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- Existential angst, blood/death imagery, references to recurring deaths across past lives, consensual blood drinking, vampire turning
I love this original story I wrote for Battleship last year and thought I’d share it here — why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Originally posted to AO3 on July 18, 2025. Read To Your Everlasting Life on AO3.
Summary: “I have spent lifetimes finding you, only to stand as a helpless mourner at the edge of your grave. I have watched you flicker and fade, again and again, and I have carried the ghost of each loss into the next search. And now… now, in this life, you are Ileana. This brilliant, defiant, fearless version of you. And I cannot do it again. I cannot watch the world take you from me. Not this time.”
Content Warnings: Existential angst, blood/death imagery, references to recurring deaths across past lives, vampire turning, consensual blood drinking
Originally posted to AO3 on July 18, 2025. Read To Your Everlasting Life on AO3.
Summary: “I have spent lifetimes finding you, only to stand as a helpless mourner at the edge of your grave. I have watched you flicker and fade, again and again, and I have carried the ghost of each loss into the next search. And now… now, in this life, you are Ileana. This brilliant, defiant, fearless version of you. And I cannot do it again. I cannot watch the world take you from me. Not this time.”
Content Warnings: Existential angst, blood/death imagery, references to recurring deaths across past lives, vampire turning, consensual blood drinking
You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turn’d so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.
—Dante Gabriel Rosetti, “Sudden Light”
The sun was performing its daily, extravagant act of self-immolation, and Trajan observed it from a careful distance. For him, the event was not one of beauty but of pure mechanics: it was a theorem of light, an exhaustively documented phenomenon and nothing more. Trajan stood in the burgeoning penumbra of a marram-crowned dune, the day’s residual warmth having already bled out of the sands, leaving behind a coolness he found to be rather pleasant. It was much nicer than the sunset anyhow, which he’d always registered as a cartographer might register a coastline, noting its features, its gradations, its inevitable recession, but with no more emotional investment than he would give to a map of a country he would never visit. He had outlived awe. He had seen this spectacle ignite the stained glass of Chartres and drown itself in the slate-grey waters of the Neva; he had watched it spill ribbons of molten gold over the sand seas of the Empty Quarter. The locations changed, but the process remained a constant—a grandiose and predictable pageant of atmospheric refraction that no longer stirred in him any vestige of awe. Repetition, stretched across an unnatural expanse of years, was a potent solvent for wonder. It was merely a signal, the ringing of a celestial bell that announced the coming of his own time and the end of hers.
She was seated closer to the water’s lacy edge, a votary before an altar. She did not simply watch the sky; she communed with it. Her posture—knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them—was one of complete absorption. The crepuscular light, that thick, honeyed glow of the world’s final waking moments, found in her a perfect subject. It caught in the fine, almost invisible hairs on her arms, turning them into a shimmering halo. It ignited the umber of her hair into a hundred thousand shades of copper and rust. It warmed the curve of her cheek into the faint flush of a ripe peach. She was a composition of transient, mortal warmth—the soft, perishable textures of life.
She was a nereid born of the sunset itself.
He remembered her as Catelijn in Bruges, a miniaturist whose fingers, perpetually stained with lapis and cochineal, smelled of linseed oil and turpentine. He recalled the shocking scarlet of her blood against the snow in a Polish forest, where she had been called Jagoda and had a propensity for humming folk songs that were centuries older than the nation that claimed them. He held the memory of her as a dozen other women, a gallery of ghosts in his mind, each one a perfect, intricate vessel for the same soul—a soul he was tethered to by a cord of longing so ancient it had become a part of his own inert anatomy. Each time he found her, the world momentarily regained a measure of its lost color. Each time, he lost her to the blundering, witless savagery of mortal life. A wasted lung, a misplaced step, the casual cruelty of other men.
This time, he had promised himself, the cycle would break. He would offer her the only true permanence he knew. He would grant Ileana the immense, silent stillness of his own condition.
“Trajan.” His name had not been uttered loudly, yet it travelled to him with perfect clarity, cutting through the percussive rhythm of the surf. Ileana did not look back, her entire body oriented toward the shimmering sea. “It is absurd to watch from the shadows. The day is over. Here, come.”
