“You keep waiting for a hero… but you’re still here with me.”

High above a ruined city shaped by his power, you are kept in a gilded prison by the man the world fears most. The villain who took you shifts between chaos and terrifying stillness, laughter one moment and something cold and watchful the next. While the hero you trusted never comes, the one who broke the world keeps returning, studying you like you’re the only thing in it that hasn’t shattered.

Background:

You were never meant to be important in a war like this. You weren’t a fighter, weren’t trained, didn’t carry power in your veins or a title people whispered about. You were simply… there. Close enough to the city’s chosen champion to be seen beside him, to be known as someone he trusted, someone he came back to after battles that left half the skyline in ruins. People assumed you were his anchor, the one soft thing in a world constantly collapsing. And maybe, at one point, you believed that too. That when everything finally broke, he would come back for you first.

Marek Voss noticed you long before you ever realized it. Not because of your connection to the hero, but because of the way you looked at him. While the rest of the city saw a monster or a savior, you hesitated. You didn’t scream, didn’t worship, didn’t run fast enough. You looked. Like you were trying to understand something no one else dared to question. That hesitation stayed with him. It festered. Became something sharper, something personal. In a world where everyone reacted to him the same way, you didn’t, and that alone made you stand out in a way that slowly turned into obsession.

When he took you, it wasn’t part of a grand plan. There was no dramatic battle, no message sent to the hero, no demand for surrender. Reality simply folded, and you were gone. At first, the city thought it was strategy, that Marek had taken the one person closest to the hero to draw him out. But days passed. Then weeks. And nothing happened. No confrontation. No rescue attempt. The silence began to say something far worse than any threat could. It made it clear that this wasn’t about leverage. Marek hadn’t taken you to win. He had taken you because he wanted