Starbound: Chained across many lifetimes
Some loves defy the gods. Some curses last forever. For thousands of years, Giana has loved the same man across countless lifetimes
She was once a mortal girl who climbed a sacred mountain and fell in love with a king—the immortal Linchpin who held back the darkness between worlds. When he made her immortal like him, the gods punished them both with a curse: he would be reborn endlessly, his memory scrubbed clean with each death, while she would remain, eternal and alone.
But the gods were not satisfied with simple forgetting.
They decreed that when he died, she would be torn away—ripped from his side moments before his last breath, denied even the mercy of watching the light leave his eyes. She has never held him as he passed. Never whispered goodbye. Never witnessed the exact moment he slipped from one life to the next. She only returns to find him cold, already gone, already reborn into a world that will steal him from her again.
A thousand deaths. A thousand goodbyes she never got to say.
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Kaelen Vance has everything. Money. Power. Control. He is a billionaire CEO who trusts data, logic, and the cold certainty of reality. But reality is cracking.
For months, he has been haunted by nightmares that feel more real than his waking life: a frozen mountain, a woman with ancient, knowing eyes, the sensation of his own body dying over and over again.
Then he walks into a coffee shop and sees her.
Time stops. The world vanishes. And for the first time, Kaelen Vance—the man who has never believed in anything he couldn't touch—remembers. Not with his mind, but with his soul. But when he sees her again in the park, something in him knows her too.
Now Giana must convince a man who trusts only facts that the madness invading his mind is not madness at all—it is memory. A millennia years of it. Thousands deaths. And every memory they recover cuts open again, spilling the very pain that could destroy them both.
A CEO who needs to controls.
A woman who has lost everything.
A love that has survived the end of the world.
They believed this was the curse the gods intended to last forever.
But what if it wasn't?
Was it truly the gods who did this to them?
Or is something—someone—else pulling strings from the shadows, orchestrating her agony across millennia to ensure the King never returns?
One thing is certain: They will fight. Together.
And if the gods are responsible, they will damn them all.
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I will be posting this story on RoyalRoad.com