The invitation was simple, yet it held for him the complexity of a formal challenge. To step out from the dune’s deepening umbra was to enter Ileana’s world fully, to stand on the shore of a sea of light whose every wave was a subtle agony. The last rays of the sun, now a flattened, searing arc on the lip of the world, did not warm his skin; they laid upon it with the prickling insistence of nettles, a thousand microscopic points of irritation. An allergy to life itself.
He moved. His feet made no purchase in the loose sand, displacing it without sound, a ghost’s passage. He came to stand beside her, the air around her a palpable shimmer of warmth, a cloud of life that smelled of salt, of her skin, of the intoxicating chemistry of her blood pulsing a mere fraction of an inch from the air. The faint, damp chill of the evening air was beginning to descend, and on her it condensed as a living dew. On him, it was merely cold settling on cold.
“You see?” Ileana murmured, a note of quiet triumph in her voice. “It does not burn.” She mistook Trajan’s hesitation for fear, a charming and utterly incorrect assumption.
Trajan did not answer, for he was not looking at the sunset. He was looking at the way the light, in its final, desperate moments, mapped the delicate tracery of veins at Ileana’s temple and caught in the liquid depth of her eyes. Those eyes, the color of sea glass, held the reflection of the fire, a tiny, perfect star of impossible heat. He could chart the sky’s decline by observing its changing geography on the surface of her cornea.
The great, cosmic engine of his thirst began to turn within him. Its workings were silent, its gears carved from vacuum and its pistons driven by pure want. This was the patient, primordial mechanism that had, over the course of his first century, mounted a coup within the country of his own body. It was now an omnipotent and omnipresent monarchy that had long ago usurped the gentle, rhythmic democracy of a human heart, leaving that vestigial muscle to atrophy in his chest cavity like a mummified relic in a forgotten tomb. The engine generated no heat, only a pull; a terrible, hollowing-out that started as a dryness on the tongue and expanded into a negative pressure building behind the eyes, a vortex spinning in the hollow of the throat. It was a state of being that demanded its opposite, a void that screamed for substance.
And its entire, terrifying focus, its sole and maddening pole star, was Ileana. The aroma of the life singing in her veins was a lodestone dragging his every inert particle toward her warmth. The sound of her pulse, that frantic drumming against the shore of the world, became the siren song for which he would gladly shatter his stillness against the rocks of her mortality. The thirst promised a cessation of this internal grinding, a communion so absolute it bordered on dissolution—for him, a moment of sublime, blinding synthesis, a filling of the endless void; for her, a brief, sharp terror, and then the long, unbroken peace.
Yes. There would be no more Catelijns dying with paint on their hands; no more Jagodas staining the snow. Only Ileana, immutable, eternal, a perfect statue beside him in the endless gallery of the night, able, at last, to live an everlasting life.
Was it a gift? Or was it the ultimate act of vandalism—to take this vibrant, breathing masterpiece and coat it in the sterile, unchanging lacquer of his own existence?
As if sensing the turn of his thoughts, Ileana finally broke her gaze from the horizon and looked into his eyes. The full, heartbreaking force of her vitality met him. A small smile played on her lips, a smile that knew nothing of his internal calculus, of the centuries of loss that underpinned his every quiet moment.
“You look at me as if I am the one setting.” There was a teasing lilt to her words.
“The sun is a crude astronomical event,” Trajan stated, his own words emerging with a formal, almost arid preciseness. “You are… less predictable.”
Ileana’s smile widened. It was a devastatingly beautiful smile, as was the rest of her. She reached out, her fingers warm and certain, and wrapped them around his hand. The contact was a shock, a jolt of pure information. When she touched him, the warmth of her living flesh did not spread through Trajan; rather, his own intrinsic coldness seemed to drain toward her, a void seeking to equalize. The life in her—that restless dance of a million tiny, dying and rebirthing cells—was a palpable hum against his inert flesh. He could tap out the faint, steady rhythm of her pulse through her palm, that frantic, frantic drumming.
