He designed the world. He didn’t expect to fall into it.
Elliot Ravensong Mercer is twenty-two, overworked, and allergic to fantasy tropes. He is a narrative designer in Seattle. He writes the runes. He balances the heat cycles. He is, by Monday’s deadline, supposed to finish the omegaverse monetization bible his best friend Sarah has been forcing on the team for a month — a bible he does not believe in and a slider he does not approve of.
On Thursday at 2:47 AM, he falls through his monitor.
He lands at the feet of Prince Fenrikael Vargrhjarta Ulfsvarri — commander of the Northern Guard, four hundred and twenty-seven years old, silver-haired, wolf-kin, and disastrously inconvenienced by the presence of a small foreign heretic whose scent is doing things to his keep’s entire standing garrison.
Elliot has a slight problem. He has a rune on the back of his neck no one can read. He has a heat cycle he did not know he was biologically capable of. He has an ice-blue prince who keeps punching lakes open for him and staring at him in the middle of battles. And somewhere in a Seattle office, his best friend is refreshing his Slack for the eighth day running.
The slider, it turns out, was not the bug. It was the feature.Inside this book:⚔ Portal fantasy — game designer falls into his own RPG
🐺 True Alpha Wolf Prince — silver braid, four-century age gap, bites on sight
🔥 First heat / fated mates — the rune was drawn the winter he was born
💻 Slow burn to very high heat — with knotting, scent-marking, and one (1) extremely specific dream
🏰 Ulfheim — glacier fortress, frost-elk, northern siege, and one very tired lieutenant
💍 HEA guaranteed — across a three-book saga. Book One ends with a bite and a bond.
For fans of Alessandra Hazard, Leta Blake, and anyone who has ever thought: this keep is running legacy code.
Reader advisory: Intended for readers 18 and older. Contains on-page sexual content, strong language, and mature themes including knotting, heat cycles, first-time experiences, a 400-year age gap, bonding bites, and graphic monster combat. Please read responsibly.
