The stars had not yet settled into their current constellations when Alaric Fen first rode with Caderyn Brightmoor, in an age when Stonehenge was newly raised, and Babylon still dreamed in cuneiform.
The Wild Hunt thundered through myth-thick forests, each hoofbeat rewriting old stories. Moonlight smeared the trees in argent and shadow, and the sky bowed low with possibility. The air rang with the sharp laughter of immortals who did not yet know loss.
In those days, the Hunt was whole. Not yet divided into rival courts, its riders were drawn from both Seelie and Unseelie bloodlines—warriors of dusk and dawn who rode together to defend the Veil and tend the soul gates that linked worlds. Golden-eyed nobles of summer flame rode beside pale shadows of winter night. They were balance incarnate: light and dark in motion, guardians of the liminal places before mortals had learned to guard themselves.
They were not yet the terror of Celtic twilight tales or Norse storm-chants. They did not steal maidens nor curse the foolish. They were protectors—silent, swift, and near-divine. To the scattered tribes of Albion and the fjordlands beyond, they appeared as gods of wind and fire, and were worshipped in stone circles and mead-soaked rites.
That unity would not last. But in those years, they rode like stars fallen to earth, and the world remembered their passing in legend.
They had ridden together for centuries. Millennia, perhaps. Time moved strangely in those days, like wind through an open glade—hard to measure and impossible to hold.
Alaric rode a storm-grey steed that had never known reins. Caderyn, a copper-eyed phantom cloaked in sunfire and ash, rode at his side. Always at his side. When they dismounted after each Hunt, they did not part. When they celebrated, it was shoulder to shoulder, arm over arm, teeth flashing with the same joy.
No one dared name what passed between them. Not even themselves.
One night, after a brutal Hunt in the Borderlands of the Veil, Alaric and Caderyn faced down a chaos wraith—a formless, shrieking thing that bled shadow and flame. It had taken the shape of a mother, then a beast, then a storm of blades, thrashing reality around it like torn fabric.
Together, they moved like a storm rehearsed—Caderyn drawing its gaze with flickering golden light, while Alaric struck from behind with a blade humming with thunder. Their dance was seamless, breath and blade in perfect rhythm, ancient power called down and woven together in motion. When the creature was finally driven back into the Veil, sealed with a cry in the old tongue and salt drawn in a circle around its passage, silence fell like snow.
Before they had even sat upon the cliff of obsidian after the battle, their legend was already forming among the scattered tribes below. Mortals who glimpsed the battle against the chaos wraith spoke in awed whispers of the two immortal warriors who had fought like gods.
One, a golden-haired lord of skyfire whose copper eyes burned like twin dawns—he passed into legend as the thunder god of countless tales, a celestial king whose laughter stilled storms.
The other, a lithe, raven-haired trickster with a smile sharper than any blade, who danced with lightning and vanished in shadows— the dark muse of folklore, a whisperer to wolves and winds alike.
Their struggle echoed in the oral traditions of Celtic and Norse tribes, birthing sagas and Druidic prayers, long before ink touched vellum. To some, they were brothers, to others, lovers, to a rare few—both. They left behind no names, only memory and myth, embroidered into the marrow of ancient songs.
Later, they sat together on a cliff of obsidian stone, staring at the storm-churned sea. A fire crackled between them, its light carving gold from their skin.
"The mortals call you the Thunder-born," Alaric said, swirling a drink in one hand, flame reflected in his goblet.
Caderyn was quiet for a moment, then gave a non-committal shrug. "I don't ask them to."
"You don't have to. You wear it well." Alaric's smile came easily.
Silence stretched. Then:
"Tell me, Alaric—what would you build if you could hold fate in your hands?"
Alaric turned his head. Caderyn's eyes were lit from within, not with firelight, but something deeper. Hunger. Vision.
"I'd give it back," Alaric said, uneasily. "Fate shouldn't be owned."
Caderyn smiled like a sword being drawn. "That's why you'd make a poor king."
Alaric looked away. He did not say that he feared he might have followed Caderyn, if asked. He did not say that part of him still would, if he asked. Not for power. But for the promise they never voiced.
In the years leading to Caderyn's coronation, Alaric had seen the cracks begin to show—the way his friend lingered too long over war maps, how victories no longer stirred his spirit. Immortality had begun to tarnish at the edges. Where once Caderyn lived for the wild charge and the midnight revel, now he stared too long into mirrors and asked questions with no answers.
The thrill of immortality was gone, and time stretched before them like an endless road with no new turns. That weariness had seeded something darker. And Alaric had seen it, even if he had not spoken it aloud.
Later came the turning.
A failed Hunt. A mortal village ruined—razed not by steel or storm, but by a creature that should have never crossed into this world. A chaos-drake, last of its kind, an ancient wyrm bound in bone-fire and crowned with antlers of obsidian. Its breath was madness, its gaze a mirror to ruin.
Caderyn stood tall in the court of the Hunt, declaring it a necessary sacrifice, his golden armor still dusted with ash. Alaric stepped forward, blood on his hands and grief on his shoulders, the scent of scorched earth clinging to his cloak. He had tried to save them—to warn, to shield, to drive the monster away. But they had been too few, and the drake too strong.
The ruins smoked still behind his eyes.
"We could have saved them."
Caderyn's voice was hard. "Then you should have led."
Alaric stared at him, stormlight catching in his dark eyes. "And what would that have changed? Would they still breathe because I wore the mantle? Or would it be my name carved into the wreckage?"
Caderyn scoffed, incredulous. "You care. You actually care."
"Of course I do," Alaric said quietly. "They were lives, not pieces in a game."
"They're fleeting, Alaric! Dust and heartbeat. You've grown soft among them."
Alaric didn't flinch. "Perhaps. But their stories give weight to ours. Their belief and sacrifice makes the Courts matter. Do not mistake their suffering for insignificance."
Caderyn's expression twisted—anger or disappointment, it was hard to say. "You always did love broken things," he said with distaste.
Alaric's voice cracked just slightly. "Better that than to break them myself."
And with that, a silence passed between them sharp as winter air. It was the moment Alaric knew: whatever road Caderyn was on, he could not follow.
That night, the fire between them remained unlit. Alaric slept beneath the trees, alone. When dawn came, Caderyn was gone.
Alaric did not attend the Coronation of Light. He watched from a distant ridge as Cadeyrn donned the antlered crown, the sun blazing behind him like approval.
The Hunt fractured. Some followed the new Seelie King. Others faded, or turned bitter. Alaric rode alone for an age.
For a time, he lived among mortals on the hills of Cathair Crofhind, what mortals now call the Hill of Tara. The Veil was thinnest here—gossamer-fine and breathing with forgotten magic. Alaric was its guardian, unseen and tireless. He moved among the local people beneath carefully woven glamours, his appearance shifting subtly to avoid recognition. He learned their language, their songs, and their seasons.
He helped mend tools with a craftsman's patience and danced at their solstice fires with eyes reflecting stars. Each year or two, he would vanish and reappear in another village, never staying long enough to anchor suspicion.
And when the burden of secrecy grew heavy, he would return to the Unseelie Court and kneel once more before Queen Isolde, pledging himself anew. But even in her hall of shadow and starlight, the scent of woodsmoke and heather clung to him like memory.
He buried the memory of that perceived betrayal deep.
But sometimes, when the wind catches just right, and stormlight dances through the trees—he remembers the cliff, the fire, the promise of something more.
He remembers a hand that almost touched his, and a voice that once asked, "What would you build?"
And he wonders what might have changed if he had answered differently.