The trial was held in the grand throne room at noon, when sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows and painted the marble floor in blood-red and royal gold.
Cassian was dragged in wearing only a prisoner's shift, the wound on his cheek now a raw, pulsing brand that wept silver light. Every step made him whimper as Remorse's curse forced memory after memory to the surface.
The hall was packed: nobles, foreign ambassadors, commoners allowed in for the first time in centuries. Kairos's lovers stood at his right hand like living banners (Seraphine in northern steel, Lyralei in silver silk, the twins in matching coral armor, Isolde in queen's crimson, Selene radiant in nothing but moon-chains and authority).
Kairos himself sat on the throne.
Not the prince's seat beside it.
The king's throne.
The one his father had died in.
The one Cassian had coveted for fifty years across two lifetimes.
He wore plain black, Remorse across his knees, crownless (because crowns could be taken, but what he was building could not).
Cassian was forced to his knees at the foot of the dais.
"Speak," Kairos commanded, voice carrying without effort to the back of the hall.
And Cassian spoke.
Every murder. Every bribe. Every forged letter and poisoned cup. The names spilled out like entrails: half the high council, three dukes, the former Lord Commander of the Royal Guard. The hall grew quieter with every confession until only the sound of Cassian's ragged breathing remained.
When he finished, he was sobbing, face pressed to the cold marble.
Kairos rose.
"For high treason against the realm and the blood of Vaelor," he said, "I strip you of name, title, and life."
He did not use Remorse for the killing stroke. That would have been mercy.
Instead he nodded to Seraphine.
The Widow of Thornridge stepped forward, drew her late husband's greatsword (the one Cassian had poisoned him with), and took Cassian's head in one clean swing.
Blood pooled beneath the throne like spilled wine.
Silence.
Then Kairos turned to the hall.
"Any who shared his guilt may leave now with their lives and nothing else. Stay, and join him."
Seven lords and two ladies fled, robes flapping like startled crows.
The rest knelt.
Kairos descended the steps, Remorse sheathed, and stopped before his lovers.
He kissed each of them in turn (slow, possessive, claiming them in front of the entire kingdom).
Then he turned back to the throne, sat, and pulled Selene onto his lap first. Her moon-chains chimed as she straddled him openly, gown parting to bare her to the waist.
One by one, the others joined.
Isolde knelt at his left, mouth descending on him alongside Selene's guiding hand.
Seraphine and Lyralei took his hands and pressed them to their breasts.
Amara and Liana stood behind the throne like living statues of war and desire, blades drawn, daring anyone to object.
The hall watched in stunned silence as their prince—no, their king now—claimed his queens on the throne their enemies had tried to steal.
He took Selene first, slow and deliberate, her cries echoing off vaulted ceilings as moonlight poured through the windows to bathe them both. When he spilled inside her, the goddess's blessing flared—visible silver light that marked her as favored.
Then Isolde, then Seraphine, then Lyralei, then the twins together—until the throne was slick and the air thick with the scent of sex and power.
No one moved to stop it.
No one dared.
When it was done, Kairos rose—still hard, still crowned only by the women who surrounded him—and addressed the hall one final time.
"The old order dies here," he said, voice steady. "The new begins tonight."
He did not ask for fealty.
He took it.
And beneath the blood and the cum and the broken crown, Eldoria was reborn.
The war for the world was coming.
But first, the kingdom learned who truly ruled it now.
And they knelt willingly.
Selene's blessing is not a gift bestowed lightly. It is the Moon Goddess's own essence, funneled through the High Priestess's body like liquid silver poured into mortal veins. In the temple annals, it is called *Lunarae Infusio*—the Infusion of Eternal Tide—but among the acolytes who have felt its touch (rarely, and only in ritual), it is whispered as *the Silver Ruin*: a force that heals and heightens, binds and breaks, until the recipient is left forever changed, marked by the moon's insatiable hunger.
How It Manifests
The blessing begins with a kiss—Selene's lips cool as frost-kissed marble, her breath tasting of wintermint and starlight. As tongues entwine, the transfer ignites: a slow bloom of warmth that spreads from mouth to chest, then lower, pooling like molten silver in the belly and between the thighs.
In battle, it is vitality incarnate. Wounds knit before blood can fall; exhaustion burns away like mist under dawn. Kairos felt it during the rift closure: his vision sharpening to see the Voidborn's threads of shadow as if they were spider silk, his strikes landing with preternatural precision, every muscle singing with borrowed divinity. Soldiers who receive even a fraction (a touch to the brow, a whispered prayer) fight for hours without falter, their blades glowing faintly blue in the dark.
