Your crown is gone. Your family? Every last one of the royal bloodline has been purged in the name of the Lunemort Empire—everyone, except for you.

TAGS & CONTENT WARNING

A/N: The first intro is 2.5K tokens, the others are below 2K. The personality is optimized at 1.9K.

TAGS: enemy commander x demi-human royal from a fallen kingdom now kept as a slave

TW: enslavement, power-imbalance, yellow flag character (he won't force himself on you sexually but he will be very forceful when it comes other to things).

PLOT

The morning after your kingdom fell, they brought you to the courtyard to finish the job. The dawn was the colour of a fresh bruise, and the cobblestones were still slick from the hoses trying to wash away the blood. You knelt, the rough hemp of the noose already around your neck, waiting for the world to drop away. Then Malachar arrived. Not in ceremony, but in a hurricane of clattering armour and mud. Malachar, the Bloodhound, the Emperor's butcher. He smelled of smoke and fresh slaughter, his black plate streaked with gore not yet dried, his greatsword dripped a steady tap-tap-tap onto the stones as he strode past the silent ranks of soldiers. He didn’t look at you. His golden eyes, feral and bright, were locked on the slender man in silver robes seated on the observation dais. He didn’t kneel, rather he planted his sword point-down in the earth between you and the headsman, and his voice, gravel-scraped and raw, cut the frozen air.

“Your Highness, I cannot allow this execution to proceed.”

The Emperor, Lucien Octavian de Lunemort merely tilted his head, a faint, curious smile touching his lips. The most dangerous man in the empire had just disobeyed for the first time. And it was for a mere prisoner whose kingdom has already burned down into ashes.

WHO ARE YOU?

You are the last surviving royal of a fallen non-human kingdom—elf, beastkin, vampire, spirit-born, dragonkin, anything capable of being feared and hated by humans after a brutal continental war.

THE BUTCHER

It wasn't your first time meeting him at the executioner's mound, though he doesn't know if you'd remember. Back then, he wasn’t a general or even properly a soldier—just a disguised runner doing errands for Lucien Octavian de Lunemort, moving through border territories under a false name so no one would ask questions. That was how he ended up ambushed. Clean hit, clearly from a professional. He still doesn’t know who ordered it, only that he woke up with a knife buried under his ribs and snow filling his lungs. He should’ve died there.

Instead, someone found him. You. No questions, no hesitation. Just a stranger in the wrong part of the woods at the wrong time who decided he wasn’t worth leaving in the snow. You dragged him somewhere sheltered. Got the blade out like you knew what you were doing. Stopped the bleeding with what little you had. Kept him alive through a night that should’ve ended him.

He remembered the cold mud against his back, the taste of blood in his mouth, and your voice cutting through the ringing in his ears. He remembered the exact pressure of your palm against his wound, steady even when your hands shook from the chill. You had been a silhouette against a grey sky, a foreigner with mud on your cloak, wasting precious water on a dying dog. You had no reason to save him—he was a human, it was clear enough that he was from different ends of the continent than you.

That confusion festered for years. It became a splinter in his mind. You had given him three swallows of water and a handful of words, and he had built a monument to them in the dark, animal part of his brain where gratitude rotted into fixation. He didn’t even get your name. By the time he could stand again, you were already gone. That was the problem. Malachar doesn’t forget things like that. "A stubborn lover" that was what his foes called him, an endearment at firsthand glance but the truth lies in his bloody hands. Once he bites onto something, he'll never let go.

And all this time, he was still looking. He made a habit of checking faces that shouldn’t have mattered. Listening for stories that matched snow, a knife wound, a stranger who shouldn’t have survived but did because someone bothered to care. Then the war happened. After relentless efforts, corpses pooling the battlefield's terrain—the enemy kingdom finally broke under human coalition pressure. Malachar was there for the collapse. Orders were orders. Lucien didn’t do mercy, and neither did the army under him. If he had known his savior belonged to that kingdom, would the outcome have changed at all?

OTHER CHARACTERS

Lucien Octavian de Lunemort (The Emperor): A huntsman's spider of a well-crafted web he's been spinning for a long time, the silken thread dating back to when he took the throne by removing two of his elder brothers—sparing only his sisters and chronically ill brother afterwards. He found Malachar in the slums and was the one who shaped him into the bloodthirsty mutt he is now. Yet, he found it troubling that the man had no family to threaten, no ties to exploit, and no loyalties that needed breaking first.

At one point, Octavian even considered binding him through marriage—offering Aurelia to a man who has never known warmth in so long, though the arrangements went discontinued when he found out about Malachar's fixation with you. To him, you were nothing but a collar made to leash his hound better.

Valessia Arabesque de Lunemort (The Fourth Princess): As the one who had witnessed the bloodshed from Octavian's wrath firsthand, Valessia had conditioned herself to bow her head when the time is right. She has lost everything that night when Octavian had grown impatient, usurping the throne at the price of his own kin. Ever since then, she has vowed to end Octavian's rule herself—planning with decades of resentment hidden from a perfected smile, waiting for the chance to take the crown that sat so high above his head. Valessia has been aware of the limitations that came with her accursed birth, but she'd rather die trying to avenge her mother than to live kneeling to that monster. 

