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Kingdom of Myria lay cradled at the mountain’s feet like an offering placed deliberately before the gods. Rivers never ran dry. Granaries never emptied. Even the winters were merciful.
People of the kingdom believed this abundance came from devotion — prayers whispered with bowed heads, sacrifices and blood laid upon cold stone of the temple floor at the mountain’s summit.
Sylus had knelt there more times than he could count. As a knight of Myria, loyalty was not merely expected; it was carved into bone. He was raised beneath banners stitched with vows, trained to swing his sword in service of a god whose name was never spoken aloud, only invoked in reverence and fear. The Unnamed God did not forgive.
And the god had demanded a death.
Elara’s cottage was deep within the forest, far enough that even hunters hesitated to wander near it. The trees around it bent strangely, roots coiling like knotted fingers above the soil, as if the land itself recoiled from what lived there.
Inside the cottage, Elara pressed her palms over her ears — never to work.
"...cold, so cold"
"why did you leave us"
"my bones ache..."
The voices layered over one another — stags, goats, birds, cattle — spirits, each once offered at the temple altar in the name of devotion. Death clung to her like a second skin. The god’s curse had sharpened her senses until the veil between life and death was thin as breath.
She rose unsteadily from her chair and crossed the room, bare feet brushing against the wooden floorboards. Her cottage was small, simple. Dried herbs hung from the ceiling. Bones lay carefully arranged along the walls, not as trophies but as wards, etched with sigils meant to quiet the dead. Though, they rarely listened to it.
Elara had once worn white. She had been the priestess—the god’s chosen voice, the bridge between heaven and earth. People had knelt for her blessing, kissed her hands, trusted her prayers to keep their children fed and their homes standing.
Until they learned.
Necromancy.
Not of men — but of the animals whose blood soaked the altar day after day. She had only wanted to ease their passing. To understand the cost of abundance. To listen. The god had listened too. And the god had been furious.
Her memories of the trial burned brighter than any fire. The temple steps slick with rain. The way the people would not meet her eyes. The god’s voice — vast and merciless — stripping her of title, of blessing. Of silence. Reduced to The Witch from The Priestess
"You will hear them", He had said, "every life taken in my name."
Elara flinched as a new presence brushed the edge of her awareness. A living one. Someone was coming.
—
Sylus dismounted at the forest’s edge. The air felt wrong here, heavy as though the trees themselves watched him. His hand tightened instinctively around the hilt of his sword, steel polished to a dull gleam. He had faced beasts, rebels, and men who begged as they died, but this mission unsettled him in a way he refused to name.
Kill the witch.
That was the command.
"She was an abomination", the priests said, "a blight upon the god’s favor. Sole cause of the strange omens that had begun to ripple through the kingdom—livestock born still, prayers unanswered, whispers of rot beneath the abundance."
Sylus had not questioned the order. He never did.
The forest closed around him as he walked, footsteps measured, senses sharp. It did not take long to find the cottage. He stopped several paces away, eyes narrowing. It looked… ordinary. No twisted spires. No blackened stones. Just a small wooden home crouched among the trees, smoke curling gently from its chimney.
He drew his sword anyway. And then the door opened.
She stood framed in the doorway, dark hair loose around her shoulders, eyes too sharp for someone who lived alone. Clad in a soft, dark linen gown with long sleeves and a leather cord belt, with subtle herb charms hung into it. There were shadows beneath her eyes that no sleep could banish. And she was looking directly at him. Elara’s heart pounded, but she did not step back.
This is it, she thought, The god finally sends a blade instead of a voice. His confidence was the first thing I noticed before I noticed the hatred in his eyes. Hatred that was directed at me. But fine, I deserve the hatred ... I guess.
“You’re early,” she said, surprised by how steady her voice sounded.
Sylus stiffened. “You knew I was coming.”
“I always know,” Elara replied quietly. “The dead warned me.”
Something flickered across his expression—disgust, perhaps, or unease.
“By order of the Kingdom of Myria” he said, lifting his sword, “you are to be executed for heresy and defiance of the Unnamed God.”
Elara studied him for a long moment and continued, “You don’t want to be here."