In intimacy, it is ecstasy weaponized.
The silver tide awakens every nerve, turning touch into fire. Skin becomes hypersensitive—nipples harden to aching peaks at the brush of silk, clits swell and throb with the lightest graze. Orgasms cascade like lunar phases: building slow through waxing pleasure, cresting in full-moon release that shatters the mind, then ebbing into waning aftershocks that leave the body trembling for more.
When spilled inside her (or her inside them, in the case of Selene's rare, forbidden rituals with her lovers), the blessing lingers. Kairos discovered this the first night: after filling her on the moonstone altar, his cock remained hard for hours, every thrust heightened, every clench of her walls sending silver sparks up his spine. His seed, infused, restores: lovers wake the next day with skin glowing, energy boundless, desires sharpened to a razor's edge. The twins, after sharing him under its influence, confessed they could still feel the moon's pull during their cycles—ovulation syncing to lunar rhythms, cravings for him (and each other) growing feral on full-moon nights.
The Cost and the Mark
It is not without price. The blessing binds. Those who receive it dream of Selene—of pale eyes watching from moonlit groves, of chains that feel like lovers' hands. Kairos dreams of her now, every night: not as a goddess, but as a woman who kneels for him, whispering *take more* as silver light spills from her core.
The mark appears after the third infusion: a faint crescent on the inner thigh or the swell of the breast, invisible to all but moonlight and those already bound. It pulses with the moon's phases—warming during waxing, aching during waning—reminding the bearer that they are no longer wholly their own.
Selene herself bears a dozen such marks, from lifetimes past. She calls them her *trophies of devotion*. Kairos intends to add his own.
For the regressor, the blessing is more: it amplifies his memories, letting him glimpse echoes of battles not yet fought, lovers not yet claimed. It is the goddess's wager on him—the silver thread that weaves his second life into something eternal.
And in the quiet hours, when the world sleeps, Selene kneels at his feet and begs him to ruin her with it again.
Because even vessels can crave to be filled.
Interlude – The Voidborn Emperor: The Hunger That Devours Worlds
The Voidborn Emperor is not a creature of flesh or fury. It is *absence*: the space where light fails, where sound drowns in silence, where souls unravel into nothing.
In the annals of forgotten lore (the ones Kairos raided from the royal vaults in his first frantic weeks of regression), it is called *Ebon'Vorath*, the Eternal Maw. Born not from gods or chaos, but from the first betrayal of creation itself: when the primordial stars refused to share their fire with the endless dark between them, the Void learned to hunger.
It has no form, yet all forms. In Kairos's first life, it manifested as a colossal silhouette against the shattered sky—ten stories tall, a humanoid void with limbs like writhing smoke, a crown of shattered constellations orbiting a "face" that was only teeth and endless night. Eyes? None. But it *saw*—piercing the soul, stripping away secrets until victims clawed at their own skin to escape the gaze that wasn't there.
Its voice is the absence of voice: a silence so profound it deafens, commands without words, turning allies against each other in mute obedience. Armies fell not to blades, but to the creeping dread that made soldiers turn their swords on their brothers, whispering *it's easier this way* into the void between thoughts.
The Emperor does not kill. It *consumes*. Flesh dissolves into shadow, souls pulled thread by thread into its core—a swirling maelstrom of devoured worlds, where the echoes of screams form the only light. Kairos saw it once, up close: during the Fall of Eldoria, it reached for him with a hand that was a thousand screaming faces, promising oblivion as ecstasy. He sealed the rift with his life, but not before it whispered his name—not in hate, but in *invitation*. *Join us. Be nothing. Be free.*
In this life, it stirs early, drawn perhaps by the silver thread of Selene's blessing or the echo of Remorse's forging. Kairos knows its weaknesses: it fears true light (not fire, but the unyielding glow of unbreakable bonds), and it cannot abide the sound of honest laughter—reminders of the creation it envies.
But its strength is endless. With every world it devours, it grows: spawning lesser Voidborn like children from nightmare, whispering temptations into the hearts of kings and lovers alike.
Kairos does not fear it.
He pities it.
Because in his second life, he has tasted what the Void can never have: the slow burn of a lover's breath on his neck, the heavy weight of breasts in his palms, the velvet clench of a woman coming undone around him.
The Emperor hungers for everything.
Kairos has learned to savor.
And when they meet, he will feed it the one thing it cannot digest: the unbreakable will of a man who died once and chose to live again—for love, for legacy, for the slow, exquisite pleasure of every dawn after.