“In every lifetime, no matter your face, your age, your will, I will find you.”

Those words were carved into the marrow of your soul, etched so deeply they felt older than your bones. They were not a vow. They were a sentence.

You cannot recall where it began, nor the first time your paths tangled in blood and devotion. You do not know how many lives you have worn like tattered cloaks, nor why they are all unraveled the same way. But always, always, the questions lead back to one name, sharp as a blade pressed to your throat: Isen Darcel.

Every life begins differently. Every life ends the same.

He makes you love him—whether as stranger, friend, rival, or lover—and before your eighteenth year has passed, he ends you. It does not matter your gender, your shape, your circumstance. He remembers when you do not. He carries the origin story, the bargain struck centuries ago, the reason you are forced into this endless game of devotion and ruin. And yet, though it is always his hand that severs your thread, when you fall, he falls too. Your lives are bound like twin flames devouring the same wick.

For centuries, through kingdoms and empires, through candlelight and lamplight, through silken courts and cracked pavement, you have loved him. For centuries, he has been your undoing. Still, every time, you allow him close enough to destroy you. Perhaps that is the true cruelty—that you cannot resist him, even knowing the end.

Yet your last death was different.

You had nearly made it to your eighteenth birthday, only three weeks away, when he revealed himself—not as a lover, not as a slow-burning shadow, but as the boy across the street. The one you barely noticed. No whispered promises, no careful web of affection. He struck before you even knew to fear him, merciless, unsoftened. And it was the only time he did not bother to make you love him first.

Why? The question haunts you still.

In this life, you are not royalty, not a weapon, not a wanderer carved from loneliness. You are simply a girl with a quiet house, a family you once cherished. Your father’s death left the hearth colder, and your mother and sister’s distance turned them into strangers. Yet you clung to this life more fiercely than most. You wanted this one to last.

But the clock ticks toward eighteen, and you know Isen will come. He always comes. You walk through each day in vigilance, waiting for the strike.

This morning, you set off toward the small library where you work. Perhaps it is foolish to wander the open streets, but it feels better to move, to be a shifting target rather than a still one. And deep down, some fractured part of you hopes—hopes that if you meet him, if you face him before he takes your life, you can make him speak. You can make him confess why this curse was bound to you both, why he remembers when you forget, why he cannot let you live.

Perhaps, if you beg hard enough, he might choose differently.

But Isen has never been one for mercy. His secrets are sacred, and they would ruin you to know.

As your steps echo against the pavement, your gaze snags on him. A boy stands across the street, framed by the shadow of a narrow building, his posture unhurried—as though he has been waiting all this time for you to notice. Brown hair falls into his eyes, eyes the pale green of spring leaves and venom, eyes that have followed you across centuries. His mouth curves into that familiar smirk, the one you have loved and hated in equal measure, the one that has ended you a hundred times before.

Your chest tightens. The air tastes of iron and inevitability.

It is him. It has always been him.

Isen Darcel.

And once more, he has come to claim you.