The seventh time I killed my lover, I finally remembered to taste his tears.
They slid down my ink-stained fingers like liquid silver, each saline drop a fractured memory I had no right to possess. In the trembling candlelight of the apothecary's back room, I watched the familiar lines of his face dissolve into shadows—not from death, but from the theft I was committing, slow and exquisite as poison. His name was Kaelen, or had been, in the three other lifetimes where we'd loved and lost and I'd stolen him back from the River of Forgetting each time, stitching his soul into new flesh like a moth's wing pressed between pages.
This body was younger than the last, barely nineteen summers, with calluses from a lute-player's strings and a hollow where fear should have been. I tried not to notice how the curve of his collarbone still fit my palm with architectural precision, how his dying breath formed the shape of my true name—a name I'd excised from collective memory two centuries ago, along with the war that had made me a monster.
The candle guttered. Outside, the city of Vespera choked on its own ghosts, their voices trapped in the amber streetlights that had burned for a thousand years without fuel. I was running out of time. The Obscurati's hounds could smell a memory-thief from districts away, and Kaelen's final thought—she is the fracture in everything —still hung between us like a thread of unraveling fate.
I pressed my lips to his cooling forehead, collecting the last fragment: the scent of apple blossoms in a courtyard that no longer existed, the weight of a silver ring I'd never given him, the taste of a promise I'd broken before the world was born. My throat burned with stolen histories. My hands, already forgetting the shape of his hands, trembled with the cruelty of survival.
And then I heard it—the soft, impossible sound of applause from the shadows in the corner. A woman stepped forward, her face shifting between expressions I couldn't quite hold in my mind, her smile made of teeth like tombstone keys.
"Beautiful," she whispered, her voice carrying the echo of a song I'd written before language existed. "But tell me, Aramanthe—when you remake him again, will you finally leave in the memory of how much he begged you to stop?"
The candle went out. The darkness remembered everything I wished it wouldn't.
Huh!.... where am I again?
The question formed without breath, without lungs, hanging in the void like a torn stitch. Lucen tasted ozone and the memory of rain on cobblestones he'd never walked. Around him, space wasn't empty—it was unraveled, the cosmic threadbare revealing something vaster and more terrible behind the veil of stars. This was the Between, where dying universes went to molt, where the sky was a crime scene of scattered constellations.
A voice came, not through ears but through the marrow of his non-existent bones: "Lucen, you lost yourself again in your endless forms?"
The accusation carried the weight of gravity wells. Lucen stood up—though "stood" was a generous term for the rearrangement of his consciousness into something resembling a man. Dark-haired, lean, with eyes that had seen their own construction from the inside out. He tried to remember how many bodies he'd inhabited this cycle, but the numbers dissolved like sugar in blood.
"Creator," he managed, his voice a rusted hinge. "I was trying to—"
"Save them?" The voice dripped with something ancient and acidic. "Or were you trying to understand why you keep failing?" A pause that swallowed eons. "As a creator, I'm sending you to an unresolved world. Fix it."
The word fix was a shackle. Before Lucen could protest—before he could ask what had broken this time, what he'd broken—the Between tore him apart molecule by molecule and fed him through the eye of a needle.
---
Screams. His own.
Fifteen years old, running, the jungle a lung that wouldn't stop bleeding humidity onto his scarred skin. Every wound was a story he couldn't read yet: the white ridge across his ribs where a guard's baton had kissed bone, the burned star-pattern on his shoulder from a brand that kept being reinvented lifetime after lifetime. Lucen's feet found purchase in mud that remembered being stone, being lava, being the corpse of a god. Behind him, something with too many mouths and not enough faces hunted by sound alone.
He burst through a curtain of lianas and into—Jail. The shift was whiplash. Cold stone floor under his cheek, the taste of rust and confession. A man in the next cell was dying from a memory of poison, his last breath forming the shape of Lucen's future name. Then the narrative folded, origami-crisp: in the complexion of humans. Even nature was struggling in a human form.
Another shift. The jungle again, but now the trees had eyes, and they wept sap that looked too much like forgiveness. Lucen realized he was reading the world like a book whose author had abandoned it mid-sentence—each paragraph a different genre, each chapter a different crime.
Maybe the author wanted to rest from the burdens instead of solving it.
The thought wasn't his. It fell from the canopy like a dead bird, rot-soft and inevitable. Lucen understood: the world was a rough draft, a storyboard of suffering, and he was the red pen sent to slice through the inconsistencies.
He ran harder. The scars on his body began to glow, each one a lighthouse trying to warn the next incarnation of the shore. He didn't know what he was running from—the hunters, the memories, the weight of a creation that had learned to create its own anguish. But he knew what he was running toward:
Seven bodies.
They materialized in a clearing where the moonlight hit wrong, casting shadows that pretended to be shapes. Seven corpses, arranged like a starburst constellation, each one wearing his face at a different age. The youngest was seven, the oldest ninety-three, and every single one of them had died by his hand or his neglect or his desperate attempt to fix something that had never asked to be broken.
Lucen—the fifteen-year-old version, the one still bleeding from the jungle's teeth—stood alone among them. His scars pulsed in recognition. The dead Lucens stared up at the canopy, their eyes reflecting a sky that had forgotten how to hold stars.
The narrative held its breath.
The Creator's voice whispered from the throat of a dead man: "Now," it said, "you can begin."
Somewhere, a pen scratched against the skin of the world. The first word of a story that had already ended seven times.
END OF CHAPTER 1.