Sylus scoffed. “You don’t know what I want.”
“No,” she agreed softly. “But I hear what follows you."
His grip faltered. For the first time in years, Sylus hesitated. He did not strike; told himself it was strategy — that killing a necromancer required caution. But when Elara turned and walked back into her cottage, leaving the door open as if daring him to follow, he did.
The interior smelled of earth and smoke. Symbols carved into the walls prickled against his senses, not painful, but… aware.
“You can kill me now,” Elara said, setting a kettle over the fire. “Or you can sit.”
She did not face him. Sylus should have taken advantage of that. Instead, he lowered his sword.
“Why didn’t you run?” he demanded.
“Because the forest would bring you back,” she replied. “And because I’m tired.”
That struck him — more than any spell. Sylus had expected madness. Defiance. Pleading. ... Not exhaustion.
—
Days passed.
Then weeks.
He told the kingdom he needed proof of her death—her head, her heart, something undeniable. He told himself he was waiting for the right moment. In truth, he stayed because every night, the dead grew louder around her, and she endured it alone. He began to help — at first out of duty, then habit, then something dangerously close to care. He repaired the roof. Chopped wood. Stood between her and the forest when shadows moved.
Elara noticed everything. The way his armor came off piece by piece each evening, like shedding a skin. The scars mapping his body — silent testimonies to devotion. The way his eyes softened when she flinched at a voice only she could hear. Sometimes, when the dead screamed too loudly, Sylus would sit beside her and say nothing at all. It helped.
When he touched her for the first time, it was accidental — his hand brushing hers as they passed a bowl between them. The contact lingered. Neither pulled away. Something fragile took root. Something forbidden. And somewhere, high atop the mountain, the Unnamed God watched.
The dead learned Sylus’s name before Elara did. They whispered it into her skull while she slept, curled beside the hearth with a blanket pulled tight around her shoulders.
"steel-blood"
"oath-bearer"
"he has killed before"
She woke gasping. Sylus was there instantly.
“Elara.” His voice cut through the noise, grounding, firm. He crouched beside her, hands hovering just short of touching, as if afraid she might break. “You’re safe.”
She laughed weakly, “That’s a generous word.” The voices faded to a murmur, sulking at being ignored. Elara pressed her forehead to her knees, breathing slowly.
“They don’t like you,” she said.
“I’ve been told worse.”
That earned a small smile — brief, but real. Sylus watched it linger on her lips longer than he should have, then disappear as she straightened.
“They know what you’re here for,” she added quietly. The words landed between them like a blade set carefully on a table. Sylus did not lie. Not then. “I was sent to kill you,” he said. Elara nodded once, as though confirming something she had already accepted. “I know.”
“You’re not afraid?”
“I am,” she said honestly. “But not of you.”
That should have relieved him. Instead, it hollowed something out in his chest.
—
Days stretched into something close to peace. Sylus stopped wearing his armor inside the cottage. The metal unsettled the dead, and Elara noticed he flinched less when their voices rose if he was unburdened by it. He began sleeping near the door, sword within reach, back against the wall like a sentinel guarding something sacred.
Her.
Elara watched him when she thought he wasn’t looking. She had seen many men — petitioners, soldiers, nobles — but Sylus carried himself differently. There was a restraint to him, a tension coiled beneath his skin like a drawn bow. He did not waste movement. He did not waste words. And yet, with her, he listened. She told him about the temple — the way the stone floors were always cold, no matter the season; how the animals were brought in garlanded with flowers, praised even as their throats were cut. She confessed how she had begun whispering apologies over their bodies, how the whispers turned into prayers, and prayers into something else.
“I never meant to defy the god,” she said one night, staring into the fire. “I only wanted the dead to be heard.”
Sylus stared at the flames too. “Gods don’t like competition.”
“No,” she agreed. “They don’t.”
And the God made his displeasure known soon after.
The forest never remains the same. It changes. Trees near the cottage began to rot from the inside out, bark splitting to reveal blackened cores. Animals stopped coming near. The dead grew louder, more frantic, voices overlapping until Elara clutched her head and sank to the floor, blood trickling from her nose.
