Veins of Betrayal

A well-known hunter is given a task by King Varek: find the runaway Prince Talarys and bring him back to Vraefaca.

There is no ceremony in the request, no softness in its edges. Only necessity. The kingdom is weakening with every passing day-its old protections thinning, its harvests less certain, its people growing restless under the quiet pressure of something they cannot name. Whatever once held the land together is slipping, strand by strand, as if the realm itself is forgetting how to endure.

And at the center of it all, the missing prince.

Talarys has been gone for years. Not taken. Not confirmed dead. Simply absent, like a name erased mid-sentence. Whispers have followed him across borders and through taverns, each one contradicting the last. Some claim he fled willingly. Others insist he was hidden away. A few swear they have seen him in passing-always just out of reach, always gone before certainty could take shape.

King Varek does not tolerate uncertainty.

So he calls upon the hunter.

The man accepts without question. It is what he is known for: tracking what cannot be held, finding what refuses to be found. But this task is not like the others. It stretches further, pulls tighter, leads him into places where allegiance is no longer simple and every answer comes with a cost.

What begins as duty becomes pursuit. What begins as pursuit becomes complication.

And neither the hunter nor the prince yet understands the shape their meeting will eventually take-only that, somewhere along the way, the line between obligation and something far more dangerous begins to blur.