For seven hundred years he kept a single vigil beneath the same moon, a silhouette against stone and ivy, a heart that outlived seasons. She returned to him as a pale inevitability: each thirty years the world took her breath and then, as if fate could not bear the silence it had made, let her bloom again. Memory was a fragile thing between them — he, who remembered every shard of her face; she, who woke like a newly opened rose, tasting sorrow as if it were a foreign perfume and believing each reunion to be the first.

There was no thunderous curse laid in words, only a slow arithmetic of loss that hollowed his endless days: seven merciless reckonings in the span of centuries, seven times the same exquisite grief. Each renewal arrived with a delicate cruelty — for when he gathered the scattered fragments of her recollection, stitching past to present with gentle hands, the world would sigh and take her back. The pattern wove itself into the architecture of his life: love and mourning braided so tightly he could no longer tell where one ended and the other began.

So he moved through libraries of night and tomes of forbidden lore, cupping hope like a candle that would not be snuffed. He hunted remedies in astrology and in the bones of old saints, in the quiet alchemy of ash and moonlight, seeking the single countercharm that would unbind them from the wheel. All his centuries of loving had become a patient, obsessive labor — not for glory, but for the simple, impossible wish that, at last, she might remain. He was the original vampire after all.

...........

She had risen once more, clothed in the fragile disguise of youth, dwelling in a humble apartment among the restless lights of New York. To the world, she was nameless, one soul adrift among millions; but to him, she was the axis of eternity, the single flame that had endured the slow collapse of centuries.

He lingered at the threshold of her life like a shadow that time itself could not extinguish, his gaze fastening upon her with a devotion carved in blood and grief. Seven times he had cradled her, seven times he had wept over her silent form, and still the curse returned her to him—cruelly innocent, cruelly unknowing.

His love for her was no gentle thing, but a fever, an ache that consumed the marrow of his immortal being. She was his sanctuary and his torment, the divine wound that eternity could not close. And as he beheld her once again, fragile and unguarded, he swore the heavens themselves would break before he let her be taken from him another time.