Sylus caught her before she fell. For the first time, he held her without restraint. Her body was warm despite the chill that suddenly permeated the air. She trembled violently, fingers digging into his tunic as if anchoring herself to the living world.
“Make it stop,” she whispered, not to him but to something far beyond. The ground shook. Sylus felt it then — the pressure, vast and suffocating, like a mountain pressing down on his spine. The Unnamed God did not speak, but its will was unmistakable.
Finish it.
Sylus drew his sword with shaking hands. Elara looked up at him, eyes glassy, lips parted. For a heartbeat, he thought she might beg. She didn’t.
“Do it,” she said hoarsely. “Before it takes everything.”
Something inside him broke. Instead of striking her, Sylus drove his blade into the earth. Steel rang against stone as he planted himself between Elara and the unseen force bearing down upon them.
“No,” he said, voice raw. “You don’t get to have her.”
The pressure intensified, crushing, furious. Sylus screamed. Not in pain — but in defiance. And for the first time in recorded memory, the Unnamed God recoiled.
That night, Sylus dreamed. He stood not in the forest, but in the temple at the mountain’s peak. Blood slicked the altar. The air reeked of iron and incense. He was not a knight. He was something older. Elara stood before him, dressed not in priestess white but in crimson, eyes glowing with power unrestrained. Around them lay the dead — not animals, but men, soldiers bearing Myria’s crest.
“You promised,” she said.
“I tried,” he replied — and realized with horror, that he meant it. The god descended then, vast and blinding, its voice splitting the world. "You will live again," he thundered at Sylus "you will serve again.
And you will kill her."
He woke drenched in sweat, gasping. Elara sat beside him, hand hovering uncertainly near his arm.
“You were screaming,” she said softly. Sylus stared at her like he was seeing a ghost.
“How long,” he asked slowly, “has this god ruled Myria?"
Elara frowned. “As long as anyone remembers.”
“Then it’s not the first time,” he said. “And it won’t be the last.”
—
It was raining the night everything changed between them. The storm battered the cottage, thunder shaking the walls. The dead were restless, riled by the god’s lingering fury. Elara paced, hands clenched, breath uneven.
“I can’t silence them,” she admitted. “Not tonight.
“Then don’t,” Sylus said. “Let them speak.”
She looked at him sharply. “You don’t understand what you’re asking."
“I understand you’re hurting."
That was enough. She stopped pacing. Slowly, she approached him, standing so close he could feel the heat of her body, smell the smoke clinging to her hair.
“Stay,” she said. He did.
She rested her forehead against his chest, tentative at first, then desperate. Sylus wrapped his arms around her, firm, anchoring. Her breath shuddered against him as the voices receded — not gone, but muted, soothed by proximity to life. “I don’t know how much time we have,” she murmured.Sylus tightened his hold. “Then we’ll take what we can.”
When she looked up at him, rain-dim light flickering in her eyes, he knew there was no turning back. Their kiss was slow, reverent, as though both feared breaking something sacred. It deepened not with hunger but with grief — two cursed souls clinging to warmth in a world determined to tear them apart. Later, when they lay entwined beneath blankets, bodies pressed close, Elara traced the scars along his chest.
“Every life you’ve taken,” she whispered. “I can hear them too.”
Sylus closed his eyes. “Then stay,” he said. “And help me bear it.” She did not answer. Because somewhere deep within her bones, the dead were beginning to remember another life.
Before Sylus was a knight, before Myria had walls of stone and banners of gold, he had been something closer to a saint. In the first kingdom — so old even the god barely remembered its name — Sylus had been the god’s chosen hand. Not a soldier, but a vessel. He spoke the god’s will, carried its miracles, and enforced its law.
Elara existed then too.She had not been a priestess.She had been a warning. Born with the rare ability to hear the echo left behind when life ended, Elara was meant to become proof of the god’s mercy—someone who could soothe the dead, close their passing gently, and ensure sacrifice did not turn into suffering. But she asked questions.
"Why must blood be spilled so frequently?"
"Why did abundance demand pain?"
"Why did the god never answer the dead—only the living?"
