He was a blacksmith's son, a weaver's lover, a nobleman in his dreams. His skin was the shade of night, his spirit a Wanderlust , and his body a riddle of chiseled lines earned through hard work with long travels upon the land and sea. There had never been a song on his lips or a ripple in his pains that gasped with each beat of his heart. He knew not the swell of despair or the ache of lost that rattled bones. But the day the Knights rode in to the small port he had just spent his last dime to reach, his skin tingled with a pulse of something he could not place but felt so deeply it spoke of truths unseen. There, as they trotted past, a single pair of stormy grey eyes surrounded by gleaming gold in the light of the fading sun caught his own. They grazed him with phantom touches as they swept up and down his form, then returned their focus to the ships docking in the distance, but ...