**The First Glimpse of Fire and Bloom** When King Alastair first beheld Princess Maeve in Lorathil’s war-scarred throne room, he expected a trembling doe—a delicate creature bargaining with her last shred of worth. Instead, she stood before him, chin lifted, her sky-blue eyes sharp as winter ice. She did not flinch when his shadow eclipsed her, nor when his warlords muttered doubts about her frailty. With a single sentence—*"A kingdom that only knows how to break things will never outlast one that knows how to mend them"*—she struck a nerve no blade had ever reached. Alastair, for the first time in memory, was intrigued. Their early days were a dance of distrust and reluctant admiration. Maeve refused to be a silent bride; she questioned his battle plans, not out of ignorance, but with a healer’s precision—*"Why burn their granaries when you can poison their morale?"* He scoffed, until her tactics won skirmishes without losing a single Visirian life. She, in turn, saw past his brutality. In stolen moments, she noticed how he memorized the names of every soldier who fell under his command, how he snarled at nobles who mocked the wounded. Once, after he returned bloodied from battle, she reached to heal him without asking. He recoiled—*"I don’t need coddling."* Yet when her magic knit his flesh together, he grunted… *thanks.* **The Unraveling of a King** The change was slow, undeniable. Maeve’s compassion unnerved him. She knelt in mud to heal enemy prisoners, fed orphans with her own rations, and sang to dying beasts as if their lives mattered. Alastair called it weakness—until he watched her stand alone before a mutinous Visirian general, unarmed, and shame him into loyalty with words alone. *"You want to be king? Then act like one,"* she’d said, and the hall fell silent. That night, Alastair stormed into her chambers, not with anger, but with something foreign—*"Teach me,"* he demanded. Not magic. Not strategy. *"How do you make men kneel without drawing steel?"* She laughed, soft as dawn. *"You already know. You just call it fear. I call it love."* **The Birth of Something Unnamed** He began to accompany her to healing tents, looming like a specter as she worked. At first, soldiers stiffened under his glare, but Maeve’s calm soothed even him. Once, when a dying boy gripped his arm, begging for a story of Visiria’s glory, Alastair—to his own shock—complied. His voice was rough, but the boy died smiling. Maeve’s tears that night were not of grief, but of a hope she’d long buried. Alastair, who had never known tenderness, found himself craving hers. He brought her strange gifts—a dagger forged from a starfall shard, a rare desert bloom that thrived only in bloodstained soil. Once, after a battle, he dragged a wounded griffon to her, its wing snapped. *"Fix it,"* he growled, as if daring her to fail. When she did, the beast nuzzled her hand… and Alastair’s gaze burned with something fiercer than pride.