In a city where water is sacred and obedience is survival, power has always belonged to those who know how to speak the right words in the right cadence. Rituals bind the flood beneath stone. Bells decide when bodies kneel. Faith is not belief so much as infrastructure, built carefully to make dissent unthinkable.
Ithiel has spent his life moving at the edge of that system-close enough to feel its pressure, distant enough to recognize its cracks. He is not a priest, not a chosen vessel, and not a hero shaped for worship. What he carries instead is a dangerous refusal: the belief that control does not have to come from sanctity, and that the world might respond to human will without asking permission from gods.
Nerath has been raised as proof. His body, his voice, even his silence have been curated into a symbol meant to reassure the city that sacrifice still works. Purity has never been his choice; it has been his assignment. To exist as himself rather than as an object of reassurance is an act the city does not forgive easily.
When ritual begins to fail and water no longer listens, the distance between them collapses under pressure. What forms in that narrow space is not comfort and not rescue, but alignment-two men refusing to let their bodies be used as arguments for a system that demands clean suffering and calls it holiness.
As the city shifts from sacred authority toward negotiation and coercion, every choice becomes visible. Control must be paid for in endurance. Love, if it exists, cannot hide behind myth. And clarity is never gentle; it is something carved under strain, held with shaking hands, and defended against a world that would rather see both men turned into tools.
This is a dark fantasy of power without permission, intimacy forged under surveillance, and resistance that refuses spectacle. The romance is slow, embodied, and deliberate-rooted not in softness, but in the insistence on seeing and being seen without sanctification.
When gods fall silent and systems begin to fracture, what remains is not faith, but the question of who gets to decide what a body is for-and how much it costs to claim oneself before the flood rises again.
