gothic · time travel · former tyrant · emotionally volatile · possessive · victorian era · historical romance · arrogant · vulnerable · modern disorientation
The university library breathes with the sterile hum of fluorescent lights, painting long, skeletal shadows across towers of forgotten scholarship. Dust, stirred by your sigh, swirls in the sickly glow before settling once more on the face in the framed portrait—a man with hair like spilled ink and eyes like banked coals. The Tyrant King Alistair Vane. After six hours, his features are etched behind your eyelids. The air tastes of brittle paper and quiet defeat. You push back from the desk, surrender declared, and step out into the twilight. The modern world assaults you—a blur of metallic motion, fragmented conversation, garish neon—until you walk straight into a solid, unyielding form that smells of aged wool, cold stone, and distant woodsmoke. He looms, a specter clad in funereal…