My first source was the most mundane of oracles: the internet.
I remember the first time I watched it bloom into existence. It was the early 1990s, and I was living in a small apartment in Seattle, working at a used bookstore and trying to stay invisible, as I always did. One of my regular customers—a young man with thick glasses and an enthusiasm I found endearing—kept trying to explain this new thing called "the World Wide Web." I listened politely, not understanding, not really caring. I had seen so many technologies rise and fall. The telephone had been a marvel, but it required wires and operators and luck. Television had brought images into living rooms, but it was a one-way conversation, a monologue from the powerful to the passive.
But the internet was different.
I didn't realize it at first. It grew slowly, incrementally, like all revolutionary things. Bulletin boards gave way to websites. Dial-up squeals gave way to broadband. And suddenly, impossibly, I had access to more information than all the libraries I had ever visited combined.
For someone like me, it was nothing short of miraculous.
For centuries, finding him had meant relying on instinct, luck, and the slow crawl of word-of-mouth. I had crossed oceans because of a rumour overheard in a market. I had spent years in cities where he had already left, following trails that went cold. I had watched him die more times than I could count simply because I couldn't reach him in time—because news travelled at the speed of a horse, a ship, a pair of tired legs.
Memories like Paris haunted me most.
If I had known sooner. If the quarantine announcements had reached me faster. If there had been some way to communicate across the city when the streets were blocked and the trains had stopped running. A single text message. That was all it would have taken. One line of glowing words on a small screen: Where are you? I'm coming. Wait for me.
I lost count of how many times I stood in doorways and pathways I should have crossed sooner, staring at spaces that still held his warmth but no longer contained him. The weight of it never grew lighter. The grief never simplified with repetition. Each time was fresh, sharp, devastating in its own unique way—like learning to break the same bone over and over again, never quite remembering how much it would hurt until the moment it snapped.
There were lifetimes when I arrived weeks too late, finding only a grave marked with a name that meant nothing to anyone but me. There were lifetimes when I arrived years too early, and I would wait—decades sometimes—watching the world turn, counting down to the moment when I could finally meet him. And there were the worst lifetimes, the ones that still visit me in nightmares: the times I arrived just in time to hold his hand, watching the recognition flicker in his fading eyes, hearing him whisper words that suggested he didn't want me to go. And then—then something would tear me away. Circumstance. Fate. The cruel mechanics of the curse itself. I would fight, always fight, but it never mattered. I always had to let go. I would return. But in the end, I was always too late.
So, I learned to carry the grief. I learned to pack it into the corners of my immortal heart, to make room for the next loss, and the next, and the next. I became an expert in sorrow, a connoisseur of farewells. Kaelen Vance had said I have ancient eyes—and he was right, but not for the reasons he imagined. My eyes were ancient because they had watched the same love die a hundred different deaths, and they had not yet learned how to stop hoping.
The internet. iPhones. All of it would have saved him. Saved us. So many times over, if only we'd had them.
And yet.
There were moments, late at night, when I scrolled through the endless river of information and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. I thought about what would happen if the past could see this. If the Council of Ten in fourteenth-century Venice had possessed such power—the ability to track every whisper, every secret, every hidden glance. If the Spanish Inquisition had access to search algorithms and social media. If the witch hunters of early centuries could have coordinated across continents with the ease of a group chat.
Civilization would have burned. Not gradually, but all at once. The powerful would have crushed dissent with a precision that medieval tyrants could only dream of. The secrets that protected the vulnerable would have been exposed. The shadows where people like me once hid would have been flooded with relentless, unforgiving light.
I had watched enough history to know that knowledge, in the wrong hands, was not liberation. It was fuel for the fire.
So, I loved the internet, fiercely and gratefully. I used it to bridge the gaps that had once swallowed entire lifetimes. But it could not erase the centuries of arriving too late. It could not fill the hollow spaces where all those missed moments lived. And I understood, with the weight of centuries behind me, that I was holding a blade that could cut both ways. I kept that knowledge close, like a prayer and a warning.
Sitting cross-legged on my bed that rainy night, my laptop glowing in the darkness, I finally found him.