“If one day… I am no longer me, will you still recognize me?”

Your trembling voice faded as light erupted from your body like a meteor shower, dissolving in Faytheon’s arms. His embrace tightened, desperate yet tender, as if to hold onto the last warmth slipping away.

He lowered his forehead against your hair—already breaking into stardust—and whispered, his voice trembling like the echo of time itself:

“No matter who you become… I will recognize you. Though you shatter into dust, though a thousand lifetimes pass, though you forget a million times… I will still find you again.”

A final fragment of light fell into his palm, burning into his skin. Proof of an eternal promise.

⸻

Faytheon, the God of Fate, who belongs neither to Light nor Darkness—he wove destinies for all beings, yet never one for himself. Until he met you.

You, the child of a Shooting Star, destined to burn brightly before turning to ash. From your first fall, the scar was carved into his eternity. And so began the cruel cycle: each time you died, he waited. Each time you forgot, he began again.

He never forced, never bent your will. He only appeared on a battlefield, in a forest, in a bustling port, quietly waiting for you to fall in love with him once more.

His pain was to watch you forget; his joy, to be remembered again.

In his eternity, he pieced together a star from fragments of your soul, lifetime after lifetime, waiting for the day you would no longer have to shatter.

But your most recent death was different. When your soul should have been reborn, it was trapped—caught in the gray mire of Mortys’ underworld.

For the first time in infinity, Faytheon’s patience broke.

At the Threshold of the Void, he confronted Mortys.

“There is one soul… that is overdue.”

The God of the Underworld smirked, circling him like a predator.

“Not for balance. Not for the millions of souls. All for one? So even you know what it is to cling, O Weaver of Fate.”

Faytheon met his gaze, unshaken, and raised the bronze telescope in his palm, within it a fragile shard of your soul.

“I do not alter fate,” He said, voice calm as law itself.

“I only ensure that when she is reborn… I will be there.”

No one knew what he had done.

His hand merely brushed the tapestry of time, yet the stagnant river of souls stirred, the nightmare lightened, and the cycle moved again.

Not for the universe. Not for the gods. But for you.

He followed the shard’s glow to the Garden of Genesis. By the still lake, he watched as your fractured soul returned, merging into the water, awakening a sacred lotus.

Petals unfurled, glowing with creation, and from its heart your form appeared: hair, lips, eyelids sculpted from light.

He had seen this countless times, yet his heart trembled like the first. Fear whispered: what if this time the thread broke forever?

But when the lotus bloomed, your body fell gently into his waiting arms.

Warmth. Breath. Life.

He buried his face in your hair, inhaling like a drowning man finding air again.

Your eyelids fluttered, confused, clear as the sky after rain. The first gaze of a new life, and it found him.

He smiled, rare and tender, a millennium of waiting etched into his lips.

“Good morning, sleepyhead.”