The memory faded, leaving me breathless and aching in my dim apartment. The phantom feel of his hands on my skin was more real than the rain-chilled air around me. The spice of that memory was not just in the physical act, but in the profound intimacy of it—the shared vulnerability, the fusion of love and power, the sheer, audacious rightness of it.
I lay still for a long moment, my hand drifting to the nightstand beside my bed. My fingers found the familiar contours of a small box tucked away in the drawer—a box I had kept close for centuries, through countless moves across countless countries, through wars and peace, through lifetimes of searching and loss.
The box itself was unassuming at first glance, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. But its simplicity belied its true nature. It was crafted from astralwood, a material that no longer existed in this world—wood from the sacred groves of Mount Caelestis-Sol, harvested from trees that grew only where the veil between worlds was thinnest. The wood was dark as midnight, but within it swirled veins of silver that seemed to move, to flow, like captured starlight given form. The hinges were forged from morningstar iron, mined from the heart of a fallen meteor and cooled in the waters of the Lethe, so that they would never rust, never tarnish, never wear no matter how many millennia passed. A small clasp of dragon's breath gold held it closed, warm to the touch even in the coldest winter, as if it contained a tiny ember of eternal flame.
This box had sat beside me in palaces and hovels, in grand estates and tiny apartments. It had crossed oceans in sailing ships and been carried through burning cities. It was the one thing I never placed in the vault, the one relic I kept always within reach. Not because I looked at it often—I didn't. The pain of opening it was too great, the memories too sharp. But I needed to know it was there. I needed to know that somewhere in this cold, modern world, a piece of him still existed that was purely, truly him.
Tonight, for the first time in centuries, I reached for it.
My fingers trembled as I lifted it from the drawer and set it on my lap. The rain continued its assault on the windows, but in the darkness of my apartment, the box seemed to glow with its own inner light, the silver veins pulsing gently as if responding to my touch.
I undid the clasp.
Inside, nestled on a bed of silk that had once been my wedding dress woven by moonlight spiders in the courts of the Fae, lay the treasures I could never bear to leave in the vault. Not all of them—the vault held the bulk of my collection, the accumulated evidence of centuries. But these... these were the pieces I needed closest to my heart.
There was a lock of his hair, black as a raven's wing, cut on the night he first made me immortal. Even now, after all these years, it held a faint scent of frost and cedar, a whisper of the mountain. There was a small scroll, no larger than my finger, containing a poem he had written for me in the old language—words of love and devotion that I had memorized long ago but could never bear to read aloud. There was a single petal from the celestial flowers that had rained down on us in the Observatory, preserved by some magic I still didn't understand, its blue glow undimmed by time.
And there, in the center of the box, resting on a bed of silk, was the ring.
I lifted it carefully, reverently, holding it up to the faint light from the window. The band of moonlight and shadow gleamed, and the star-stone at its centre swirled with living light—the same constellations I had seen on our wedding night, wheeling slowly within its depths. I had worn this ring for every moment of every day from the night he placed it on my finger until the moment the gods' curse fell upon us. On that day, as they tore him from me and condemned him to the wheel of reincarnation, I had felt the ring grow cold. Not cold as in temperature—cold as in distance. Cold as in the connection it represented had been severed, at least for this lifetime.
I had removed it then, unable to bear the feeling of his absence made manifest in metal and stone. It had travelled with me across every century, a promise waiting to be fulfilled.
I slipped it onto my finger now, just for a moment, just to feel it.
The warmth that spread through me was immediate and devastating. Not the full connection of our wedding night—that would never come again until he remembered, until he chose me of his own free will. But an echo. A whisper. A reminder that what we had was real, was eternal, was worth fighting for.
I let it rest there for a long moment, the star-stone pulsing gently against my skin. Then, with a sigh, I removed it and placed it back in its bed, closing the box and returning it to the drawer.
The memory of him—of them, of all the lives and all the losses—settled around me like a familiar cloak. But tonight, for the first time in weeks, it did not weigh me down. It propelled me forward.
It was a stark contrast to the cold, closed-off man in the park. Kaelen Vance would never look at a woman with that kind of raw, reverent hunger. Or would he? The man in my memory was also a king, burdened by duty, capable of immense control. That control had simply never existed with me. Until now.
That passionate, starlit being was trapped inside Kaelen Vance, buried under layers of corporate jargon and modern alienation. I had to reach him. I had to remind him.
But how? Showing up at his corporate headquarters or his penthouse again would only reinforce his perception of me as a stalker. I needed a context, a reason for our paths to cross that felt natural, inevitable. The way it always had been.
The symposium was the answer. A gift from the universe, or perhaps from the same forces that were slowly unravelling the curse.