When exhaustion finally claimed me, I collapsed onto the bed and stared at the blank ceiling as if it were a scrying pool, hoping to glimpse the future in its emptiness. The white plaster offered nothing but its own blankness, a void that reflected nothing back.
Instead, I saw only the past. His face imposed over the white plaster.
Then I bolted upright, a thought striking me with the force of revelation.
He left. Why?
Why would he leave? In every other lifetime, across every other incarnation, he had always approached. Always. The pattern was as fixed as the stars, as unchanging as the laws of physics. Find him, watch him approach, love him, lose him. That was the rhythm of my existence, the drumbeat to which I had marched for centuries.
But this time, the pattern had broken.
I sifted through the dusty files of my memory, retrieving a ledger of our encounters across too many lifetimes to count. How many had there been? I had long since lost track. A dozen? A hundred? The numbers blurred together like rain on a windowpane, each lifetime distinct yet somehow the same, variations on an endless theme.
There were lifetimes when I found him as a merchant traversing ancient trade routes, his hands calloused from ropes and reins, his eyes lighting with curiosity when I crossed his path in some dusty market. There were lifetimes when he wore the robes of a scholar, poring over scrolls by candlelight, his mind reaching for truths his soul already knew. There were lifetimes when he carried a sword, when he held a sceptre, when he worked the land with dirt beneath his fingernails and hope in his heart. He had been rich and poor, powerful and humble, celebrated and forgotten. He had worn a thousand faces across a thousand years, and in every single one, I had found him.
And in every single one, the pattern held: he would approach.
Drawn by that invisible thread tied to our souls—the thread I had tied myself, in a moment of desperate love, when he made me immortal so I would never have to leave him—he would cross whatever room divided us, whatever city, whatever circumstance. He came to me like a moth to flame, again and again, never knowing why, never understanding the pull—only that it existed and he could not resist it.
Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. Sometimes years. But always, eventually, he would find his way to me. The thread would pull taut, and he would follow it, drawn by a force he couldn't name and couldn't fight.
Until now.
But this time was different. It was clear: the moment he saw me; he turned on his heel and left without a word. He hadn't followed the thread—he had cut it. Severed it. Run from it as if it burned.
A new, terrifying, and utterly impossible hope began to blossom in my chest—a fragile, thorned flower pushing up through soil I had thought barren forever.
What if he remembered?
Not everything. Not consciously. But what if, for the first time in all these centuries, some part of him recognized me on a level deeper than conscious thought? What if the curse was fraying? What if the gods' punishment was finally, after all this time, beginning to lose its hold?
I scrambled for my phone, my fingers trembling as I dialled a number I knew by heart but rarely used. It was answered on the second ring.
"Yes, Madam?"
"Hello! Hey, sorry to disturb you, I know it's late."
"Madam, it's quite alright. How may I be of service?" The voice on the other end was Silas—the family's eternally discreet solicitor. My family, for centuries, had required such services. The Silas family had served me for generations, passing down the knowledge of what I truly am from father to son, mother to daughter, always maintaining the careful fiction that I was simply an eccentric heiress with unusual needs.
"Yes, I need a favour. Can you try to get the security footage from The Grind? The coffee shop near my university? The one Mrs. Backston owns? From about eight hours ago, earlier today."
"Of course, Madam. May I ask what this is regarding?"
"Oh, it's nothing serious," I said, layering my voice with a light, unconcerned tone I did not feel. "I just... left something important there earlier. I want to see if someone picked it up." The lie was smooth and practiced, worn smooth by centuries of use. "How soon can you get it?"
Silas paused for a moment. When he spoke, his breath carried a weight of gentle disbelief—he knew perfectly well it was a lie. But he also knew his role, knew the boundaries of our relationship, knew that some questions were not meant to be asked.
"I understand, Madam. I'll make a call. Give me ten minutes."
I hung up and waited, each second stretching into an eternity.
When my phone finally pinged, the sound was like a gunshot in the silent room. "Sent to your laptop, Madam."
I lunged for the device, firing it up, my heart hammering against my ribs with a violence that should have been impossible for a heart that had beaten for so long. The video file loaded—a black-and-white, silent film of my own personal tragedy, captured in grainy security footage.
