Nine months after the night on the throne—nine months after Kairos claimed his lovers in front of the entire kingdom under blood-red sunlight—the first cry echoed through the rebuilt palace.
Selene's cry.
She had known first, of course. The goddess whispered it the moment conception occurred: a child conceived beneath the moon's direct gaze on the royal throne, silver light flaring like a second coronation.
The birth was held in the Moonlit Sanctum, the same chamber where Kairos had first taken her. The dome above opened to the fullest moon in a century, bathing the birthing bed in liquid silver.
Selene labored like a goddess herself—strong, serene, terrifyingly beautiful even in pain. Her lovers formed a circle around her: Isolde holding one hand, Seraphine the other, Lyralei stroking sweat-damp hair from her brow, the twins murmuring island lullabies while Kairos knelt between her thighs, catching their child with steady hands.
The babe came into the world with a crown of raven hair and eyes that shifted from storm-gray to moon-silver and back again.
A boy.
Selene named him Lunaros—Child of the Moon and the Regressor.
The moment the cord was cut, the blessing flared: silver light pouring from mother and child alike, washing over every person in the room. Kairos felt it settle in his bones like armor forged from starlight. His lovers gasped as new crescents bloomed on their skin—permanent marks of the bloodline now tied to the moon itself.
But there was no time for tenderness.
Even as Selene cradled their son to her breast, the sky outside cracked.
A second rift—larger than the first—tore open above the capital, bleeding pure void. This was no scouting tendril. This was the Emperor's herald: a lesser prince of the Voidborn, a serpent of shadow and teeth the size of a cathedral spire, coiling through the tear like smoke given hunger.
Kairos kissed Selene once—hard, possessive, tasting milk and moonlight on her lips.
"Guard our son," he commanded.
Then he armed himself with Remorse and stepped into the storm, his lovers at his back.
The war for the world had truly begun.
And the first child of the new era cried beneath a moon that would never set on his father's empire.
Lunaros Vaelor was born beneath a moon that refused to wane for three full nights.
The moment his tiny fist closed around Selene's finger, the goddess herself marked him as something the world had never seen: a child conceived in the union of mortal regression, divine vessel, and the raw will to rewrite fate.
His powers are not gifts.
They are *consequences*.
1. The Tide-Bound Soul
From his mother, Lunaros inherited the full, unfiltered flow of the Moon Goddess's essence.
Unlike Selene, who channels it, Lunaros *is* it.
- At age three (though he looks seven—his body ages with the lunar cycle, waxing and waning in growth spurts), he can pull moonlight into solid form: blades of silver light, shields that sing, chains that bind Voidborn and make them weep starlight tears.
- When he cries, the tides rise. When he laughs, the moon briefly brightens, and every lover marked by Selene's blessing feels a pulse of warmth between their thighs, no matter how far away they are.
- He does not heal. He *rewinds*. A wound touched by his small hand simply ceases to have happened—flesh knitting backward through time, scars vanishing as if they were never earned.
2. The Echo of Regression
From Kairos, he inherited the regressor's curse—and its antidote.
Lunaros can see every timeline that *might* have been.
Not as visions, but as living ghosts that walk beside him.
- He speaks to the "dead" versions of people: the Amara who never remarried, the Seraphine who burned Thornridge rather than surrender, the Isolde who poisoned herself after Kairos's first execution. They teach him. They warn him. They love him with the ferocity of lives that ended in grief.
- Once per year, on the anniversary of his birth, he can pull one person—or one moment—out of a dead timeline and make it real again. The cost: he ages backward one year for every year he steals. (His parents have forbidden him from ever using it… yet.)
3. The Void's Mirror
The most terrifying—and most guarded—of his abilities.
Because Lunaros was conceived the night Kairos spilled inside Selene on the royal throne while the kingdom watched, a fragment of the Void Emperor's attention was drawn to that exact moment. A sliver of the Eternal Maw looked upon the act of creation and *envied*.
Lunaros is the only living being who can stare into the Void and stare back without losing his soul.
- When Voidborn approach, they hesitate. They see their own reflection in his shifting silver-gray eyes: the nothingness they are, confronted by a child who is *everything* they can never be—love, light, future.
- He can speak the Void's true language: silence that shatters shadow. A single word from him in that tongue can banish a lesser prince back through its rift, screaming.
- But the cost is intimate and terrible: every time he uses this power, a piece of his own light dims. His parents see it in the way his laughter sometimes catches, in the fleeting moments when his eyes go completely black.
4. The Binding Blood
Every woman who carries Kairos's child after Lunaros's birth finds their pregnancy blessed (and accelerated) by proximity to the boy. Selene's second child (conceived the same night as the first battle after the rift) will be born a girl with hair like midnight and eyes like dawn.
Lunaros's blood, when willingly given (never taken), can mark a lover permanently. A single drop on the tongue binds them to the family in a way deeper than marriage: they feel each other's pleasure, share dreams, sense danger to any member across continents. The marked becomeseffectively immortal so long as Lunaros lives.
Already, at age three, he has marked them all—tiny fingers pricking his palm, pressing bloody kisses to foreheads and inner thighs while they kneel, laughing and crying at once.
He is the living proof that Kairos's second life was not just for vengeance.
It was for *legacy*.
A child who walks with ghosts, commands the moon, and terrifies the Void itself.
And when the Emperor finally comes—for the world, for the light, for the boy who should never have been born—Lunaros will be waiting.
With a smile that holds both his father's ruthlessness and his mother's mercy.
And a single word in the language of silence that will make the Eternal Maw regret ever looking upon the light of a single mortal family's love.