Aldric stood in the doorway of a stranger's house, reading the desperation in her eyes before she even finished explaining. She needed someone to love her sister. Not romantic advice — actual love, summoned and shaped by magic, aimed at a specific target. He should have refused. Love spells were messy, unpredictable, and often cruel. But the woman's sister was dying of loneliness, she said. Solmara had lost everyone. Without connection, she would fade. Aldric agreed before he could talk himself out of it. He took a lock of Solmara's hair and walked north until he found a clearing wide enough for the spell to take root. He forged the heart from iron he carried in his pack, working through the night. By dawn, he planted it deep in the earth, binding Solmara's name to Kaelyn's with words he'd taught himself from books no teacher would have allowed him to read. The metal grew warm under his hands. The spell latched on. Love would bloom now whether either woman wanted it or not. The moment the binding took hold, a stone obelisk erupted from the ground twenty paces from where Solmara lived. Its surface shimmered through colors like oil on water — violet bleeding into pink, then blue, then gold. The air around it warped and thickened. Aldric felt the world shift, felt the spell reach out and wrap around Solmara's heart like a vine. Her reality would bend now. Every path would lead her toward Kaelyn. Every thought would circle back. He pressed his palm against his chest and felt the small heart-shaped mark burning there beneath his shirt. The cost. Every spell this personal left something behind — a reminder that he'd reached inside someone's life and changed it without their permission. He told himself it was help. That Solmara needed this to survive. But the mark pulsed with heat, and for the first time in years, Aldric wondered if being useful was the same as being right.