Bound By Her Blood—Part 1: Tower and Shadows.

A Dark Fairy Tale / Romantasy. Part 1/5

Fate doesn’t care about intentions. It cares about blood.

This is a short(ish), darkly romantic fairy tale about a warrior prince on his final trial, a princess who’s been missing for eight years, and the soul bond that shouldn’t exist—but does.

Think morally grey hero, cursed heroine, a Black Tower swallowed in fog, a desperate rescue that goes wrong… and a bond that might ruin them both.

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Part 1

Caspian

Glory. Power. Blood.

That’s why he was here.

Not for love. Not for legacy. Not to “rescue the damsel.”

Please. What a load of horse shit.

The crown was within reach—he just had to complete this one last task. Rescue the missing princess.Return her to the capital.

Smile for the scribes. Get knighted, crowned, consecrated.

Simple.

If he happened to cleave a few enemies in half along the way, all the better.

He liked the feel of blood on his hands—the way it coated his skin with purpose, thick and steaming, slipping into the grooves of his knuckles as if it belonged there. There was a weight to it, a warmth, a hush that followed a clean kill, like the world itself paused to acknowledge the act.

They called him a butcher behind closed doors, whispered the word like it might shame him, like he hadn’t earned it in sweat and steel and silence. He didn’t mind. Butchers of men still got thrones. Still slept soundly while the world called them monsters and kings in the same breath.

And the girl?

Oh, he knew her.

Princess Asteria of House Darcel. Petulant little brat with a voice like silver bells and a temper like wildfire. She used to visit court when they were children. He remembered her throwing a goblet at a steward because her honeycakes had the wrong glaze. Thought she was a gift from the gods—spoiled, imperious, obsessed with birds and poetry.

Then one day, she vanished. Abducted. Maybe cursed. Disappeared into the wilds. No one really knew.

Caspian had barely noticed. It was one less self-important royal in the castle gardens, and, frankly, he’d assumed she was dead. So when the High Priests had handed him his final task—rescue the lost princess from the Black Tower—he’d nearly laughed in their faces.

Eight years missing? What were the odds she hadn’t starved, gone mad, or merged with whatever dark magic had taken her?

Still. Orders were orders.

And yeah, five years. That’s how long he’d been doing this. Not this quest, specifically, but the path to the throne. To become High King.

Five brutal years of bloodsport, exile, unspoken rules and barely-survived tasks—The Seven Feats, they called them. A rite of passage dictated by the High Priests, revised with every heir.

And they were never simple.

He’d faced a bloodthirsty monster in the depth of the Leviathan’s Gate.

Slept in a pit of vipers to retrieve a sacred bone relic.

Had a cursed arrow pulled from his side by a desert priestess who refused to look him in the eye.

He had bled, burned, and beheaded his way through six trials.

This was the last. One more mission, one more victory. And the crown would be his.

He didn’t need to like it.

He didn’t even need her to like him.

He just needed her alive enough to drag back to the capital and throw at the feet of the Order.

⚔️⚔️⚔️

The sun was a sadistic bastard today.

Scorching at its peak, it beat down on him like he’d wronged it personally, smothering his neck under the layered weight of boiled leather and plated steel. Sweat dripped down his spine. Every breath tasted of dust and heat and horse.

By the time he was finally about to reach the edge of the forest, he barely stopped himself from groaning aloud.

Shade.

A blessing.

When he passed beneath the thick canopy of ash and silver birch, the air shifted—cooler, damp, threaded through with the scent of loam and moss and the slow sweetness of decaying leaves, like a soft breath exhaled against the back of his neck. The forest felt sentient somehow, pulsing with an old, rooted rhythm that no man could ever hope to tame. Alive in a way half the kingdoms were not.

His stallion, Valor, huffed hard as they slowed to a halt. Caspian dismounted in a single fluid motion, boots sinking into the damp earth as he reached up to pat the beast’s flank—solid muscle and hard-earned trust beneath his palm. The horse had carried him halfway across the realm in the past month alone. He was an astounding warhorse, bred for thunder and chaos, loyal to the bone and savage when called for. Just like the man who rode him.

Still needed a break, though. So did he.

Caspian stretched his shoulders, rolling his neck until it cracked. His armour creaked with the movement. He could still feel the ache in his ribs from that cave troll he’d gutted three weeks back. Damn thing had flung him into a tree like a sack of grain.

He reached for his canteen, took a long pull, and glanced down at the compass in his palm.

Three needles. One always pointed north. One always pointed to danger. The last…

The last pointed to what the bearer wanted most.

It flicked toward the forest, then twitched. Paused.

Spun once, sharply, then settled. Straight at the horse.

Caspian frowned.

“Really?” he muttered.

He waited. Still pointed at Valor.

He sighed, adjusted his grip, and tried again.

