[Warning: Mature Content R18+]

“Fuck, you’re not what I expected.” The words cut clean through my mind, link, sudden, and unmistakable, and I froze.

The man standing before me was more than wreckage washed ashore. Caelan was the outcast, born a Witch-Fae, and they termed him the wild one. Born of both courts and claimed by neither, he was a creature of untamed magic and impossible legend. 

And now, he stood before me at the edge of the Pearl Castle, salt water curling around his ankles, cloak clinging to his frame like shadows and silk.  “Up close, you’re even more handsome, Morkai,” he said aloud, voice rough but laced with a mocking edge, and he grinned like someone who’d just won a very long game.

My pulse kicked hard beneath my ribs and realized that I’d known him before this moment. Not his face, not his form but his voice and his presence. That voice had pierced my thoughts through the link days ago, waking something I thought long dead.

“You’re Caelen,” I said quietly, reverently.

He winked and stepped closer, unconcerned by the power thrumming between us. “Didn’t think you’d recognize me so fast, your Majesty.”

“Your voice is imprinted in my mind,” I replied, the truth spilling out before I could stop it.
Caelen tilted his head slightly, the wet strands of his dark hair catching in the breeze. His green eyes, bright and impossibly deep, caught mine and held them. “Then I suppose meeting you here was inevitable,” he said, softer now.

I stepped forward. I heard the way his breath hitched, and I knew then he was as affected by me as I was by him. “You are truly a sight to behold. Is this magic or witchery?” I murmured, and a flicker passed through his expression, like he’d been waiting for those words.

“Oh,” he said, voice dipping low as he moved closer, close enough for our magic to stir the air between us, and he raised his chin, stared up into my eyes, and spoke with quiet fire, “What about you, your Majesty?” He paused. “You’re not just handsome, you're the kind of beautiful that unsettles every part of my body, since the first time I set my eyes on you."

My breath caught, and for the first time in a century, the sea went silent around me.



***************************************************************************************

Beneath the waves, destiny awakens. On the shore, something ancient stirs.

Morkai Vaelan, the Abyssal Sovereign, was once a prince, now a legend, drowned in time. Bound to the sea by a forgotten curse, he reigns in solitude from his spectral Pearl Castle, feared by sailors and forsaken by the gods. His heart, like the ocean, hides storms no one dares to weather.

Caelen Thorne is a Witch-Fae with no home to call his own. Too wild for witches and too human for Fae, he is haunted by a prophecy that marks him as both a harbinger and a key. His magic is dangerous. His past, a mystery. And his future? Drenched in blood and saltwater.

When a rupture in the ocean's heart threatens to destroy both land and sea, Morkai and Caelen are bound by a force older than time and drawn into a love that defies every law of gods and men. But as desire deepens and secrets surface, they must face the greatest danger of all: each other.

Dark, romantic, and sweeping as the tide, The Drowned Prince and the Outcast is a tale of ancient magic, forbidden love, and the storm that comes when two broken souls refuse to let go.

"Before the first kingdom rose, Ysara Thorne walked the twilight between worlds. Her breath was the wind in the heather, her shadow the silence beneath the moon."


The wind shifted, and I felt it first in the roots of my magic, an ancient tug, a tremble of the wards I had anchored across Drevina's coastal barrier decades ago. I froze where I stood in the courtyard of my cottage, tea untouched in my hand, the early morning sun blinding and irrelevant now. My breath caught. The wards were flickering, thinning, and something was pushing from the other side.


"No," I whispered, heart suddenly thudding. "No fucking way."


Chapter 36 - THE DAMN WITCH