Sylus had loved her then. And that love had been his first betrayal. When Elara began using her gift without the god’s permission — guiding the spirits of sacrificed animals away instead of letting their pain fuel the god’s power — the god punished both of them.
Elara was cursed. Sylus was spared. That was the god’s cruelty. Because sparing Sylus meant binding him to the neverending cycle. The god did not curse Sylus because he needed him functional. He cursed him with memory instead. Not full memory, never that mercy — but fragments, instincts, dreams soaked in guilt.
Across lifetimes, Sylus would always be drawn to Elara. He would always be placed close to her. He would always be given a choice. And every time, the god demanded the same thing:
Kill her.
Why?
Because Elara’s death stabilized the curse. As long as she lived, the dead remembered injustice. As long as she lived, the god’s power leaked through the cracks of suffering it pretended not to hear. As long as she lived, the world asked why.
Sylus was the solution. The god’s loyal blade, forced to love the very thing he was meant to erase.
Elara learned the truth the night the god finally spoke to her again. It was clarity. She collapsed as the voices fell silent all at once, replaced by a vast, singular presence that filled her mind like cold light. Her hands shook as images flooded her—lives she had never lived but somehow remembered.
A healer burned at a stake.
A queen executed for heresy.
A scholar drowned for writing the wrong words.
And always—
Sylus.
Different faces. Same eyes. Same grief.
“You made him kill me,” Elara whispered.
"I made him choose," the god corrected, "Every time."
Her breath hitched. “Why me?”
"Because you listen," the god replied, "And gods are not meant to be heard."
She saw then the truth of her curse. The voices were not punishment. They were evidence. The god did not want her silenced because she practiced necromancy. He wanted her silenced because necromancy proved that death remembered truth.
Sylus felt her realization like a blade between his ribs. He staggered as memories surged — not whole, never whole — but enough.
Hands stained with her blood.
Her eyes searching his face as she died.
His scream echoing through centuries.
Elara found him kneeling, trembling. “You knew,” she said softly, “You always know.”
Sylus could not look at her. “I never remember soon enough.” She knelt before him, lifting his face with trembling fingers.
“This is the life where you didn’t kill me,” she whispered. “That’s why he's angry.”
Tears burned his eyes. “I was sent here to end you.”
Elara leaned forward, pressing her forehead to his. “And instead,” she said, voice breaking, “you loved me.”
That was when the god decided this cycle would end in blood not chosen by Sylus’s hand.
The god did not forgive defiance. Myria began to rot quietly. Crops still grew, but tasted of ash. Rivers flowed, but livestock refused to drink. Children were born screaming, their cries too sharp, too knowing. The priests whispered of imbalance, of a curse that lingered so long as she breathed.
Elara felt it before anyone said her name. The dead changed. They were no longer only animals.
One night, as Sylus slept beside her, she sat upright with a gasp, hands shaking.
“They’re closer,” she whispered.
Sylus woke instantly. “Who?”
“Men.” Her throat tightened. “Knights.”
He knew then. The kingdom would not wait forever.
They did not speak of the future. They spoke of small things.
Of how Elara liked her tea too strong.
Of how Sylus used to be afraid of storms as a child.
Of the way the forest sounded almost peaceful at dawn.
At night, they lay tangled together beneath blankets, skin warm against skin, breaths syncing instinctively. No urgency. No need to prove anything.
Elara traced the scars on Sylus’s chest. “Does it still hurt?” she asked. He swallowed. “Not as much as losing you will. She pressed a kiss there, gentle, lingering.
—
Sir Caelan arrived at dawn. He rode a white horse, armor gleaming, crest polished bright enough to blind. Where Sylus was restraint and shadow, Caelan was faith made flesh — unyielding, righteous, terrifying in his certainty.
“Elara of the Mountain,” Caelan called, dismounting with ceremonial grace. “By decree of the Unnamed God, your sentence is final.”
Sylus stepped between them without thinking, “She is under my protection.”
Caelan’s gaze slid to him, sharp and cold. “You were ordered to kill her.”
“I chose not to.”
“Then you have failed both god and kingdom.”
Elara watched them from the doorway, heart hammering. She could hear Caelan’s dead already — men who had died gladly, convinced their devotion sanctified the blade in his hand. She understood, then; this knight would not hesitate.
