"I'm your husband!" The words tore from his throat with all the force of his breaking heart, carrying across the square and drawing shocked gasps from the growing crowd of onlookers.
Emberlyn stopped. For one heart-stopping moment, Ethan thought he saw something flicker across her face—confusion, perhaps even recognition. But when she turned back to face him, her expression was harder than before.
"What are you talking about? I don't know you. And I've never been married!" Her voice cut through him like a blade, each word precisely aimed to cause maximum damage.
"Huh? What are you saying?" Ethan felt his world crumbling around him, reality becoming as insubstantial as morning mist. This couldn't be happening. This couldn't be real.
Desperation consumed him like wildfire. He crawled toward her on hands and knees, his pride forgotten, his dignity abandoned. All that mattered was making her remember—remember their first kiss under the old oak tree, remember their wedding night when they'd sworn to love each other until death parted them, remember yesterday morning when she'd held him close and marveled at his cooking.
"Please!" he sobbed, his voice breaking on the word. "Emberlyn, please! I'm Ethan—your Ethan! I made you dinner last night—your favorite, grilled chicken with mashed potatoes and green beans. I set the table and waited for you.. I was so worried when you didn't return—"
But his words seemed to bounce off her like raindrops off stone. She stared down at him with the cold regard one might show a particularly persistent beggar.
"Give it up, Ethan," Lucas whispered, kneeling beside him with mock sympathy. His voice was low enough that only Ethan could hear him. "Emberlyn is no longer the woman you once knew. That head injury... It changed everything. She doesn't remember you, and she never will."
"EMBERLYN! PLEASE! PLEASE BELIEVE ME! I'M YOUR HUSBAND!" Ethan's cry shattered the afternoon air, raw and desperate and utterly heartbroken.
The crowd that had gathered around this spectacle began to murmur among themselves. To them, Ethan was nothing more than a madman, a pathetic figure claiming to be married to the legendary Emberlyn Scarlet. After all, everyone knew she was unmarried—a fierce, independent hunter who had never shown interest in romantic entanglements.
The secret they had kept so carefully to protect their love had become the very thing that destroyed it. With no proof of their marriage, no witnesses to their relationship, Ethan's desperate claims sounded like the ravings of a delusional stranger.
"Shut up! You're nothing but a liar!" someone shouted from the crowd.
"Don't you dare come near Lady Emberlyn again!" another voice added.
The crowd's anger turned physical. Fists flew, boots connected with his ribs, and Ethan found himself at the center of a storm of violence. He curled into a ball, protecting his head as best he could, but made no effort to fight back. What was the point? His world had already ended.
Through the rain of blows, he caught glimpses of Emberlyn watching with detached interest, as if observing a mildly entertaining street performance. The woman who had once kissed his wounds better now watched impassively as strangers inflicted new ones.
When the crowd finally tired of their sport, they left him broken and bleeding on the cobblestones. The market square, which had moments ago been filled with shouts and violence, fell unnaturally quiet.
Heavy clouds had gathered overhead while Ethan wasn't paying attention, and now they opened up in a torrential downpour. Rain fell in sheets, soaking through his torn clothes and washing the blood from his face in pink rivulets.
"Emm... Berr... lyn..." he whispered, his voice lost in the sound of falling water.
He lay on the cold stones, abandoned by the woman he'd loved more than life itself, forgotten by the world that had never acknowledged their bond. The rain seemed to cry with him, each drop carrying away another piece of his shattered heart.
Memories flooded his mind with cruel clarity—Emberlyn's sleepy smile over morning coffee, the way she'd hum while braiding her hair, the soft sound of her breathing beside him in their bed. All of it felt like someone else's life now, like a beautiful dream from which he'd been brutally awakened.
"Emberlyn..." he whispered to the weeping sky. "I will keep searching for you, even if the world turns against me. Even if you don't remember me, I remember you. I remember us. And I will find a way to bring you back to me."
The words were a vow, a promise made to the rain and the darkness and the pieces of his broken heart. Even in the depths of despair, the love that had driven him through monster-infested forests refused to die.
With tremendous effort, he pushed himself to his feet. His body was a canvas of pain, but his spirit—battered though it was—still burned with purpose. He would go home. He would find their wedding rings, their photographs, the letters she'd written him during their courtship. He would gather proof of their love and return to make her remember.
But as he stumbled through the rain toward the forest road, his blood ran cold. On the horizon, thick black smoke billowed against the storm-dark sky, rising from the direction of their hidden sanctuary.
"No," he breathed, then louder, "NO! NO! NO! NO! NOOOO!"
His feet found strength he didn't know he still possessed. He ran through the rain like a man possessed, his heart hammering against his ribs as terrible understanding dawned. Someone had found their home. Someone had destroyed the only place where their love had existed safely, secretly, perfectly.
The forest road became a blur beneath his feet. Branches tore at his clothes and face, but he felt nothing except the growing certainty that his worst fears were about to be confirmed. Behind him, the lights of Eldervale faded into the storm. Ahead, the smoke grew thicker, more ominous.
As he reached the edge of their property, the full scope of the devastation became clear. Their house—their beautiful, secret sanctuary—was engulfed in flames that reached toward the weeping sky like grasping fingers. The garden where he'd grown herbs for their meals was already blackened ash. The oak tree where they'd carved their initials was beginning to smolder.
Everything. Everything was burning.
"NO! NO! NO! The photos! Our rings! Everything!" He ran toward the inferno that had been their home, desperate to save something—anything—that might prove their love had been real.
But as his foot touched the front step where he'd kissed her goodbye just yesterday morning—
BOOOOOOM!
The explosion lifted him off his feet and hurled him backward through the air. He hit the ground hard enough to drive what little breath remained from his lungs, his vision filled with stars and flame and falling debris.
When his hearing returned, all he could hear was the roar of the fire and his own broken sobbing. He tried to rise, but his body finally rebelled, keeping him pinned to the muddy ground as he watched their life together reduce itself to ash and ember.
"Emberlyn... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry I couldn't protect our home... I couldn't protect anything..." His words were lost in the storm, carried away by wind and rain and the greedy crackling of flames.
There was nothing left. No proof they had ever been married. No evidence they had ever been in love. No witnesses to the beautiful mornings they'd shared, the quiet evenings by the fire, the thousand small moments that had made up their perfect life together.
Just ashes. Just smoke. Just the echo of a love story that the world would never believe had existed.
As consciousness finally began to slip away, Ethan's last thought was not of his pain or his losses, but of Emberlyn's face—not as he'd seen it today, cold and distant, but as it had been yesterday morning when she'd pressed her cheek against his back and asked what he was cooking.
"I love you," he whispered to the rain and the ruins. "I will always love you. And someday... someday I'll find a way to make you remember that you loved me too."
Then the darkness took him, and Ethan Culver—husband to no one, known by no one, believed by no one—finally found peace in dreams of a world where love was stronger than forgetting, and where happy endings were more than just fairy tales told to children who still believed in magic.