Trajan looked down at their joined hands. Ileana’s hands, alive with color, the knuckles showing the faint pink of exertion, the nails perfect, opalescent shells. His hands, slabs of marble and memory, bloodless and pale, the skin stretched taut over the fine, sharp architecture of bone. The contrast was not, as he had so often thought, between life and its absence. It was between a state of constant, chaotic flux and one of serene, terrible permanence. Her warmth was a fire, and all fires must eventually consume their fuel and gutter into ash. His cold was the cold of deep space, of the void between stars—a state of being that did not burn, did not change, did not end. It simply was.
And in that moment, the entire edifice of his resolve crumbled. He had imagined this act as a preservation, a way of placing her under glass, safe from the inexorable decay of time. But the truth, he now saw with a clarity that was its own form of pain, was that the glass was already around him. He was the one locked within his own vitrine, watching the world through a distorting lens. To turn her would not be to save her from death. It would be to drag her into his prison, to force her to watch the sunsets through his eyes—to see the physics but forget the fire, to know the colors but lose the glory. He would be stealing the world from her, a theft so total and so catastrophic it made his own long damnation seem a triviality.
The last sliver of the sun vanished, and with it, the warm light of the day. The spectacle was over. The sky, stripped of its fire, deepened into a vast, melancholic expanse of indigo and violet, punctured by the first diamond-chip of a planet. The world was surrendering to Trajan’s element. This was his time, his kingdom of shadow and silence. And holding Ileana’s hand, he had never felt more like an exile from it.
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “Now it is our time,” she whispered, leaning her head against his shoulder for a moment. The subtle weight of her, the scent of her hair, the residual warmth of her skin through the fabric of his coat—it was a constellation of sensory data Trajan could not process, only endure.
He looked out at the sea, which had become a dark, shifting mirror for the nascent stars. Each wave, an effacing sheet of gray, rendered the faint indentation of Ileana’s presence moot, reducing the brief testament of her mass to a nullity of glistening sand. This programmatic indifference, this universal tic of dissolution that returned all things to their elemental state, did not so much ignite his fury as give it a sudden, immaculate target. It was an ancient, ossified contempt, awakened now and aimed with precision at this grand, witless mechanism of decay. He would not be a bystander. He would perform a singular act of expropriation. He would wrench Ileana from the cogwork of causality, excise her from the sequence of rot and reincarnation, and grant her instead the changeless permanence of his own damnation—which, in this moment, felt indistinguishable from a state of grace.
A smile touched Ileana’s face, a knowing, playful curve of lips. She shifted on the driftwood, the movement a small disruption in his focused state.
“You have gone a thousand leagues away, Trajan,” she murmured. “What is it that you see out there in the dark that holds you so captive?”
Trajan turned his head slowly, his eyes meeting Ileana’s at last. They were not cold, not now; they burned with a dark, imploring fire that had been banked for centuries.
“The nexus of my entire history with you.”
Ileana’s smile faded, her amusement giving way to a beautiful, clear-eyed confusion. “With me?”
“With the soul that is currently called Ileana,” Trajan clarified, the words spilling from him now, an avalanche of confession held back for too long. “I remember the quiet light of a Bruges studio, where it belonged to Catelijn, a miniaturist whose hands were always stained with lapis and whose fingers smelled of linseed oil. A fever took her in three days. I remember the echo of a song in a snow-choked Polish forest, where it was Jagoda’s, a voice warm as honey against the cold, silenced by a stray piece of lead meant for a soldier.”
His gaze intensified, becoming something so close to a physical touch, a searching of her very essence. “And in every life, we find each other. In every life, we fall in love. And every time, you are changed—braver, perhaps, or kinder, or more stubborn. Your eyes a different shade, your hands skilled in a new art. But the soul, the light within, the fundamental music of you… that is always the same. And every time, the ending is the same: a clumsy butchery of fate.”
He took a step closer, breaking the space between them. “I have spent lifetimes finding you, only to stand as a helpless mourner at the edge of your grave. I have watched you flicker and fade, again and again, and I have carried the ghost of each loss into the next search. And now… now, in this life, you are Ileana. This brilliant, defiant, fearless version of you. And I cannot do it again. I cannot watch the world take you from me. Not this time.”