I fast-forwarded, my eyes glued to the screen, until I saw it.
The door opened. And he walked in.
The camera angle, positioned high in the corner and aimed toward the counter, offered a clear, unobstructed view of his face. But even without that clarity, the footage couldn't hide the essence of him—the lean, tall build, the way he carried himself with an innate grace utterly alien to this slouching world, the unmistakable sweep of his dark hair. It was him. Even in grainy digital capture, even frozen on a screen, he moved like a king walking through a world that had forgotten how to kneel.
He approached the counter, his posture relaxed, his movements unhurried. He spoke to the barista—I couldn't hear the words, but I could imagine them, could imagine that voice speaking modern pleasantries with the same ancient cadence.
And then he paused.
His head turned—not a casual glance, but a deliberate, focused look directly toward my table. Toward me. I watched, breath held, as my own pixelated form sat frozen, staring back at him across the crowded room.
What happened next stole the air from my lungs.
He didn't just look away. For one breathless moment, he stared—and then he recoiled. A subtle flinch, a nearly imperceptible jerk of his shoulders, as if something had struck him. As if my gaze had carried across that crowded room and landed directly on his chest like an arrow finding its mark.
Then he turned sharply from the counter and walked out, his pace quick and hurried. A retreat. A flight.
It wasn't the calm departure of someone who'd forgotten his wallet. It wasn't the casual exit of someone who'd changed his mind about coffee. It was the flight of a man who had just seen something he couldn't explain, something that threatened the very foundations of his reality.
I hit pause and sat in the humming silence of my apartment, the only sound is the frantic beating of my own immortal heart.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
A heart that had beaten through centuries. A heart that had learned to brace itself for loss, for disappointment, for the cruel mechanics of a curse that allowed me to find him but never keep him. A heart that had grown expert at managing hope, because hope was the most dangerous thing of all. Hope was what made the losses unbearable. Hope was what turned grief into something that could destroy you.
And now that heart was threatening to crack my ribs open.
He recognized me.
The thought was a seismic shift in the bedrock of my eternal punishment—a seditious whisper in the sacred halls of my curse, a heresy against the divine sentence that had structured my existence for millennia. I turned it over in my mind, examining it from every angle, searching for the flaw, the loophole, the explanation that would make it less world-shattering.
It was impossible. The rules were the only constants in my endless journey: new life, blank slate. Always. Across centuries, across continents, across every version of him I had ever found, the pattern held. He would feel the pull, yes. He would be drawn to me like iron to magnet, confused and fascinated by a stranger who felt like home. He would approach, and we would circle each other in that familiar dance, and eventually—sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly—he would love me.
But recognition? Actual, conscious recognition of who I was, of what we had been? That was forbidden. That was the entire point of the torture—for me to see the knowing void in his eyes, the friendly curiosity where once there had been soul-deep familiarity. For me to love him, again and again, knowing that he could never truly love me back because he could never truly know me.
But the evidence was there, frozen on my screen. The moment our eyes met across the café—I had felt it. And his reaction, captured in this grainy footage, confirmed everything.
I rewound the footage, zooming in until the pixels bled into greyish smudges. There—the slight tension in his shoulders as he turned, the way his head dipped not in casual avoidance, but as if warding off a blow. This wasn't the behaviour of a man made uncomfortable by a stranger's intense stare. This was the reaction of a man who had seen something he was conditioned to flee.
What was going on? Was it some primal, soul-deep instinct? Had my stare, raw with a thousand years of longing, simply been too intense for a modern man to handle? Maybe he'd looked at me and seen not a lover from another life, but a crazy woman with unsettling eyes. Maybe his flight was just the natural reaction of a wealthy man confronted by a stranger who looked at him like he was the answer to a prayer.
But no. No, that didn't fit. I had seen his face in that frozen moment before he turned away. I had seen the recognition flicker in his eyes—not conscious recognition, perhaps, but something deeper. Something that bypassed his modern mind and spoke directly to the soul beneath.
A cold fire ignited in my veins—a feeling so foreign I barely recognized it after centuries of melancholic acceptance. Purpose. Raw, undiluted, and terrifying.