Owned by the obsidian beast
Elara Vance is the collateral for a debt she didn’t rack up, sold by her father, Silas, a black-market gambler who stole the Dragon’s Eye relic. To settle the score, Julian Vane, the "Dead Prince of Oakhaven," claims Elara not for gold, but as a living anchor to stall the Stonework Curse. A terrifying calcification turning his flesh into literal marble. As Julian loses his physical senses one by one to the stone, Elara’s presence becomes his only tether to humanity. Her scent of Night-Blooming Cereus hits him like a physical blow, fracturing the frost on his skin and awakening a predatory hunger that has been dormant for a century.
While trapped in Julian’s gothic estate, Elara coordinates with her friend Mina, an underground data-broker who hacks the supernatural black market to track Elara’s rising auction price. Through Julian’s research and Mina’s intel, a dark truth emerges: Elara is a Seeker, a rare conduit of power Silas has been "priming" like a battery to sell to the highest supernatural bidder. The dynamic between captor and captive shatters as Julian realizes he isn't just collecting a debt,he is guarding a prize the entire underworld is coming to claim. Hostility turns into a volatile, touch-starved attraction as Julian becomes the only wall between Elara and her father’s buyers.
As Elara begins to anchor Julian, a "Shadow-Seeker" bond forms, forcing her to experience his centuries of isolation and bloodlust every time they touch. She doesn't just heal him; she begins to inherit his ruthlessness, transitioning from a victim to a predator who finds power in his terrifying devotion. Meanwhile, Julian’s court panics at his restoration, fearing a sovereign they can no longer control. His former lover, Isolde, orchestrates a lethal betrayal, baiting them with a "Heart-Stone" shard that acts as a catalyst for a violent transformation rather than a cure, while simultaneously leaking their coordinates to the brutal Fenris Pack.
Inside Oakhaven, the tension reaches a breaking point as the curse begins to take Julian’s sight, leaving him dependant on Elara’s voice and touch. When they venture into the dark woods to claim the shard, the environment amplifies Elara's raw power and Julian’s primal instincts. His self-control finally snaps under the weight of the curse and his desire; he pins her against the ancient stone, fangs at her throat, ready to consume her power to stay alive. This moment of extreme vulnerability is interrupted by a coordinated slaughter as the wolf-and-vampire alliance launches a siege on the forest.
In the heat of the ambush, Julian bites Elara, but her Seeker blood acts as a detonator rather than a sedative. The marble skin explodes outward like shrapnel, revealing the "Dragon Beast" within a primal nightmare of obsidian scales and hellfire. Julian becomes a storm of teeth and rage, annihilating the Fenris Pack to protect his anchor. Elara survives the carnage only because her power instinctively shields her from his incinerating heat, marking her as the only creature capable of standing beside him. They escape the slaughterhouse together, their souls irrevocably fused by the shared blood-rite.
The journey concludes in the Blackwood, where Elara stops running and chooses to rule. She performs the "Vow of the Obsidian Heart," binding Julian’s divinity to her own heartbeat; he is restored to a god-like state, but he can only draw his power through her command. After Julian erases Isolde and Silas’s buyers from existence with his bare hands, Oakhaven is reborn as a fortress of glass and shadow. The story ends with the "Dead Prince" and his "Seeker Queen" hosting a gala for their former enemies. Elara remains not as a prisoner of the estate, but as the wielder of the beast....his anchor, his queen, and his only master.