Then, Trajan reached out, his hand hovering in the air, trembling with the gravity of his admission. “This is a sin of the most colossal selfishness, Ileana. But I am tired. So very tired. Tired of this cycle, of this cosmic cruelty that lets me find you only to remind me that everything I touch is fugitive. I want to keep you. Not a memory of you. Not the promise of finding you again in another life, another body. I want you, Ileana. Now. And for all the nows to come. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry for this, but I—”
He was silenced by Ileana’s soft touch to his cheeks.
Her hands cupped Trajan’s face, her palms infusing natural heat into the marble of his skin, anchoring him to her present as she claimed his mouth. The tingling sensation alone bypassed centuries of compounded pain and sorrow.
Then, she pulled back. Her breath was a warm ghost against Trajan’s lips. Her eyes held Trajan’s with a luminous earnestness. They were awash with the clear, unshed waters of some immense emotion, yet her voice, when it came, was as steady and sure as the sighs of the sea.
“Stop being sorry, Trajan. My only wish in this world is for you to have me.”
With that, the last fortifications of Trajan’s hesitation crumbled to dust. He tilted Ileana’s head back with a touch that held the reverence of a high priest and the finality of a king, his thumbs stroking the living vellum of her skin. Ice-cold lips traced a path from the fierce line of her jaw to the soft, singing hollow beneath her ear. He inhaled, and the scent of her was a library of her life—salt from the sea, the faint, floral note of her perfume, the warm, unique musk of her own humanity, and underneath it all, the intoxicating promise of her blood.
His own heart, that useless, mummified organ, gave a painful, sympathetic lurch as he felt the wild, panicked thrumming of her own heart against his mouth.
Then he drank.
Trajan drank greedily and willingly. He drank the summers of Ileana’s current, brilliant life—sun-warmed strawberries and the ghost of chlorine from her private swimming pool. Drank the dregs of her morning coffee, the lingering notes of wine shared with close friends. He drank the phantom sting of Catelijn’s lapis dust, drank the echo of Jagoda’s plaintive folk songs, drank the sweetness and tartness and sharpness of all of the other women whose bodies she had inhabited and those unborn she would never have to inhabit again. The torrent of Ileana’s vitality poured into him, a river of sanguine fire that filled the arid canyons of his soul. He heard the magnificent engine of her heart slow its desperate cadence, each beat a heavier, more sonorous tolling against his lips, a great bell marking the end of her endless cycle of reincarnation, and the beginning of an immortal, everlasting life. This bell announced, at last, it was their time.
He lifted his head, his lips glossed with the most vibrant shade of vermillion. Then, once he’d had his fill basking in the glory of the twin jewels of alizarin crimson that welled where his lips had been, he sealed Ileana’s fate with one more kiss, tucking away the last of her mortal warmth as he did.
“At last,” Trajan whispered, his voice shaking with the force of his love and his crime. “I have you at last.”
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turn’d so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.
—Dante Gabriel Rosetti, “Sudden Light”
The sun was performing its daily, extravagant act of self-immolation, and Trajan observed it from a careful distance. For him, the event was not one of beauty but of pure mechanics: it was a theorem of light, an exhaustively documented phenomenon and nothing more. Trajan stood in the burgeoning penumbra of a marram-crowned dune, the day’s residual warmth having already bled out of the sands, leaving behind a coolness he found to be rather pleasant. It was much nicer than the sunset anyhow, which he’d always registered as a cartographer might register a coastline, noting its features, its gradations, its inevitable recession, but with no more emotional investment than he would give to a map of a country he would never visit. He had outlived awe. He had seen this spectacle ignite the stained glass of Chartres and drown itself in the slate-grey waters of the Neva; he had watched it spill ribbons of molten gold over the sand seas of the Empty Quarter. The locations changed, but the process remained a constant—a grandiose and predictable pageant of atmospheric refraction that no longer stirred in him any vestige of awe. Repetition, stretched across an unnatural expanse of years, was a potent solvent for wonder. It was merely a signal, the ringing of a celestial bell that announced the coming of his own time and the end of hers.
