Taming the Wild Beast of Alamina

Matthias’s recognition of Yerofei’s name changed the atmosphere in the sitting room.

The fire had settled into a low orange glow behind its screen, and beyond the partially open bedroom door, Theodore remained asleep beneath the warm light of the nursery lamp. The palace outside their windows was quiet, Altera stretching beyond the gardens in scattered gold and silver lights, but Dean no longer felt particularly tired.

"You really knew of him," Dean said.

"Everyone near Dominic knew of Emperor Yerofei." Matthias shifted forward in the armchair, his long black hair slipping over one shoulder. "Palatine was too important not to. But I never met him personally."

Dean rested his forearms against his knees.

"There was a journal."

Matthias’s attention sharpened.

"Yerofei’s?"

"Fragments of it survived. Enough that my family eventually understood what his siren type actually did."

Arion sat beside Dean, one arm stretched along the back of the sofa. Neither of them needed the history simplified; Lucas’s experience had made siren abilities considerably less theoretical than most ancient records suggested.

Dean continued.

"A siren doesn’t simply choose to reverse time. The reset is triggered through extreme suffering, when the current life reaches whatever threshold their ability interprets as impossible to continue. Then the timeline returns to a fixed point."

"Birth?" Matthias asked.

"Sometimes. More often presentation, when their secondary gender awakens. It depends on where the ability anchored itself."

Matthias absorbed that quietly.

"My father’s anchor is presentation," Dean added. "Lucas is currently living his third timeline."

Matthias stared at him.

Dean understood the reaction. Even knowing what enigmas, sigmas, sirens, and corrupted abilities could do did not make hearing that a living person remembered three versions of his own life particularly ordinary.

"Yerofei reset more often," Dean said. "Five lives that we know about."

"Five..."

"The fifth became the last."

Matthias’s expression changed.

"Asair."

Dean nodded.

That name no longer required careful avoidance between the three of them. Matthias knew exactly what Asair had been, and both Dean and Arion knew what Nero was.

Enigmas.

Publicly, Asair’s historical profile had identified him as a dominant alpha, exactly as Nero was presented to the world now. Almost nobody outside the closest family circles knew Nero’s actual secondary classification, and for the foreseeable future it would remain that way.

But dominant alpha had never explained either man.

Enigmas possessed something no other secondary gender did: once they chose their mate, they could alter that person’s secondary gender into a dominant omega, regardless of what the person had originally been.

"Asair met Yerofei in the earlier timelines," Dean said. "We don’t have every detail, but Yerofei’s journal makes it clear that their connection was central to why those lives became unbearable."

Matthias’s jaw tightened.

"And Asair chose him?"

"That is what we believe."

Arion glanced toward Matthias.

"If this Titan structure you described existed on top of Asair being an enigma, then Yerofei wasn’t only trying to escape a powerful man."

"He was trying to escape someone whose nature had already settled around him," Matthias said.

Dean nodded.

"And every time Yerofei suffered enough, the siren ability sent him back."

The implications felt uglier now than they had before Matthias explained Titans.

A normal pursuer could be escaped through different choices.

A Titan whose will influenced probability itself was another matter.

Yerofei could change cities, alliances, decisions, relationships, perhaps entire political sequences, yet if Asair encountered him again and chose him again, reality could begin bending toward the same endpoint.

"Until the fifth timeline," Dean said.

Matthias watched him closely.

"What changed?"

"Asair met someone else first."

"A dominant omega?"

Dean shook his head.

"A beta woman."

Matthias immediately understood.

There was no surprise about an impossible gender transition because nothing about it was impossible where an enigma was involved.

"Asair chose her," he said.

"Yes."

"And changed her."

"That is what we believe."

Matthias leaned back slowly.

That explained something Dean had previously treated as an isolated fact in the old family records. Asair’s eventual mate had begun life as a beta and later appeared in private records as a dominant omega, while official histories offered little explanation beyond inconsistent documentation.

There had never been a mystery.

Only an enigma whose nature had been hidden from the public.

"Yerofei changed the timeline far enough that they did not meet before Asair made his choice," Arion said.

"That was the escape," Matthias murmured.

Dean looked at him.

"Exactly."

Yerofei had not broken Asair’s attachment after becoming its center.

He had prevented himself from becoming the center at all.

Once Asair chose someone else, his enigma biology fixed on that woman, changed her into the compatible mate his body required, and whatever Titan nature existed beneath his abilities had a different fixed point around which to organize itself.

Yerofei was free.

And the siren resets stopped.

Matthias rubbed one hand over his mouth as he thought.

"So five lives were not five successful escapes."

"No," Dean said. "Four failed ones and one timeline where he moved early enough, but I don’t think he truly knew what Asair was."

The room remained quiet for a while.

Then Arion’s gaze shifted toward Dean.

They had both reached the next thought.

Nero.

And Sebastian.

Nero’s enigma status was one of the most closely protected secrets in Saha. Sebastian knew what Nero was, as did the people who actually needed to know, but none of them had ever had this particular context.

Titan.

Fixed points.

A historical enigma whose chosen person had apparently needed multiple timelines to prevent that choice from occurring.

Dean felt the unease before he could articulate why.

"We don’t tell Nero."

Arion answered immediately.

"No."

Matthias looked between them.

Dean rubbed his thumb along the seam of his trousers.

"I don’t have a rational argument for it yet. I just don’t want him knowing."

That was enough for Arion.

"I feel the same."

Matthias’s brows drew together.

"You think he would use the information?"

"I think Nero is intelligent enough to do something with almost any information," Dean said. "And I don’t want to discover what he does with knowledge about Titans, fixed points, or a man who spent five timelines trying to escape one."

He paused.

"And Sebastian definitely does not need this dropped on him when we still don’t know how much of Matthias’s explanation applies to Nero."

Arion nodded.

"If anything becomes relevant to Sebastian’s safety, we tell him. Until then, this stays here."

Matthias considered that before inclining his head.

Dean looked toward the bedroom.

Theo shifted faintly on the monitor and settled again.

There were already enough ancient abilities influencing people who had never asked to inherit them.

For once, Dean saw no reason to hand one of those histories to Nero and see what happened.

His instincts had kept him alive too often to dismiss them now.

And every instinct he had said the same thing.

Nero should not know.