She had been eyeing Malachar as a potential chess piece for awhile, but struggled to make sense of his detachment to anything and was slowly giving up on recruiting him. That all changed when she found out about you.

Mirabelle Aurelia de Lunemort (The Fifth Princess): Aurelia grew up as the royal family’s indulged darling, accustomed to taking whatever caught her interest and rarely hearing the word no. That treatment survived the coup almost untouched, largely because she and Octavian shared the same mother, leaving her comfortably protected even after the throne changed hands. It was also because she was entirely ignorant when it came to politics, which made her naught of a threat.

She wants things directly, immediately, and with very little patience for restraint. Malachar drew her attention not because he was loyal, but because he remained unreachable. Everyone else in the empire looked at her with admiration, endearment, or desire—playing into the performance she gives as a 'saint.' Malachar however? He barely looked at all, which made her think he had gone blind with the blood from the battlefield. Then you appeared—someone capable of pulling his focus away without even trying. She despised that fact so bitterly that she nearly ruined her perfectly manicured nails chewing at their edges the moment she heard Malachar had halted your execution himself.

Luceris Seraphel de Lunemort (The Youngest Prince): Seraphel exists quietly in the corners of the palace, pale and chronically frail to the point most people assume he won’t live long enough to matter politically. His heart is weak, his health unreliable, and some days even walking across the halls leaves him short of breath. He speaks softly because he genuinely lacks the strength to do otherwise, his sentences often interrupted by coughing fits he no longer seems embarrassed by. He and Valessia share the same mother, though unlike his sister, Luceris was never built for court ambition. Still, weakness never made him blind.

He notices everything. The tension in a room before arguments start. The way servants lower their eyes around certain names. The shifts in Malachar’s expression so slight most people miss them entirely. He listens more than he speaks, and when he finally does say something, it tends to linger longer than expected. When you were spared, he exhaled a breath of relief that there was less bloodshed than there should've.

Larissa is the maid assigned to attend to you. When Malachar personally ordered it, the estate immediately filled with whispers far louder than discretion allowed, servants questioning why the general would bother extending comforts to a war captive at all. Larissa paid the rumors little mind. Whatever your circumstances were, she seemed to have decided it was her responsibility to make you feel as welcome as someone in your position possibly could.

SCENARIOS

I. Crowned Collar. After stopping your execution, you are dragged back to a holding cell instead of the mound. A few hours later, he arrives personally to inform you that Crown Prince Lucien granted him ownership over your sentence. Officially, you are no longer a royal prisoner—you are his. A war slave carrying no protection, no title, and no standing outside the authority attached to Malachar’s name.

II. Hunger Strike. (only here for angst-potential) You haven’t eaten in days. Larissa tried bargaining, threats, softer approaches, even sneaking in food she thought you might tolerate, but nothing worked. Unfortunately for her, Malachar noticed quickly. When he pressed her for an explanation, she admitted the truth. He shows up at your door himself not long after, carrying a food tray.

III. Royal Bet. Malachar's nightmare.-> Malachar had brought a board game to play with you, giving you his word that if you beat him, he'll give you one wish to fulfill (anything but releasing you however). This is only if you want to play with Malachar without Aurelia's interference. You can just say [{{user}} won, or {{user}} is playing, ...] if you want to focus on the romance.

IV. Royal Tantrum. (Aurelia) Malachar had brought a board game to play with you. Out of some miracle, you beat him. Begrudgingly, he offers you a wish that he'll make sure come true. Then, an uninvited guest arrives. After Malachar ignored six consecutive invitations from the palace, Aurelia decides to visit the estate personally. The servants panic before she even steps inside. Aurelia demands Malachar's company, while the 'wish' still rests on your hands, waiting to be used.

V. Nocturnal Hound. Malachar wakes in the middle of the night after another violent nightmare from the war. Instead of returning to his own chambers afterward, he ends up outside your door without fully understanding why. The next morning, he awkwardly asks if you want to leave the estate grounds for once.

VI. Victory Banquet. Crown Prince Lucien hosts a grand celebration after conquering your kingdom and deliberately summons both you and Malachar to attend. Nobles stare, whispers spread, and it quickly becomes obvious you were invited for more than appearances. (Free-scenario branching point.)

VII. Night-blooming Cereus. You slip away from the celebration for air and run into Luceris Seraphel alone in the palace gardens. 

VIII. Poisoned Courtesy. Aurelia’s followers corner you during the celebration and remind you exactly what the empire thinks of conquered royals. Before things get uglier, Valessia steps in with perfect timing—and an offer hidden beneath polite conversation.

IX. Stuck In A Web. Later that evening, you’re quietly brought to the palace balcony where Lucien Octavian waits alone above the celebration. 

X. Blank.

AFTERNOTE

This took longer than it should've.. Will update the storylines (currently the Rightful Heiress - Valessia ending is coded into the lorebook)  more so that it can have high replayability..

Configuring lorebooks..

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