It spun. Flicked once toward the trees. Once toward the horse. Then finally jerked toward the satchel at his hip.

Oh.

He chuckled under his breath, pulled out a few strips of smoked venison and some dried blackberries. Ate standing. The third needle quivered again—then finally swung to align with the others, back on track.

“Satisfied now?” he muttered to no one, shoving the rest of the fruit in his mouth.

He wiped his fingers, tucked the compass away, and sank deeper into the forest with Valor following right behind him.

They walked for the best part of the hour when something changed. He felt it before he saw it.

One moment, the path was steady—soft soil, low light, birdsong threading through the leaves. The next, it shifted. The temperature dropped. Not gradually, definitely not naturally. It plummeted.

The air grew heavy, syrupy. Cold in a way that clung to the skin, sank past the bones, reached deep into the marrow.

Caspian slowed his pace, jaw tightening. He let the reins slip through his gloved fingers as Valor halted, stamping once, then again. The stallion tossed his head, ears pinned, muscles bunched like coiled rope.

“Easy,” Caspian muttered, one hand brushing his neck. “What is it?”

The compass pulsed faintly at his belt. Not glowing. Just… twitching. Like it didn’t quite know what to do here. Caspian took another step forward. Just one.

The world lurched.

Light faded as though swallowed whole, shadows thickening, draping themselves over bark and branch like a veil. The trees around him loomed taller now, twisting in on themselves as if reshaping beneath unseen hands. There was something very wrong in the air. The silence pressed in tight, unnatural and weighty, like a lid forced down over a pot on the edge of boiling. A hush that did not soothe, but warned.

Even his breathing changed—each inhale turned shallow, damp, like drawing air through wet wool. He blinked, stepped back.

And just like that—normal.

Sunlight filtering through leaves. Distant breeze. The forest alive again.

He frowned.

Stepped forward once more.

Cold. Stillness. Suffocation.

Stepped back.

Warmth.

“Right,” he muttered under his breath, flexing his hands. “So that’s the edge, then.”

He turned to Valor, who was now fully spooked. Snorting, eyes wide, backing up without being asked.

“Not your fight,” Caspian said, looping the reins around a low-hanging branch and fastening them below to a knot of root. He gave the stallion a final pat on the neck. “Stay.”

He reached up, pulled his helmet down over his head with a solid clink, then drew his sword. Steel kissed with obsidian, a gift from the Temple of Dust. He still bore the scorch mark from Trial Four.

His breath fogged faintly in front of him. He inhaled once, deep and slow. Felt the weight of the moment settle on his chest. Then exhaled through his nose.

A grin tugged at his mouth.

“Let’s see what all the fuss is about.”

And he stepped across the line.

⚔️⚔️⚔️

The moment he fully stepped past the threshold, the forest stopped being a forest.

It became a maw. So much worse than when he was only testing the boundary.

The trees no longer looked like trees. They were black pillars, stretching up into nothing, twisting at the tops like claws. The fog slithered along the ground, thick and low, rising to his shins with every step. It wasn’t natural. Wasn’t even mist. It was smoke, maybe. Or something like it—too dense, too dark, too cold.

Sound dulled, muted to the faint creak of leather, the soft crunch of damp earth beneath his boots, the distant rasp of his own breath as though it belonged to someone else entirely. He tightened his grip on the sword, fingers curling tighter around the leather-wrapped hilt, pulse low and steady in his wrist like a war drum waiting to quicken.

Something scraped just beyond the edge of vision—a scrape against bark, a shift of weight that didn’t belong to the wind. He turned sharply, shoulders coiled and ready.

But there was nothing.

Only trees.

Only silence.

The compass?

Dead in his palm. All three needles spinning with a quiet whirring, frantic and useless. He shoved it back into his belt and pressed forward.

His eyes began to play tricks on him. Shadows at the corner of his vision. Flashes of white between trees. Once, he thought he saw a child—a small girl with white-blonde hair—standing just behind a fallen log. He blinked. Gone.

The sword in his hand felt heavier.

He didn’t even notice when he dropped it. One second, it was there. The next, his hand was empty.

Caspian swore, spun, scanned the fog.

Nothing. No glint of steel, no sound of it hitting the ground.

The smoke thickened, it pushed into his nose, his mouth, his eyes. It didn’t just disorient—it invaded—made it hard to think.

A faint pressure crawled over his skin, like fingertips dragging across his shoulders under the layers of leather and metal. He spun again, unable to stop the shiver crawling up his spine.

Still nothing.

And then he saw it. The Black Tower. Rising from the fog like a verdict—silent, watchful, as if it had always been there, waiting for him to arrive.

It loomed tall and crooked, a monolith of slate and shadow and ancient bone-pale stone, which made its name feel like a lie—until you looked closer and saw the dark that bled from its seams, the way it drank the light around it. It didn’t simply stand. It stretched, climbing into the sky with no visible end, a spire carved from some long-dead god’s ribcage, humming with memory and menace.