She was seated closer to the water’s lacy edge, a votary before an altar. She did not simply watch the sky; she communed with it. Her posture—knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them—was one of complete absorption. The crepuscular light, that thick, honeyed glow of the world’s final waking moments, found in her a perfect subject. It caught in the fine, almost invisible hairs on her arms, turning them into a shimmering halo. It ignited the umber of her hair into a hundred thousand shades of copper and rust. It warmed the curve of her cheek into the faint flush of a ripe peach. She was a composition of transient, mortal warmth—the soft, perishable textures of life.
She was a nereid born of the sunset itself.
He remembered her as Catelijn in Bruges, a miniaturist whose fingers, perpetually stained with lapis and cochineal, smelled of linseed oil and turpentine. He recalled the shocking scarlet of her blood against the snow in a Polish forest, where she had been called Jagoda and had a propensity for humming folk songs that were centuries older than the nation that claimed them. He held the memory of her as a dozen other women, a gallery of ghosts in his mind, each one a perfect, intricate vessel for the same soul—a soul he was tethered to by a cord of longing so ancient it had become a part of his own inert anatomy. Each time he found her, the world momentarily regained a measure of its lost color. Each time, he lost her to the blundering, witless savagery of mortal life. A wasted lung, a misplaced step, the casual cruelty of other men.
This time, he had promised himself, the cycle would break. He would offer her the only true permanence he knew. He would grant Ileana the immense, silent stillness of his own condition.
“Trajan.” His name had not been uttered loudly, yet it travelled to him with perfect clarity, cutting through the percussive rhythm of the surf. Ileana did not look back, her entire body oriented toward the shimmering sea. “It is absurd to watch from the shadows. The day is over. Here, come.”
The invitation was simple, yet it held for him the complexity of a formal challenge. To step out from the dune’s deepening umbra was to enter Ileana’s world fully, to stand on the shore of a sea of light whose every wave was a subtle agony. The last rays of the sun, now a flattened, searing arc on the lip of the world, did not warm his skin; they laid upon it with the prickling insistence of nettles, a thousand microscopic points of irritation. An allergy to life itself.
He moved. His feet made no purchase in the loose sand, displacing it without sound, a ghost’s passage. He came to stand beside her, the air around her a palpable shimmer of warmth, a cloud of life that smelled of salt, of her skin, of the intoxicating chemistry of her blood pulsing a mere fraction of an inch from the air. The faint, damp chill of the evening air was beginning to descend, and on her it condensed as a living dew. On him, it was merely cold settling on cold.
“You see?” Ileana murmured, a note of quiet triumph in her voice. “It does not burn.” She mistook Trajan’s hesitation for fear, a charming and utterly incorrect assumption.
Trajan did not answer, for he was not looking at the sunset. He was looking at the way the light, in its final, desperate moments, mapped the delicate tracery of veins at Ileana’s temple and caught in the liquid depth of her eyes. Those eyes, the color of sea glass, held the reflection of the fire, a tiny, perfect star of impossible heat. He could chart the sky’s decline by observing its changing geography on the surface of her cornea.
The great, cosmic engine of his thirst began to turn within him. Its workings were silent, its gears carved from vacuum and its pistons driven by pure want. This was the patient, primordial mechanism that had, over the course of his first century, mounted a coup within the country of his own body. It was now an omnipotent and omnipresent monarchy that had long ago usurped the gentle, rhythmic democracy of a human heart, leaving that vestigial muscle to atrophy in his chest cavity like a mummified relic in a forgotten tomb. The engine generated no heat, only a pull; a terrible, hollowing-out that started as a dryness on the tongue and expanded into a negative pressure building behind the eyes, a vortex spinning in the hollow of the throat. It was a state of being that demanded its opposite, a void that screamed for substance.
And its entire, terrifying focus, its sole and maddening pole star, was Ileana. The aroma of the life singing in her veins was a lodestone dragging his every inert particle toward her warmth. The sound of her pulse, that frantic drumming against the shore of the world, became the siren song for which he would gladly shatter his stillness against the rocks of her mortality. The thirst promised a cessation of this internal grinding, a communion so absolute it bordered on dissolution—for him, a moment of sublime, blinding synthesis, a filling of the endless void; for her, a brief, sharp terror, and then the long, unbroken peace.
Yes. There would be no more Catelijns dying with paint on their hands; no more Jagodas staining the snow. Only Ileana, immutable, eternal, a perfect statue beside him in the endless gallery of the night, able, at last, to live an everlasting life.
