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.

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  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.