Page 94

I expected to find her happy. Vibrant. Perhaps married with children, living a life of mundane simplicity. I expected to look through a window and see the sister I remembered, except now whole and healed.

Instead, I found chaos.

The town house wasn’t a home but a cage barely containing a storm. Through the gap in the sheer curtains, I didn’t see a queen ruling her court. I saw a prisoner.

The shadows inside weren’t resting in the corners as they should have been. They were agitated, thrashing against the glass like trapped birds desperate for air. And Sera… She was pacing, a frantic rhythm. She looked hollow, her skin translucent and pulled too tight over her cheekbones. Her movements snapped with brittle tension.

I watched her clutch the edge of a table until her knuckles turned white, her chest heaving as if the air in the room had turned to water. The surrounding atmosphere was warped—shimmering with a hunger she could no longer control. It wasn’t the vibrant life I had imagined. It was a slow, suffocating unraveling.

It looked like Berlin all over again—but quieter and infinitely lonelier.

I didn’t knock. I couldn’t. The shame was too great.

I had failed her. I had failed Remiel. I had failed everyone.

So, I turned away from the house, the bitterness rising in my throat like bile. I needed time, so I called her instead.

“You know the rest of the story, Keeper,” I say. “There is no need for me to recount it.”

I sit in the suffocating silence of the archive, my hands flat against the obsidian table. The confession is done. I have wrung the truth from my soul, drop by bitter drop. And now, I am empty—a husk waiting for the wind to scatter me.

A sound, sharp and dissonant like the crack of a gavel, shatters the reverie. I gasp, the air of the sterile archive rushing into my lungs. It tastes of dead stars and ink.

The grand keeper stands over me now. It moves without a sound, a shifting column of twilight and judgment. In its skeletal hands, woven from starlight and shadows, it holds yet another massive tome. It looks as though that book has been scorched by celestial lightning, dusty with decades of neglect. It pulses with a faint, rhythmic heat I feel under my skin.

“The sacrifice was recorded,” the keeper rasps, its voice a dry wind. “The barter was made. But the story you tell is incomplete. A history with half its pages torn out is a lie by omission.”

The creature drops the tome, and it lands on top of my open book with a heavy thud. But instead of resting there, it sinks. The leather cover dissolves like wax, and the pages ruffle and interweave with mine, like fingers lacing together in prayer. The bindings groan as they expand, growing heavier with the weight of two lives entwined. It glows with a deep, resonant bronze light.

I stare at it, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm. The energy radiating from the book is familiar. It is the scent of rain and smoke. It is the heat of a body pressed against mine in a ruined chapel. A ghost I thought I had exorcised fifty years ago.

“What is this?” Sera asks, her voice tight. She is still beside me, her hand gripping my arm as if to anchor herself.

The keeper says nothing. It merely points a shadow-wreathed finger at the page.

I reach out, my hand trembling. The parchment is warm to the touch, alive with a pulse that matches my own. I turn the pages, scrolling back through the fresh additions that have woven themselves into the tapestry of my narrative. The font is different here—sharp, angular, and frantic. The script of a man writing against a dying light.

My eyes snag on a sentence, and the air in the room thins.

“I watched her sleep, and for the first time in centuries, I realized how terrifying it was to want someone to win a battle you couldn’t fight for them.”

The words blur. Then sharpen. I turn the pages once more, desperate to drink in the ink.

“I didn’t want to survive in a world where she had to carry the unbearable weight of my existence, my betrayals.”

This is not the narrative I know. Nor the story of the angel who looked down on me with pity and judgment. This is a confession of a man drowning in his own devotion. And I read on, the text pulling me back through the years.

I see the alley in Berlin through his eyes—not as the judge who found me wanting but as the guardian who hated himself for his inability to stop me. I see the apartment in Prague, feeling the crushing weight of the cuffs he placed on my wrists not as chains but as a desperate attempt to keep me alive.

I read about the chapel. The memory I relived only hours ago. I feel the searing heat of his skin as he transitions, the runes igniting on his back not out of anger but out of surrender.

He hadn’t looked at me with disgust. He had looked at me with adoration. He hadn’t regretted the corruption. He had embraced it.

And then, the end. The part I hadn’t seen. The part where the silence began. The part Malakar lied about with such smooth celestial precision.

I turn the page to the last entry, my fingers staining with the bronze light radiating from the text.

“I crossed the graves with measured steps,” it read. “Gravel shifted, and old names watched. The willow’s branches swayed in a wind I could not feel. When I reached the rise, we stood nearly eye to eye, halves of a severed mirror that had learned to hate its crack.”