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.

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  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?

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