It was the kind of place that felt alive in the wrong ways. The kind of place that didn’t just watch you.

It waited to swallow you whole.

His stomach twisted.

His hand went to the compass again, hoping.

It was still useless.

But there was a strange pull, something in his chest. Not magic, not quite instinct. Something deeper. A thread pulling him forward.

So he followed it.

The ground shifted beneath his boots, steeper now, wet. It didn’t feel like the tower was getting closer, not really. It just grew more tangible, more real the longer he walked.

He reached the base. There was no door.

He circled once. Twice. Found a sealed archway that was condemned with heavy beams nailed across it and old iron chains. Runes were carved into them in a language he couldn’t read.

“No,” he muttered. “No no no—”

He grabbed the beams, yanked hard, but nothing gave. Rage flared as he dug his fingers under one of the crossbars and ripped.

Wood cracked, nails screamed loose and splinters tore across his gloves, but he didn’t stop. He would not be denied. He had come too far. Lost too much. Fought too hard.

He shoved the final beam down with a roar, kicked open the door with his boot, and stormed inside.

He didn’t even have time to catch his breath.

The air bent. The world buckled. Vertigo punched through his skull, his vision tilting, his stomach lurching sideways.

And then—

Something was on him.

A shape. A shadow, sharp-edged and breathless, with no face, no form, but fast as hell. Heavy, unnatural, and made from something cold enough to gut the soul.

He grunted, shoved back, but it didn’t move. Its weight was impossible—like stone and storm all at once. It dragged him further into the tower for what felt like forever before pinning him down, choking the breath from his lungs.

He twisted, but it was like fighting smoke.

His helmet was ripped off—flung into the dark. His head slammed into the stone floor.

The thing clawed at his throat.

Caspian gasped, gurgled, grabbed at its wrists—but they were not wrists. They were cold. Slippery. And way too strong.

His vision darkened at the edges. His chest burned. His mouth opened around a wordless roar—this couldn’t be it, not like this, not here—

He reached blindly for his dagger, his consciousness already fading at an alarming pace. He didn’t think. Didn’t even really aim.

Just plunged the blade into the centre of the thing’s chest.

It screamed.

Not aloud.

In his mind.

The force slammed off him like a wave.

The figure collapsed on top of him as he hit the stone floor hard again, the barely breath knocked from his chest as the weight slumped over him. Not smoke anymore, not shadow. A solid body, warm and unmistakably human.

Then came the blood.

Hot and sudden, spilling fast—too fast—soaking his breastplates, his arms, the cracks in the floor.

“Shit—”

He roared, rolling the body off him in a panic, and scrambled to his feet.

That’s when he saw her. His dagger dropped to the side.

And his heart just stopped.

No.

No. no no no—

The world swayed.

Right there at his feet, curled like a broken promise, was Princess Asteria.

Older.

Beautiful.

Dying.

Same raven-black hair—longer now, dirty but sleek as ink. Same high cheekbones, sharp nose, stubborn mouth.

But her face looked… wiser. Stranger.

Worn by silence and carved by years alone.

Her dress was barely more than tatters, blood soaking through the silk right between her breasts, leaking through her fingers. Her chest heaved once. Twice.

His dagger shouldn’t have been able to pierce the bones of her sternum, but somehow, it had.

Her face was barely turned toward him, eyes squeezed shut.

But she shifted a little, smiled through the pain.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

It was hoarse. Croaky. Like a voice that hadn’t been used in years.

Caspian stared.

His mouth opened, but no words came out for an excruciatingly long beat.

“Wha—what…?” he choked, the sound barely human.

That somehow sprung him into action. Sudden, brutal and desperate.

He lunged forward, falling to his knees, hands shaking as he yanked open his satchel and clawed through his belt. He found the bandages, the healing salts, the needle and thread from his wound kit.

“No no no—hold still—fuck—don’t move—”

His words blurred together as he pressed against her chest with his now bare hands, tried to stop the bleeding. Tried to squeeze the gaping wound back together. But the blood kept coming.

She winced but didn’t pull away.

And then she opened her eyes.

Green. Spring green. Familiar and impossibly deep.

Caspian felt it like a blow to the chest.

It struck him like lightning, straight through the ribs, something ancient snapping into place—like fate exhaling.

He staggered back, his hands still red, breath caught in his throat.

The bond.

Soul-deep. Unmistakable. Unforgiving.

His mouth went dry, his head light, his vision widened as his world split open.

No.

Not here.

Not her.

She watched him.

Bleeding. Smiling. Silent.

And he just knelt there, in the pool of her blood, realising too late what he’d done.

What he’d couldn’t take back.

⚔️

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This is basically how I imagine Caspian.

Part 2 coming out next week!

Anyhow my loves, ya like?