As he grew older, the dreams changed. The violence remained—always the violence, always the dying, always the cold embrace of death reaching for him—but the angel's face began to resolve, like a photograph developing in slow motion. By the time he was a teenager, he could make out the curve of her jaw, the way it caught the light from whatever impossible sun illuminated his dreams. In university, the shape of her mouth, the way it curved in a smile that was both sad and hopeful. By his late twenties, he could see her eyes.

  Ancient eyes. That was the only word for them. Eyes that had seen things—terrible things, beautiful things, things that spanned centuries and civilizations and the rise and fall of empires. Eyes that looked at him with a love so profound it hurt to witness, a love that seemed to encompass not just who he was in that moment but who he had been and who he would become. A love that was patient and eternal and absolutely, devastatingly real.

  But in these newer dreams, she was always leaving.

  He would see her across a crowded ballroom, her hand extended, her eyes bright with hope, and before he could reach her, the crowd would swallow her. He would push through the press of bodies, calling her name—a name he couldn't remember upon waking—but she would be gone, vanished into the sea of masked faces as if she had never existed.

  He would stand on a mountain peak, snow swirling around him in a frozen cyclone, and watch her walk toward a cliff's edge, never turning back. He would scream for her to stop, to wait, to turn around and see him, but she would keep walking, step after step, until she reached the precipice and simply... disappeared.

  He would reach for her in a narrow street, torchlight flickering on ancient stone walls, and feel her fingers slip through his just as rough hands seized him from behind. He would fight against the hands, would strain every muscle to reach her, but she would recede into the darkness like a dream fading at dawn, and he would be left alone with his captors and his despair.

  The dreams of his own death had been frightening as a child. But these dreams—these dreams of losing her—were a different kind of torment entirely. He would wake with his heart shattering, his hands grasping at empty air, the phantom sensation of her touch still warm on his skin. He would lie in the darkness of his bedroom, gasping, weeping, reaching for someone who wasn't there, and the grief would be so overwhelming that he couldn't move, couldn't speak, could barely breathe.

  He never told anyone about the dreams as an adult. What would he say? I keep dreaming about a woman I've never met, watching her leave or maybe dead or vanish into crowds, and it feels more real than my actual life? He was Kaelen Vance. He dealt in data, in certainties, in the cold hard logic of the biological sciences. He did not deal in phantom women with ancient eyes and the grief of a thousand lifetimes.

  But the dreams persisted. They grew stronger, more vivid, more insistent as he aged. And a few months ago, one had nearly broken him.

  He dreamed of her, as he always did, but this time the dream was different.

  He was in a bedchamber, the kind that belonged to another century—heavy velvet curtains draped around a massive four-poster bed, candles flickering on a distant vanity, the scent of lavender and something else, something that made his chest ache with a longing he couldn't name. The sheets were silk, cool against his skin, but the body beside him was warm.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  She was beneath him, tangled in his arms, her dark hair spread across the pillow like ink spilled on snow. Her skin glowed in the candlelight, and her eyes—those ancient, knowing eyes—were half-lidded with pleasure, fixed on his face with an intensity that made his heart stutter. But her face—he couldn't make out her face. It was there, he knew it was there, but whenever he tried to focus on her features, they blurred, shifting like smoke, like a memory he couldn't quite grasp. He knew she was beautiful—he felt it, knew it with a certainty that went deeper than sight—but her face remained just out of reach, a dream within a dream.

  He moved inside her slowly, deliberately, each thrust a declaration, a promise, a prayer. His lips brushed her temple, her cheek, the corner of her mouth, and he whispered against her skin—words in a language he shouldn't know, sounds that were older than speech itself. Sweetness. Devotion. A love so vast it could swallow the stars.

  She gasped beneath him, her fingers digging into his shoulders, her body arching to meet his. She tried to speak, tried to whisper something back—her lips moved, forming words he couldn't hear, couldn't grasp—but he knew, with a certainty that transcended conscious thought, that she was telling him she loved him. That she would always love him. That she would wait for him, across any distance, through any lifetime.

  He wanted to stay here forever, lost in this moment, in this woman, in this love that felt more real than anything his waking mind had ever known.

  But dreams, even the sweetest, do not last.

  The room dissolved. The warmth of her body faded. The scent of lavender became something else—smoke, thick and choking. The silk sheets became rough wool, the soft candlelight became the hazy glow of too many torches in too small a space.

  He stood in a room thick with smoke—not the acrid burn of battlefields, which he had also dreamed, but the hazy haze of candle wax and rising tempers, of too many bodies pressed into too small a space. Voices filled the air, urgent and fearful, speaking in Portuguese. Portugal. He couldn't have named the city or the year, but the language settled into his bones with the weight of recognition, as if he had spoken it in another life.

  He looked down at himself. A brocade coat, deep blue with silver threading that caught the candlelight. Breeches. Buckled shoes. His hand—his hand was reaching for someone across the chaos of the crowded room, reaching with a desperation that transcended conscious thought.

  And there she was.

  Her dark hair was pinned up, escaping in curls around her face that framed her features like a halo. She wore a simple gown of cream and gold that seemed to glow in the smoky light, and her eyes—her ancient, knowing eyes—were fixed on him with an intensity that stopped his heart.

  "Kaelen." She spoke his name—his modern name, the one his current mother gave him, the name that belonged to this life and no other—and it sounded impossible in that room, in that time, in that body that wore a brocade coat and buckled shoes. "Find me. In the next life. FIND me."

  He reached. His fingers brushed hers. For one electric moment, he felt the warmth of her skin, the desperate pressure of her grip, the pulse of her life beating against his palm.

  Then the crowd surged. Hands grabbed him from behind—rough hands, violent hands, hands that belonged to men who smelled of sweat and blood and revolution. Voices shouted "Aristocrat!" "Traitor!" "To the guillotine!" He was pulled backward, away from her, her fingers slipping through his like water, like smoke, like everything beautiful and precious that he had ever tried to hold.

  And then he felt it—a sharp, white-hot agony exploding through his chest from behind. He looked down and saw it: the glistening tip of a blade erupting through his brocade coat, just below his sternum, stained dark with his own blood. Before he could process, before he could cry out, another pierced through his side. Then another. And another. They kept coming, over and over, each thrust methodical, efficient—designed not just to kill, but to ensure he stayed dead.

  "NO!"

  The scream tore from his throat, raw and primal, but she was already receding, her face dissolving into the smoke, into the chaos, into the hungry maw of the Revolution that consumed everything it touched. And he—he felt the cold bite of shackles on his wrists, the rough jostle of the mob, the press of bodies all around him, and then—

  Then nothing.