Was it a gift? Or was it the ultimate act of vandalism—to take this vibrant, breathing masterpiece and coat it in the sterile, unchanging lacquer of his own existence?
As if sensing the turn of his thoughts, Ileana finally broke her gaze from the horizon and looked into his eyes. The full, heartbreaking force of her vitality met him. A small smile played on her lips, a smile that knew nothing of his internal calculus, of the centuries of loss that underpinned his every quiet moment.
“You look at me as if I am the one setting.” There was a teasing lilt to her words.
“The sun is a crude astronomical event,” Trajan stated, his own words emerging with a formal, almost arid preciseness. “You are… less predictable.”
Ileana’s smile widened. It was a devastatingly beautiful smile, as was the rest of her. She reached out, her fingers warm and certain, and wrapped them around his hand. The contact was a shock, a jolt of pure information. When she touched him, the warmth of her living flesh did not spread through Trajan; rather, his own intrinsic coldness seemed to drain toward her, a void seeking to equalize. The life in her—that restless dance of a million tiny, dying and rebirthing cells—was a palpable hum against his inert flesh. He could tap out the faint, steady rhythm of her pulse through her palm, that frantic, frantic drumming.
Trajan looked down at their joined hands. Ileana’s hands, alive with color, the knuckles showing the faint pink of exertion, the nails perfect, opalescent shells. His hands, slabs of marble and memory, bloodless and pale, the skin stretched taut over the fine, sharp architecture of bone. The contrast was not, as he had so often thought, between life and its absence. It was between a state of constant, chaotic flux and one of serene, terrible permanence. Her warmth was a fire, and all fires must eventually consume their fuel and gutter into ash. His cold was the cold of deep space, of the void between stars—a state of being that did not burn, did not change, did not end. It simply was.
And in that moment, the entire edifice of his resolve crumbled. He had imagined this act as a preservation, a way of placing her under glass, safe from the inexorable decay of time. But the truth, he now saw with a clarity that was its own form of pain, was that the glass was already around him. He was the one locked within his own vitrine, watching the world through a distorting lens. To turn her would not be to save her from death. It would be to drag her into his prison, to force her to watch the sunsets through his eyes—to see the physics but forget the fire, to know the colors but lose the glory. He would be stealing the world from her, a theft so total and so catastrophic it made his own long damnation seem a triviality.
The last sliver of the sun vanished, and with it, the warm light of the day. The spectacle was over. The sky, stripped of its fire, deepened into a vast, melancholic expanse of indigo and violet, punctured by the first diamond-chip of a planet. The world was surrendering to Trajan’s element. This was his time, his kingdom of shadow and silence. And holding Ileana’s hand, he had never felt more like an exile from it.
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “Now it is our time,” she whispered, leaning her head against his shoulder for a moment. The subtle weight of her, the scent of her hair, the residual warmth of her skin through the fabric of his coat—it was a constellation of sensory data Trajan could not process, only endure.
He looked out at the sea, which had become a dark, shifting mirror for the nascent stars. Each wave, an effacing sheet of gray, rendered the faint indentation of Ileana’s presence moot, reducing the brief testament of her mass to a nullity of glistening sand. This programmatic indifference, this universal tic of dissolution that returned all things to their elemental state, did not so much ignite his fury as give it a sudden, immaculate target. It was an ancient, ossified contempt, awakened now and aimed with precision at this grand, witless mechanism of decay. He would not be a bystander. He would perform a singular act of expropriation. He would wrench Ileana from the cogwork of causality, excise her from the sequence of rot and reincarnation, and grant her instead the changeless permanence of his own damnation—which, in this moment, felt indistinguishable from a state of grace.
A smile touched Ileana’s face, a knowing, playful curve of lips. She shifted on the driftwood, the movement a small disruption in his focused state.
“You have gone a thousand leagues away, Trajan,” she murmured. “What is it that you see out there in the dark that holds you so captive?”
Trajan turned his head slowly, his eyes meeting Ileana’s at last. They were not cold, not now; they burned with a dark, imploring fire that had been banked for centuries.
“The nexus of my entire history with you.”
