From Orion Frosthelm
His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Orion of Frosthelm
Capital Province, Frosthelm Prime
Danika,
I was all set to board a battle cruiser and begin the journey to your planet. But my mother stopped me.
She tells me I must be patient with you, that I must woo you.
As if you are some fragile, trembling thing that needs coaxing.
She says human women are delicate, that they have not yet reached their highest form of evolution and don’t fully understand the bond of mates.
That you are used to choosing your mate based on currency or land or power rather than recognizing what was already decided before your birth.
I have read that on your world, mates choose each other and enter into bond contracts that can be dissolved on a whim.
You call it divorce. The entire concept is absurd: the way you flit between partners, discarding them as easily as a garment that no longer pleases you.
It is meaningless. The kind of foolishness my kind engages in when we are young and restless, before we are mated.
A mate is something else entirely. You do not deny a mate. You do not leave a mate. There is no divorce. There is no choosing.
I know no other way to explain it to you.
Mates are not chosen, Danika. They are born. Just as a prince is born and one day becomes king, a mate is born to complete another soul. That is how the universe works.
Still, my mother recommends that I woo you, coax or cajole you. Me, a man used to commanding an army, has to make pretty words to one woman.
I am not a poet, Danika. I am a warrior. A leader. A man who has never had to ask for what is his.
Yet I’m expected to woo you from a distance?
What exactly is it that you cling to on that planet of yours? You have not even moved beyond the hold of your own moon. Your people scrape at the edges of the void. Yet you remain bound to a single rock, clinging to it as if there is nothing greater beyond your sky.
You have no idea what awaits you when you come to me.
I could show you wonders you have yet to imagine.
I could take you beyond the edges of your limited world and show you a sky where the stars sing.
Where entire nebulae pulse with color so vibrant it would steal the breath from your lungs.
Where the rings of distant planets cut across the heavens like the stroke of an artist’s brush.
There is poetry in the stars, Danika.
You only need to accept the bond, and I will show you. I will open your eyes to the vastness of the universe, and you will wonder why you ever resisted, why you ever thought a single world could be enough.
So tell me, what is it that keeps you there? What tie do you believe is stronger than the one that has already bound us together? What life do you think you are clinging to that is greater than the one I am offering?
You are not meant for this small, insignificant life you are clinging to. You were made to be adored. To be worshipped. And I will do so with my hands, my mouth, my entire body until you collapse in our bed, sated and mine.
You were made for me. Just as I was made for you. The universe does not make mistakes. We will fit. Perfectly. Completely.
Write back. Now.
Orion Thalos
Crown Prince of Frosthelm
Your Fated Mate