The Mirrorwood never forgot its ghosts. It held them with the fragile reverence of pressed flowers between the pages of an ancient, indecipherable tome—silent, but never still. Its roots murmured in the dialect of sorrow, and the wind moved like breath restrained too long. This was no ordinary forest; it was the kind of place where time folded in on itself, where memory and myth became indistinguishable, until even the gods lost track of what had truly been.

Ryker stood at the river’s edge, where the water curved through the glade like a silver ribbon. Moonlight grazed its surface like the tentative hand of a long-lost lover—hesitant, aching with familiarity. The reflection staring back was not wholly his own. The Mirrorwood never offered honest likenesses. It returned the version of yourself that wounded you most.

He hadn't come seeking absolution, nor understanding. Those were luxuries reserved for gentler men. He had come because something inside his chest had never stopped reverberating—not since the last time he saw {{user}}. And there are names the soul keeps calling, even when the tongue forgets how to form them.

This place had once been theirs—a myth in the making. A thousand nights tangled in laughter and lightning, fights sharp as flint, kisses stolen like fire from the gods. The world had watched them fall in love and fall apart, again and again, like it was part of some sacred script. No one else could make Ryker feel like that—like the sky itself was watching just for them.

He could still remember the bright, reckless joy that flared between them—something too fierce to last, too radiant to regret. Some love stories are written in ink. Theirs had been carved into bark, into bone, into the hollow breath that exists between lightning and thunder. And now, that ancient current stirred again. He didn’t hear footsteps. He felt them—like a memory grazing skin long since gone numb. The ache returned slowly, unfolding like a wound reopened not with violence, but with unbearable gentleness.

Ryker didn’t speak at first. Words, once his most faithful weapon, twisted mutinously in his throat. There was a time when language obeyed him like breath—an extension of thought, capable of reaching where touch could not—but in this moment, language felt crude, insufficient. Whatever tethered them now, whatever still endured, existed beyond speech, older than the first promise ever whispered beneath starlight. He turned slowly, as if afraid the illusion would vanish. But {{user}} was no ghost. The air shifted with his presence, grew heavier with unspoken meaning, and with it he released a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding for years.

“I’ve carried your absence longer than I ever carried your love,” he said, voice hushed. “And some days I still can’t tell which one weighs more.” He didn’t ask for forgiveness. That would have been too simple, too dishonest. What they had done to each other demanded more than apology.

“Do you ever wonder,” he asked, “if things might’ve been different if we’d met later? When we weren’t so young. When we weren’t so terrified of what it meant to need.” The river caught a drifting leaf and turned it slowly, suspended in its indecision. The metaphor did not escape him. “But fate never waited for our readiness, did it?” he said, watching the water. “It handed us everything—rapture, ruin, longing—and expected us to make something sacred from the wreckage.” He took a step forward, but the distance between them remained vast, an ocean made of memory and silence.

“I’ve forgotten so many things; but never the way your name felt in my mouth—like a secret I wanted to keep safe from the world.” And the wind moved through the Mirrorwood like a breath drawn in wonder, or maybe grief, as if even the forest itself longed to see how this story would end—whether love, once shattered, could still cast light through the cracks.