57.

Alina didn’t move for a long time.

The door remained ajar behind him, but she didn’t rush to close it. She just sat there, the blanket pooled around her legs, her fingers trembling against the soft wool. The hum of the night returned, the distant hiss of tires on wet streets, the murmur of a world continuing without pause. But inside her, everything had stopped.

She pressed a hand to her chest. Her heart still beat, steady and slow, but it felt like it wasn’t hers. Like it belonged to someone else—someone from a time she couldn’t remember, someone who had lived and died and burned and still hadn’t left.

Was it madness to believe him?

Every word Caelan had said spun in her mind like golden thread on the edge of fraying. The Great Library. The spirit of fantasy. The fire. A woman who had died in the ashes, brave and unflinching. And her. Always her.

Alina had spent her life obsessed with fantasy. She wrote stories when the world felt too cold. She filled her pages with dragons and towers and ancient lore. And now—now it turned out she had been writing echoes of a life she never knew she had lived?

Tears pricked her eyes again. She wasn’t sure what kind they were this time. Not sorrow. Not joy. Something else. Something deep and shapeless and terrifying.

She stood, slowly, unsteady like a deer learning its legs again. The air in the room still held his presence. The scent of him—cedarwood and something stormy. The warmth of his voice. The weight of the truth.

She walked to the window. Her fingers touched the glass where he had stood. The street below was slick with rain, shimmering gold and shadow. She searched for him. But Caelan was gone.

She closed her eyes.

And in the dark behind her eyelids, a flame stirred.

A memory, not quite real. A sensation.

Bookshelves taller than temples. A girl with ink-stained fingers. Laughter echoing through halls of parchment and sunlight. And then, the scream. Fire swallowing air. A hand slipping from hers. A voice calling her name—not Alina. Another name. Older. Forgotten.

She stumbled back.

Her knees hit the floor, and she sat there on the rug, gasping. Her fingers clenched into fists.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered into the silence.

But maybe she did.

Maybe some part of her always had.

She had always felt like she didn’t belong. Like the world was tilted just a bit too far in a direction no one else seemed to notice. She used to say she was born out of time. Now maybe she knew why.

She was reborn.

Was that even possible?

Was any of it?

She didn’t know. But she remembered how he looked at her. Not like a stranger. Not like a man enchanted by a girl. But like someone who had searched through lifetimes just to find one familiar face in the dark.

She couldn’t sleep. Not that night.

She made tea with shaking hands. Burned her tongue on the first sip. Wandered from room to room with no purpose. And always, her thoughts returned to Caelan.

To his voice. To the pain in his eyes. To the quiet resignation when he said he would wait.

To the words he left her with.

You don’t have to remember. Not yet.

She didn’t know what she would do tomorrow.

But tonight, she sat on her balcony with the blanket over her shoulders and the rain curling in from the edge of the roof. She opened her journal. Not to write fiction. But to write everything he said. Every line. Every moment. Every feeling.

Because she didn’t want to forget.

Because maybe—just maybe—a part of her already remembered.

And for the first time in her life, she didn’t feel so alone.