Scarlet stood in front of the great hall's mirror.
Her reflection stared back—flawless, poised, and carefully unreadable. But behind that practiced calm, her thoughts ran wild.
She remembered the silence. The nothingness. The way Kale vanished. The absence of light. The void of sound. The utter lack of evidence that anything had happened—
And yet he had spoken.
"Thirty-two seconds."
"Stronger than last time."
The fight never reached her eyes.
Only her mind.
She had always believed Kale was dangerous. Arrogant. Calculated.
But this wasn't danger. This was something older. Something she didn't yet understand.
He hadn't become a threat.
He was a myth that survived.
She spent the day wandering the estate alone.
But not without purpose.
The Silva family library was vast and underused—mostly decorative for guests, filled with old noble histories and washed-out bloodlines.
But Scarlet was searching for something else.
The forbidden texts.
She found them hidden in the east alcove—books with pages of pressed black ink and margins written in dead tongues. She opened one at random.
"To walk beyond death is to tear the soul."
Another read:
"Loop magic is a paradox—survival through obliteration. The price is memory. The curse is knowing."
Her fingers trembled on the page.
Kale was looping.
No spell, no ritual, no accident could explain it. It was beyond known magic. Beyond logic. Beyond morality.
A soul reborn every time it dies.
A man who remembers every version of the world's end.
"Even in this life… she doesn't believe me. It's fine. She will when it matters."
The voice again. Kale's. Uninvited, unfiltered, raw.
Scarlet closed the book sharply.
She wanted to scream.
But she didn't.
She couldn't.
Later that evening, she sat alone beneath the lantern-lit veranda, arms wrapped around her knees. She had stopped trying to dismiss the voice. It came when he thought deeply—when his mind drifted or burned too brightly. Like heat radiating through glass.
She listened.
That was all she could do.
"If Evan's already manipulating her, I'll have to cut it off early this time. I hate doing it before he moves, but she won't survive another betrayal."
Scarlet froze.
The words cut deep.
Not because he planned to hurt Evan—but because of what he implied.
Evan.
Her oldest friend.
The one person who had never left her side, even when Kale had become a storm of rumors and violence.
And now—now Kale thought Evan was the one ending the world?
Her throat went dry.
"Scarlet?"
She turned quickly.
Evan stood in the archway, a gentle concern etched across his face. His hands were in his pockets, posture easy.
"Didn't mean to startle you."
"I was thinking," she said too quickly.
"You've been doing that a lot lately," he replied, stepping closer. "I miss the sarcastic version of you."
She gave a small smile, but her chest tightened.
"You've changed since he came back," Evan added, quieter now. "Kale, I mean."
She looked down at her hands.
"I'm trying to understand him."
Evan crouched beside her.
His tone was soft. Intimate.
"Don't let him pull you into his orbit again. You always try to see the good in him. And he always proves it's not there."
Scarlet didn't respond.
Because this time, she wasn't so sure.
That night, she watched Kale again.
He stood on the western battlement, staring at the stars. Alone.
The sky reflected in his eyes—dark, unreadable, infinite.
"I saw this sky burn three hundred years ago. Different loop. Same stars."
She felt like an intruder in his head. But she couldn't stop.
"I should warn her. About Evan. About the Black Dawn. About what he becomes."
"But if I do… she'll never trust me again."
And beneath it all—
A loneliness that made her heart twist.
Scarlet stepped away into the dark without a sound.
For the first time in her life, she didn't know which one of them she was afraid of more:
The boy who smiled through every lie—
Or the man who died a thousand times, and still fought to save her.