Ileana’s smile faded, her amusement giving way to a beautiful, clear-eyed confusion. “With me?”
“With the soul that is currently called Ileana,” Trajan clarified, the words spilling from him now, an avalanche of confession held back for too long. “I remember the quiet light of a Bruges studio, where it belonged to Catelijn, a miniaturist whose hands were always stained with lapis and whose fingers smelled of linseed oil. A fever took her in three days. I remember the echo of a song in a snow-choked Polish forest, where it was Jagoda’s, a voice warm as honey against the cold, silenced by a stray piece of lead meant for a soldier.”
His gaze intensified, becoming something so close to a physical touch, a searching of her very essence. “And in every life, we find each other. In every life, we fall in love. And every time, you are changed—braver, perhaps, or kinder, or more stubborn. Your eyes a different shade, your hands skilled in a new art. But the soul, the light within, the fundamental music of you… that is always the same. And every time, the ending is the same: a clumsy butchery of fate.”
He took a step closer, breaking the space between them. “I have spent lifetimes finding you, only to stand as a helpless mourner at the edge of your grave. I have watched you flicker and fade, again and again, and I have carried the ghost of each loss into the next search. And now… now, in this life, you are Ileana. This brilliant, defiant, fearless version of you. And I cannot do it again. I cannot watch the world take you from me. Not this time.”
Then, Trajan reached out, his hand hovering in the air, trembling with the gravity of his admission. “This is a sin of the most colossal selfishness, Ileana. But I am tired. So very tired. Tired of this cycle, of this cosmic cruelty that lets me find you only to remind me that everything I touch is fugitive. I want to keep you. Not a memory of you. Not the promise of finding you again in another life, another body. I want you, Ileana. Now. And for all the nows to come. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry for this, but I—”
He was silenced by Ileana’s soft touch to his cheeks.
Her hands cupped Trajan’s face, her palms infusing natural heat into the marble of his skin, anchoring him to her present as she claimed his mouth. The tingling sensation alone bypassed centuries of compounded pain and sorrow.
Then, she pulled back. Her breath was a warm ghost against Trajan’s lips. Her eyes held Trajan’s with a luminous earnestness. They were awash with the clear, unshed waters of some immense emotion, yet her voice, when it came, was as steady and sure as the sighs of the sea.
“Stop being sorry, Trajan. My only wish in this world is for you to have me.”
With that, the last fortifications of Trajan’s hesitation crumbled to dust. He tilted Ileana’s head back with a touch that held the reverence of a high priest and the finality of a king, his thumbs stroking the living vellum of her skin. Ice-cold lips traced a path from the fierce line of her jaw to the soft, singing hollow beneath her ear. He inhaled, and the scent of her was a library of her life—salt from the sea, the faint, floral note of her perfume, the warm, unique musk of her own humanity, and underneath it all, the intoxicating promise of her blood.
His own heart, that useless, mummified organ, gave a painful, sympathetic lurch as he felt the wild, panicked thrumming of her own heart against his mouth.
Then he drank.
Trajan drank greedily and willingly. He drank the summers of Ileana’s current, brilliant life—sun-warmed strawberries and the ghost of chlorine from her private swimming pool. Drank the dregs of her morning coffee, the lingering notes of wine shared with close friends. He drank the phantom sting of Catelijn’s lapis dust, drank the echo of Jagoda’s plaintive folk songs, drank the sweetness and tartness and sharpness of all of the other women whose bodies she had inhabited and those unborn she would never have to inhabit again. The torrent of Ileana’s vitality poured into him, a river of sanguine fire that filled the arid canyons of his soul. He heard the magnificent engine of her heart slow its desperate cadence, each beat a heavier, more sonorous tolling against his lips, a great bell marking the end of her endless cycle of reincarnation, and the beginning of an immortal, everlasting life. This bell announced, at last, it was their time.
He lifted his head, his lips glossed with the most vibrant shade of vermillion. Then, once he’d had his fill basking in the glory of the twin jewels of alizarin crimson that welled where his lips had been, he sealed Ileana’s fate with one more kiss, tucking away the last of her mortal warmth as he did.
“At last,” Trajan whispered, his voice shaking with the force of his love and his crime. “I have you at last.”