POV: Aphrodite
The bond does not wait for consent.
I knew that before I took the step. I took the step anyway, which is a choice I made with full understanding of what I was choosing, and the understanding didn't make the reality of what happens when a bond of this age and this force and this specific complicated structure slams into place anything other than what it is.
The throne room disappears.
Not literally — the walls are still there, the stone is still there, the court is still arranged in its bound positions and the King is still at the far end of it — but the sensory priority of all of those things drops to zero in the fraction of a second between the step and the impact, because the impact is the only thing that exists for that fraction of a second.
The bond hits me in the chest and keeps going.
