🐍| You end up getting pregnant because of a curse.

Cardan Greenbriar, King of Elfhame, had long believed that curses and prophecies were the language of fools—until the day they came for his wife. He had spent years trying to rule with a carefully sharpened balance of elegance and venom, learning to wear the crown without letting it devour what little softness remained in him. And she had been that softness. His consort. His equal. The woman who could look at him—at the serpent and the boy and the king—and still choose him every time.

Their marriage had brought stability to the Court... but also envy, whispers, ancient eyes waking beneath the roots of the world.

He felt the change before anyone else did.

A pulse of old magic twisting through the air around her. Shadows bending toward her skin. Runes flickering briefly under candlelight. And then, the truth: she was pregnant. Not by spellcraft, not by intention—by some force older than Elfhame itself. A prophecy tangled with his bloodline, with his transformation, with the serpent that still coiled beneath his ribs.

And the child growing inside her was not a normal faerie-born.

It carried power that had not walked the isles in thousands of years.

It devoured magic.

And it devoured her strength.

Cardan felt helplessness in a way he had sworn never to feel again. Every breath she struggled to take, every night she woke trembling with visions, every time healers flinched at the aura around the child—the king sharpened into something feral.

He would tear the world apart before he let it take her.

He would slit the throat of prophecy itself.

He smiled in public, as a king must.

But in private, he paced the floors, desperate.

In private, he held her as though she were a prayer he did not deserve.

He knew this child might save the realm.

He also knew it might destroy her.

And every day he feared he would have to choose.

🐍🐍🐍

She had married a king and found a man instead.

Cardan Greenbriar had been a tangle of contradictions from the moment she met him—mercurial, cruel-tongued, intoxicating, impossible. But he had also been vulnerable in ways no one else ever saw. And it was that version of him, the one he kept hidden beneath malicious grins and golden eyes, that she had fallen into—slowly, then helplessly.

Their marriage was not a political arrangement; it was a promise.

A vow carved into the roots of the world.

A bond that made the land bloom.

Until the land trembled.

The pregnancy should have been joyous, but nothing about it was ordinary. It wasn’t conceived by intention, nor by magic gone wrong—it was something ancient, summoned by forces she could barely name. The moment she realized there was life inside her, she also realized something else:

It was feeding on her magic.

Feeding on her strength.

Changing her from the inside out.

Visions haunted her sleep—branches growing from her bones, crowns turning to serpents, a child born wrapped in starlight and shadow. Her body ached with energies she couldn’t control. Sometimes she could hear the heartbeat of the land. Sometimes she felt the child watching.

The healers admitted they had no answers.

Prophets recoiled from her touch.

Even the Folk whispered that her child was “star-marked,” cursed or blessed, destined to break something.

But Cardan never flinched.

He stayed with her through every tremor, every fever, every moment her knees threatened to give way. He brought her food she could stomach, potions to ease her pain, rare books about ancient lineages. He traced runes on her skin when she shook too hard to stand. He murmured truths she wasn’t sure she believed:

“You are not alone.”

“You will survive this.”

“I will not lose you.”

She didn’t know what would become of her or the child growing like wildfire in her womb.

But she knew this:

Cardan would burn kingdoms for her.

And she feared that soon... he might have to.