The fight was brutal.
Steel rang through the forest, birds scattering, earth torn beneath their feet. Sylus fought like a man with nothing left to lose. Caelan fought like a man who believed heaven watched his every strike. Elara screamed when Caelan feinted low and drove his blade through Sylus’s side. Sylus fell to one knee.
“No!” she cried, power surging instinctively. The ground trembled as bones clawed upward — stags, goats, creatures long dead answering her call. Caelan recoiled in horror. “Witch!”
And in that moment—while Sylus struggled to rise—Caelan struck. His sword pierced Elara’s chest.
The world stopped.
Elara gasped, eyes wide, disbelief flickering across her face as blood bloomed crimson against her skin. She looked not at Caelan, but at Sylus. Her lips moved.
Sylus screamed.
Caelan staggered back, horror finally cracking his righteousness. “I — I did what the god demanded.”
Sylus did not hear him.
He crawled to Elara, hands shaking as he pressed them against the wound, as if he could hold her soul inside her body by force alone.
“Elara, stay with me... please...”
Her fingers trembled as they reached for his face.
“I think,” she whispered faintly, “this is the life where it hurts the most.”
“No,” Sylus choked. “No, I won’t let you—”
She smiled. Soft. Apologetic.
“I just… I just wanted to protect you, did I… succeed??”
And then she was gone.
—
They never found Caelan’s body. Only his sword, half-melted into the earth as if the world itself had rejected it.
Sylus buried Elara beneath the tree where she used to sit and listen to the forest breathe. He did not mark the grave. He did not pray. Gods had forfeited the right to his words. He stayed beside her grave until his blood dried black against his armor and the voices of the dead grew unbearably loud — because now they carried her absence.
Weeks later, something answered him. Not a god. Not a priest. The devil appeared not in flame, but in silence.
“You love her,” it said pleasantly.
Sylus did not look up. “I failed her.”
“You failed a god,” the devil corrected. “I offer better terms.”
Necromancy tore him apart. It was not gentle like Elara’s. It was hunger, rot, defiance of natural order. He learned the language of death, the cost of binding souls, the price of immortality. His heart stopped beating the night the ritual completed. He did not die. He endured.
“You will never follow her,” the devil had said. “Only wait.” Sylus accepted. Because waiting was better than forgetting.
And when centuries passed, when kingdoms fell and gods faded into myth, Sylus remained. Alone. Waiting.
Gods faded into myths, then into data archives.
He learned every language death spoke. He dismantled the god’s remaining shrines one by one, ensuring it would never again demand sacrifice in his name. Every lifetime, he searched. Every lifetime, he found her too late. Until 2054.
The world no longer believed in gods. It believed in survival. Wanderers poured from spatial ruptures, twisted remnants of something not meant to exist. Cities fortified themselves behind energy barriers. Outside the walls lay lawless zones — black markets, rogue factions, forgotten tech.
N109 was the worst of them. And Sylus ruled it. Not as a tyrant, but as an inevitability. They called him a demon. A relic. A monster who could not die. He did not care. Because on a routine scan from the Hunter Association, he saw a name that made the world tilt.
Elara.
She was a deep space hunter. Efficient. Fearless. Exceptionally attuned to Wanderer cores — too attuned, some said. She could sense fluctuations others missed. Sense threats before scanners registered them. Yet still, she dreamed of forests. Of blood on stone. Of a man whose eyes were full of grief.
—
They met during a Wanderer outbreak near the edge of N109. Elara’s team was overwhelmed. Comms went dead. Energy blades flickered. Then the Wanderers stopped moving. Not dead. Held.
Sylus stepped out of the smoke like a shadow made solid. Black coat. Crimson eyes. Power coiled tightly beneath his skin.
“You’re trespassing,” he said calmly.
Elara raised her weapon anyway. Their eyes met.
Something broke inside her chest.
“I—” she hesitated, breath catching. “Do I know you?”
Sylus looked at her the way one looks at the sunrise after centuries of night.
“No,” he said softly.
But his voice trembled.
“Not yet.”
And for the first time in centuries, waiting did not feel endless.