The evening air hit me like a wall—cool, damp, tasting of exhaust fumes and pretzels from a nearby cart and all the ordinary smells of an ordinary city on an ordinary evening. My head whipped from side to side, my senses straining, desperate for one more trace of that mountain-air scent, one more glimpse of that tall, graceful figure.
But it was gone. He was gone.
The street was a river of anonymous faces, none of them his. They flowed past me like water around a stone—students, tourists, workers heading home, couples holding hands, all of them utterly oblivious to the cataclysm that had just occurred in their midst. He had vanished into the city as if he had never existed at all.
"G! Please! what is going on?" Apple was at my side again—had she followed me? When had she followed me?—her hand on my arm, her face a mask of concern. "What's going on? You're scaring me."
I turned to look at her, and I knew—I could feel—that my eyes were too wide, my expression too raw, too exposed. The careful mask I had maintained for centuries was cracking, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
"I'm fine," I managed, wiping my tears. The lie was automatic, practiced, worn smooth by years of use. "I just thought I saw someone I knew."
Apple's eyes narrowed. She wasn't buying it—Apple was many things, but stupid wasn't one of them. "Someone you knew? G, you looked like you were having an exorcism. That wasn't 'someone you knew' face. That was 'someone you'd die for' face."
The accuracy of her observation struck me like a physical blow. I opened my mouth to deny it, to deflect, to do what I always did when the questions got too close—
But nothing came out.
Apple studied me for a long moment, her expression shifting from concern to something more complex. Curiosity, yes. But also, something else. Something I couldn't quite name.
"That guy," she said slowly, her voice thoughtful. "The one who just left. He seemed... familiar, somehow."
I snapped my head around to look at her, my heart seizing in my chest. "What did you say?"
"I said the guy was a looker and he had nice black hair—"
"No, no. The part where you said he looked familiar."
"Oh! Yes, he kind of did. But I can't place him. Which is insane, right? A guy that handsome, you'd think you'd remember. I mean, who could miss that physique?" A mischievous glint entered her eyes—the natural deflection of someone trying to lighten a heavy moment. "OMG, sex with him would be divine."
A phantom heat flushed my skin.
Oh, Apple. If only you knew.
I couldn't agree with her aloud, couldn't give voice to the thoughts that were consuming me, but my silent soul screamed it. The memories of our nights together were not fantasies, not wishful thinking, not the desperate imaginings of a lonely heart. They were etched into my being, glorious and agonizingly real. The feel of his hands on my skin. The whisper of his breath against my neck. The way the starlight over Mount Caelestis-Sol would catch in his eyes when he looked at me, turning them into galaxies made flesh.
I had never forgotten a single moment. Not in all the centuries. Not through all the lives. Not through all the deaths.
But this man—this version of him—was different.
The moment he stepped through that door, I had felt it: a resonance so deep it shook the very foundation of my immortal soul. It wasn't just his face, though that alone was enough to stop my heart and empty my lungs of air. It was the way he moved—that same fluid grace, that same economy of motion, that same sense of contained power that I had watched for years on the mountain. It was the way he held himself, as if the world around him was slightly less real than the world inside his own mind. It was the way the air seemed to bend around him, as if recognizing its rightful master and making space for his passage.
He walked like a king walking among peasants who didn't know enough to kneel.
And his face was not the face of some distant descendant, some random incarnation bearing a passing resemblance to the original. In every other lifetime, there had been echoes, but never this. Never him.
There had been others, across centuries and continents—each with features that whispered of him, hints and suggestions, but never the full truth. A tilt of the head here, a particular gesture there, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. I had learned to find him in those fragments; to piece together the whole from the pieces the universe allowed me. They were still him. Still the man I had loved across centuries, even when his face was not the one, I first fell in love with.
But this—
This was the face.
The face I had first seen on Mount Caelestis-Sol when I was seven years old—barefoot, breathless, and far too young to understand what I was witnessing. The same proud brow, the same aristocratic nose, the same impossible cheekbones that looked carved by the hands of gods who had long since abandoned this world. The same full mouth that had curved into that first, devastating smile and had stolen my first kiss. The same jaw that could cut glass and had, in fact, cut through my defences when I was barely more than a child.
But it was his eyes that had always undone me. They were not merely dark—they were infinite, depths within depths, holding secrets and sorrows and a light that seemed to come from somewhere beyond this world. In certain lights, flecks of silver and gold would catch and swirl like galaxies turning slow dances across the vastness of space.
It was as if the curse had slipped. As if, for this one lifetime, the universe had decided to give him back to me exactly as he had been. No dilution. No variation. No echo.
I had spent centuries searching for that face. I had found approximations, echoes, shadows. I had learned to love those shadows because they were all I had, because the alternative was a loneliness so profound it would have swallowed me whole. I had held those shadows in my arms and whispered words they couldn't understand, loving them for the fragments of him that shone through.
But this—this—was not a shadow.
It was him.
It was really, impossibly, miraculously him, walking through the coffee shop in a tailored coat, his dark hair brushed back from his forehead, his jaw set with that ancient pride I knew better than my own reflection. This was the King, the Linchpin, the guardian of the threshold between worlds, reduced by a cruel divine punishment to a mortal existence he couldn't remember.
And he had looked at me—really looked, not just glanced—and something in him had recognized.
"G?" Apple's voice cut through my spiralling thoughts. "You're doing it again. The staring-into-the-void thing. It's kind of creepy, not gonna lie."
I blinked, forcing myself back to the present. The sidewalk. The streetlights. The ordinary world that had somehow, impossibly, become extraordinary.
