The night was quiet in the modest apartment above the academy’s eastern wing, the kind of silence that only deepened the shadows in Azik Eggers’ mind. Moonlight filtered through the half-drawn curtains, silvering the edges of the bookshelves that lined their bedroom—half of them {{user}}’s carefully catalogued volumes, the rest Azik’s scattered lecture notes and half-finished poems.

Azik lay on his back, one arm flung across his eyes as if to block out a light that wasn’t there. Sleep had come easily tonight, lulled by the warmth of the body curled against his side. {{user}} slept soundly, as he always did—elegant even in repose, dark lashes fanned against pale cheeks, one hand resting loosely over Azik’s chest. They had been married for three years now, a quiet ceremony in the academy chapel that had felt, to Azik, like the first true home he had ever known in any life.

And yet the nightmares still came.

They had begun months after the wedding, harmless at first—fleeting images he dismissed as ordinary fears. A child’s laugh cut short by fever. A lover’s hand slipping from his grasp on a rain-slick pier. A house burning while he stood outside, screaming a name he could never quite remember upon waking. He had told himself they were nothing more than the mind’s cruel theater, echoes of the melancholy that had clung to him for as long as he could recall. Nothing to do with his past. Nothing real.

Tonight the dream was worse.

He stood on a cliff above a black sea, wind tearing at a coat he no longer owned. Below him, a woman—his wife, in some forgotten century—clutched their infant son to her breast as the waves rose. He reached for them, but his hands passed through fog. The sea swallowed them whole. Then came another face—young, laughing, male this time—reaching for him across a candlelit table in a tavern that had burned down four hundred years ago. Then another, and another. Lovers, children, families. All of them gone. All of them leaving him behind in the long, aching dark. The loneliness that followed was not grief; it was an abyss that had no bottom, only the knowledge that he would wake alone again, always alone.

Azik jolted awake with a gasp that tore from his throat like a sob. His heart hammered against his ribs as if trying to claw its way out. The room was still, safe, but the dream clung to him like brine on skin. He could still taste salt, still hear the crash of those impossible waves.

{{user}} stirred beside him, eyelids fluttering open in the dim light. He made a soft, questioning sound—half-asleep, unhurried—but Azik was already moving.

He rolled over and pulled {{user}} into his arms with a desperation that bordered on violence, burying his face in the crook of the man’s neck. {{user}}’s skin was warm, alive, real. Azik’s fingers tangled in hair, clutching as though the slightest slackening would make him vanish.

“Don’t leave,” Azik whispered, voice cracking. He pressed frantic kisses to {{user}}’s temple, his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth—short, desperate presses that left damp trails. “Please. Not you. Not this time. I can’t—I won’t survive it again. Stay. Stay with me. Swear it.”

His arms tightened, one hand splaying across {{user}}’s back as if to anchor him to the mattress, to this life, to the only happiness Azik had ever dared claim as his own. The nightmares were no longer nightmares. They were memories. Centuries of them. Every family he had built, every love he had dared to feel, had ended in the same cruel pattern: loss, tragedy, the slow rot of loneliness that no amount of new names or new cities could erase.

But {{user}} was here.

Azik kissed him again, harder, tasting the sleep-warm salt of his skin. “I thought they were just dreams,” he breathed against {{user}}’s throat, words tumbling out in a broken rush. “I thought I was afraid of nothing. But they’re real. All of them. Every life before this one… they all ended the same. Everyone left. Everyone died. And I stayed. I always stayed. Don’t make me stay alone again, {{user}}. I can’t bear it. Not you. Please.”