The real workshop began the next morning, but the intellectual exercises were now just a backdrop to the silent, intense drama unfolding between us.
We were placed in the same breakout group, tasked with brainstorming solutions for watershed management in alpine regions. I spoke little, but when I did, I focused on concepts of balance, of listening to the intelligence of the natural system rather than imposing human will upon it—principles I had learned from him on the slopes of a mythical mountain, centuries ago.
He listened, his expression unreadable, but I could see the wheels turning behind his eyes. My ideas, drawn from a time before time, were resonating with the brilliant, forward-thinking scientist he was in this life. The concepts were sound, regardless of their origin. And that, I knew, would trouble him more than anything else.
During a lunch break, I escaped the lodge and walked down to the lakefront. The water was a sheet of dark glass, reflecting the fiery colours of the autumn trees with perfect clarity. I stood there, breathing in the familiar scent of cold water and pine, feeling a pang of homesickness so acute it was a physical pain.
I heard footsteps on the gravel path behind me. I didn't need to turn to know it was him.
He came to stand beside me; his hands shoved into the pockets of his coat. We stood in silence for a long time, watching a hawk circle high above the lake, its shadow skimming the water's surface.
"I felt it," he said finally, his voice quiet, stripped of its earlier hostility. "When you touched me. I felt... something."
"I know," I said softly.
"I've been having these dreams my whole life," he continued, his voice low, as if confessing a crime. "Mountains. Snow. A woman with dark hair standing at the edge of a cliff, calling a name I can never remember when I wake. I've seen myself in other times, other places, wearing different faces. I've felt deaths that weren't mine." He turned to look at me, and the vulnerability in his eyes was almost too much to bear. "I thought I was going mad. I built an empire on logic, on data, on things I could prove—and all the while, this... this other thing was living inside me, waiting."
I met his gaze, letting all my love, all my loss, all my centuries of waiting show in my eyes. "It wasn't waiting. It was remembering."
"And this language you spoke," he continued. "At the symposium. I've heard it before. In my dreams. It sounds like something I should know, something I do know and understand, but I can't speak it. It's like words on the tip of my tongue that never come."
"The place is called Mount Caelestis-Sol," I whispered. "The Heavenly Sun. It's real—or it was. It's the birthplace of the language you hear in your dreams. The language you once spoke as easily as breathing."
His breath caught. "The mountain with the sun and snow. I've seen it. I've stood on it."
"In your dreams," I said. "And in your memories. In a life before this one. In a hundred lives before this one."
He turned to face me fully, and I saw the war in his eyes—the desperate need to believe warring with the terrified need to dismiss. "Who are you?" he asked again, but this time it was a genuine question, a plea for an answer that could make sense of the chaos inside him.
"I am the one who has been waiting for you," I said. "I am the memory you lost. And I am here to help you find your way back."
The hawk above us cried out—a sharp, lonely sound that seemed to seal the truth of my words. The battle for Kaelen Vance was far from over, but the first, most crucial wall had been breached.
The king was remembering his kingdom.