"I'm fine," I managed, my voice thin and hollow even to my own ears. "I just... I thought I recognized someone. But I was wrong."
The lie tasted like ash on my tongue.
Apple's eyes narrowed further, clearly unconvinced, but she didn't push. That was the thing about Apple—she knew when to press and when to wait. She squeezed my arm once more, then nodded toward the café behind us.
"Well, we gotta go. The coffee shop is closing." She gestured to the barista inside, who was wiping down tables with a pointed look that clearly conveyed that lingering customers were not welcome.
We walked in silence for a moment—or rather, as silent as it ever gets with Apple. The night air was cool against my fevered skin, a stark contrast to the confusion and curiosity burning beneath it. After saying goodbye to Apple at the crosswalk, I watched her head toward the sterile, secure women's dormitory where her parents, in their suffocating protectiveness, had insisted she live. A cage, they believed, would keep their daughter safe from the dangers of the world.
My own "parents"—a kind, distant couple who were the great-great-grandchildren of people I had once known in a different life, in a different century—had simply signed the lease for my private apartment without a fuss. They saw me as fiercely independent, a young woman who knew her own mind and needed no supervision. They had no idea I was simply practiced. I had lived a hundred variations of this life, worn a hundred different faces, adapted to a hundred different family structures. This was just another iteration.
Sometimes, I wondered at the irony. Apple's parents locked her in a gilded cage, oblivious to the wild, weekend-party animal she became the moment she was out of their sight. They thought they were protecting her from the world, but they had no idea that the world had already found her, that she navigated it with a skill they would never understand.
The world had changed, indeed. I was a living archive of its follies, a silent witness to every shifting moral and social tide. I had watched customs rise and fall, watched values transform and mutate, watched humanity cycle through the same mistakes with the cheerful optimism of those who believed their generation would somehow be different.
But tonight, the world felt different. Tonight, something had shifted.
I walked home alone, my footsteps echoing on the empty pavement. The city hummed around me—distant traffic, the occasional siren, the murmur of late-night revellers making their way between bars and clubs—but I moved through it like a ghost, my mind still trapped in that single, frozen moment when his eyes had met mine across the café.
The other versions—the ones I had found and lost across so many lifetimes—they had all carried fragments of him. A tilt of the head here, a curve of the lips there. Echoes of his kindness, shadows of his strength. I had learned to love those fragments, to piece them together like a mosaic, to find comfort in the small ways his soul leaked through whatever mortal mask he wore.
How many times had I done this? How many lifetimes had I watched him approach, drawn by that invisible thread tied to our souls, only to let him slip through my fingers? Too many to count. The numbers had blurred together centuries ago, each loss bleeding into the next until the only thing I could clearly remember was the shape of the wound they left behind.
Always the same pattern: find him, love him, lose him, grieve him, repeat.
I reached my apartment building and climbed the stairs in a daze, my body moving on autopilot while my mind remained trapped in that café, in that moment, in the echo of his footsteps walking away. I fumbled with my keys, dropped them, swore in a language that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries, and finally slammed the door behind me with enough force to rattle the pictures on the walls.
The silence of my apartment was deafening.
I leaned against the door, pressing my palms flat against the cool wood, and forced myself to breathe. In. Out. The walls were still there. The furniture. The mundane evidence of my carefully constructed modern life. A stack of unread books on the coffee table. A half-empty cup of tea from that morning, a thin film forming on its surface where the liquid had cooled and separated. My laptop, still open to the research I had abandoned hours ago.
Normal. Safe. Familiar.
Safe.
But I didn't feel safe. I felt cracked open, raw, exposed—as if someone had peeled back the layers of centuries, I had wrapped around myself like armour and left the tender, vulnerable core of me bare to the world. The face I had been searching for across millennia had just walked through a coffee shop door, looked me in the eyes, and I had done nothing.
I pushed off from the door, didn't bother with the lights, just let my bag drop to the floor and walked to the window. I parted the curtains just enough to see the street below, searching for—what? A tall figure in a dark coat, walking away? A pair of star-flecked eyes looking up at my window?
Nothing. Just the normal quiet of a city street at night. No kings in disguise. No ghosts from the past. No answers to the questions burning in my chest.
I let the curtain fall and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. The same gesture I had made a thousand times across a thousand different windows, in a thousand different cities, in a thousand different centuries. Always searching. Always waiting. Always hoping that this time would be different.
In my mind, I was back on Mount Caelestis-Sol, watching the King turn to face a fourteen-year-old girl who had dared to climb too high. I remembered the way his eyes had widened—just slightly, just enough for me to notice—when he saw me standing there. I remembered the soft smile that had touched his lips, the first smile I had ever seen on that ancient face.
"You see me," he had said. Not a question. A statement of wonder.
"Everyone sees you," I had replied, confused by the strangeness of his words.
"No, little one. They see the healer. They see the stranger. They see what they expect to see—a kindly man who tends the sick, a myth made flesh, a curiosity to be whispered about and then forgotten. But you..." He looked at me with those star-flecked eyes boring into mine with an intensity that should have terrified me but didn't. "You see me. Not the role. Not the legend. Not the surface. You see what lives beneath."
I had seen him then. I saw him now.
And for the first time in centuries, I thought—I hoped—that he might be starting to see me too.
But he was gone.
I stayed at the window for a long time, watching the city lights flicker and shift like distant stars falling to earth. My breathing steadied. My heart slowed. But the turmoil in my mind refused to quiet, circling the same questions over and over without finding answers.