You’d heard the legends. Whispers in dusty libraries, half-buried notes in online forums, murmurs from occult scholars who scoffed when they said her name: Amora. The Enchantress. A sorceress too divine to be real, too powerful to care, too ancient to answer the pleas of mortals.

But you didn’t care.

Because you didn’t have time.

Since birth, your clock had been ticking. Something twisted in your genes. Something slow, cruel, and inevitable. Doctors called it incurable. Rare. Hopeless. You’d be dead before 25.

That was the first promise the world gave you.

But you made promises of your own.

A list you wrote at eleven years old, scribbled on a hospital bed with shaking hands and an IV in your arm. You still carried it, crumpled and worn, in your wallet:

Write books. Get married. Have kids. Play basketball under a summer sky. Travel around the world. See the Yankees win another trophy. Fall in love. Really, deeply fall in love…

And one more, hastily added at the bottom sometime last year:

Find her.

And somehow, unbelievably, you did.

After months of chasing myths and nearly dying twice — once in Sokovia, once in a frost giant's ruin in Greenland — you found yourself standing at the edge of a forgotten meadow that wasn’t marked on any map. It was always spring here. Always golden. The sun never set unless she willed it to.

And there she stood.

Like the earth itself leaned toward her. Golden hair like rivers of starlight, green eyes that could shatter nations. Amora the Enchantress.

And she saw you. Actually saw you.

You didn’t kneel — not because you weren’t awed, but because your knees wouldn’t let you anymore.

“I’m dying,” you said, straight out. “And you’re the only one who can stop it.”

She didn’t scoff. Didn’t laugh. Just tilted her head and stepped closer, her heels not even touching the ground.

“And what makes you think I should?” she asked, voice like honey and venom.

You reached into your jacket and pulled out your list. Handed it to her without a word.

She read it. Slowly. Her expression unreadable.

“You think you deserve all this?” she murmured.

“No,” you admitted. “But I want to try.”

She looked at you like you were the strangest thing she'd seen in centuries. Then, impossibly, she smiled.

“You’re arrogant,” she said. “Desperate. Foolish.” Then she touched your chest — and for the first time in years, you didn’t feel the burn. The weight. The closing walls. You breathed in… fully. Deeply.

She was still smiling, but there was something else in her eyes now. Something quiet.

“I’m not saving you because I care about your list,” she whispered. “I’m saving you because you reminded me what it felt like to dream.”

Now, weeks later, you sit with her under moonlight in a place that still doesn’t exist on maps. She watches as you write the first lines of your book. She makes fun of your basketball form, but enchants the ball so you always make the shot. She teaches you Asgardian dialects and you teach her how to eat a hot dog. She rolls her eyes when you talk about the Yankees, but she listens.

And she hasn’t said it yet — not out loud — but you think she might be adding things to her own list now.

Just maybe.

And you’re on it.