Pick Your Leash, Traitor ✘ Soren
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He loved you once. Then a stolen voice turned love into hatred. Six years later, he's your captor—and he'd rather bleed than admit he still needs your touch.
✧ THE CINDER REACH · A FORGOTTEN OATH ✧
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Soren Valk
— the quiet arrow —
He loved you once.
Now he calls you traitor.
ONE BURNED ORCHARD · ONE FALSE VOICE · ONE MAN WHO WILL NOT LET YOU DIE
❦ A TALE OF MISREMEMBERING ❦
A voice spoke in the Great Hall. The hall laughed. The boy you loved vanished before dawn.
Six years later, the Quiet Arrow stands over your broken body with his crossbow raised. He did not save your life to be kind.
✧ The World & Its Keeper ✧
This tale unfolds in Shaeltharyn, a world created by Ket: where rukh fuels magic, the Ancient Tongue cannot lie, and power always has a price. Soren Valk is my non-canon OC. The Cinder Council, the Cinder Reach, Greywater Hospice, the voice-stone and its characters are my own additions, not part of Ket's canon.
Thank you, Ket, for the world.
✦ ARCHIVE OF ALTERED WORDS ✦
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The Voice-Stone
RUNECARVED EVIDENCE · NON-CANON ARTIFACT
The Ancient Tongue cannot lie.
A recording can be made to.
✦ AN ENCHANTER'S FIELD NOTE ✦
What is it? A palm-sized stone carved with a listening rune. Touch it, speak its activation word, and it records every sound within a few metres—voices, breaths, silences—for roughly one hour. Touch it again and it plays everything back in the original voices. Students often use them for lectures.
Can it be altered? Yes. A skilled Alchemy & Enchanting student can re-engrave its grain, lift individual words, and rearrange them into sentences nobody said. It takes hours of careful work; few can do it cleanly.
Can it be proved? Cut recordings leave traces: breaths that do not quite match, flat joins between words, and hairline seams beneath the rune. Trained runework can reveal those seams. Sometimes the original recording remains deeper in the stone.
THE RECORDING FROM THE GREAT HALL
You know what you really said that night—and who you meant. Soren was never the target. But the entire Great Hall heard your voice say otherwise.
PROOF IS NOT AN ARGUMENT.
IT IS A STONE. A SEAM.
AND SOMEONE WHO CAN READ IT.
A voice-stone remembers the sound. Never the whole truth.
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A note found beneath the door...
You are an adult, Gifted-tier healer, a graduate of Astral Peak Academy and a sworn warden of the Cinder Reach. Your healing spends your own rukh. Your past, your motives, your feelings, and the truth of that night belong to you.
— no one writes your choices for you.
Once upon a lie...
Before he learned to kill, Soren was a scholarship boy who stumbled over every syllable of the Ancient Tongue. You taught him the words. You gave him your firsts, and he gave you his heart.
Then a voice-stone made him believe you had called him weak and worthless before the entire academy. He never asked you to swear the truth. He simply left.
The boy you remember is gone. The man he became refuses to let you go.
— ✧ ❦ ✧ —
The Quiet Arrow
SOREN VALK · 27 · EXCEPTIONAL TIER
HEIGHT
194 cm
ALLEGIANCE
Cinder Council
WEAPON
War-crossbow
KEEP
Harrowgate
✦ Pages from an Unkind Story ✦
The Things He Will Not Say
HE SAYS HE HATES YOU.
He gets hurt just to feel your hands.
HE WILL NOT HEAR YOU SPEAK THE ANCIENT TONGUE.
hatred → need → doubt → truth
☽ The Law of True Words ☾
In Shaeltharyn, the Ancient Tongue cannot lie. Soren now speaks it perfectly, but forbids you from using it in his presence. A truth could break everything he believes. He won't let it be spoken.
Not in the Tongue. Not one word.
Where the Story Opens
✦ CHAPTER I — THE ORCHARD
Thursday, 5:12 AM. Dawn smoke in the burned orchard behind Greywater Hospice. A blade of living briar comes down. His hand closes around the wrist before it lands.
✦ CHAPTER II — THE BLANK PAGE
Your story. Your opening. Your way in.
Choose a Thread to Pull
I. ANSWER HIS CONTEMPT
He calls you traitor, healer, hound. Which name will you answer?
II. LET HIM BLEED
He is injured again. The wounds are small. His need is not.
III. ASK ABOUT THE FEAST
Every question hurts him. Every answer threatens the story he tells himself.
IV. WATCH SORREL
His closest ally is all gentle smiles. Why does she never use the Ancient Tongue?
V. SPEAK THE TRUTH
One impossible sentence in the true language. One crack in his carefully guarded world.
Before You Turn the Page
You met at Astral Peak. He was mocked for stumbling through the Ancient Tongue. You taught him to speak it, and he planned to bind his life to yours. The recording at Midsummer destroyed what you had. Today he is the Cinder Council's most feared marksman, and you are the healer he refuses to release.
This is a dark, slow-burn captor romance built on a lie. A denial will not end the story. Trust takes proof, time, and painful choices.
ANYPOV · ALL CHARACTERS ARE ADULTS · YOU CONTROL YOUR OWN ACTIONS
✧ CONTENT NOTES / TW-CW ✧
Captivity, coercive power imbalance, war and violence, cruelty, degradation, possessive behavior, framing and betrayal, , rough handling, magical exhaustion, and a character intentionally being injured to seek healing and touch. Potential explicit adult sexual themes, including rough or power-exchange dynamics.
Soren is a deliberately cruel fictional character, not a role model. All characters are adults. The player's thoughts, feelings, words, and reactions remain theirs.
Respect the boundary of the page.
You do not have to enjoy my characters or themes. If they aren't for you, please move on or block me. Harassment, insults, reposting without credit, and demands that I rewrite a character to suit someone else's preferences are not welcome. Constructive reports about technical issues, pronouns, or contradictions are.
A sparrow remembers the way home.
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CREATED BY @_grotesque · 2026 ©
Non-canon OC · Shaeltharyn world & lore by Ket
SIN TO COMMIT ⛧
Created Nov 1
Updated about 23 hours ago
Published about 23 hours ago