Where fire is born, kingdoms fall.

The night sky over Devgarh had always been Agnika’s only witness.

It had watched her grow from a silent child into a woman carved from bruises and whispered cruelty. It had seen her mother fade like a dying flame, and it had watched King Devraj Singh Rathore twist his daughter’s existence into a punishment she never deserved.

Tonight, that same sky watched her run.

The palace behind her—once a cage of gold—glowed with the light of torches and betrayal. Every marble hallway she fled through echoed with the truth she had discovered only hours before:Her marriage was not meant to bind kingdoms.

It was meant to end her.

Her fiancé’s voice still rang in her ears—cold, amused, deciding her fate as if she were nothing but a pawn to be removed from the board.

And her father… her father had known.

Agnika’s breath trembled, but her resolve did not. In her clenched fist lay the only fragment of hope she possessed: the map her mother had hidden for years. A map marked with a single destination in her mother’s delicate handwriting—

Simhagarh.

Enemy land. Enemy king. Enemy fate.

But it was her only path to survival.

The desert wind stung her eyes as she rode into the darkness, urging her horse forward with desperation and the ghost of her mother’s voice whispering, Run, Agni. Live.

Miles away, atop the obsidian throne of Simhagarh, King Adhiraj Veer Pratap stood beneath the same moon.

He was a man made of iron and ruin, feared by every kingdom that dared speak his name. His scars were a language of their own—etched by battles fought for a family long buried, by a kingdom taken from him, and by a hatred that had become his pulse.

But that night, something shifted.

His men brought news of an intruder crossing the borders. A lone rider. A woman.

He should have ordered her execution.

Instead, a strange, ancient pull stirred inside him—an instinct older than war, darker than vengeance, and far more dangerous than any blade.

When their eyes met for the first time, under the shadow of Simhagarh’s colossal gates, something silent and devastating settled between them.

He saw defiance in her.

He saw fire.

She saw the monster every story had warned her about.

Neither knew that their fates had already entwined long before that night—through blood, through betrayal, through losses neither had yet faced.

This was not a beginning born of softness.

It has the start of a storm that would swallow kingdoms whole.

A princessrunning from death.

A king who had forgotten how to feel.

And a destiny written in ashes, waiting to ignite.

Their story began not with love…

but with fire.