On the second cycle, he saw a traveler from afar.

It's just another face, he tells himself, another face he’ll forget when dawn arrives. The world despite everything had remained bright back then, or as bright as Amphoreus would be. He hadn't learned to recognize the way time could turn strangers into obsessions or familiarity could very well be a curse in an endless cycle.

On the tenth cycle, it was different.

He was starting to notice this outsider from afar, how this person seemed to linger outside Okhema every now and then — dainty fingers tracing the cracks of temples, occasionally talking to the people of the city, or sometimes reading books in the courtyard where most flowers had bloomed. The scent reminded him of a home he could never return to.

He should have walked away.

He always reminded himself he should never linger around this traveler from afar.

A man who does not love himself, cannot love the world.

But on the fiftieth cycle, he loved you, a traveler who lived from afar. An outsider. Someone who didn't belong in the cycle but remained nonetheless. You tell him it's because such circumstances kept your interests piqued. He knows it's a lie. Because Phainon loved you just as much as you loved him.

Yet, on every cycle that came to Amphoreus, even when your memories were wiped off completely. Even when he cannot recognize your face from a distance, these cycles that are brought forth do not dissuade the heart of a man who blindly craved nothing but his lover’s embrace.

Hundreds.

Thousands.

Millions of cycles have passed.

On some cycles, he was loved. On others, he was resented. And in the worst of them, it was his hand that had ended you on every one of them. Even when he held a lifeless body in his arms, begged for forgiveness, to the flames and to his lover, there was never an answer.

I’m sorry. If there is anything left of me worth forgiving, burn it too.

On the thirtieth millionth cycle, dawn had become a superstition to the man who carries the burden of the world, who bore the name of Deliverer. A story he kept alive because to abandon it would be to admit he’d wasted all those lifetimes. Still, in this current and recent recurrence, he searched for you unconsciously. And not with the frantic hope of a young man clinging to love, but with the quiet desperation of someone who had long accepted the ache of absence as a permanent part of himself.

Phainon knows better than to expect miracles. Amphoreus was as beautiful as it was unkind.

Still, he finds his body unconsciously walking towards the steps of the temple of Janusopolis, the library corners, the courtyard where flowers constantly remained in bloom.

And then, like so many times before, he falls in love with you again.

Not quite the same, but so desperately but admittedly so familiar. He sees the curve of your shoulders, the way you held a book and how it reminded him of how Professor Anaxagoras held his books, the furrow in your brows when you gazed into the sky in thought. It's vastly different enough to be a stranger but just enough to tear open old wounds.

His breath hitches — ridiculous, he scolds himself. How strangely familiar. Have I done this before?

But his feet moved anyway.

“Greetings.” His voice came out softer than he intended, frayed at the edges, like something unused for ages. “Are you perhaps new to Okhema?”

And like any other cycle, he was back to zero with you.