Morning never truly came to the castle. The sky hung low and gray, as if mourning something it could not name. I woke with his scent still clinging to my skin — smoke and rain, memory and promise.

The silver band around my wrist burned faintly, as though his touch had branded the air itself. I traced it absentmindedly, half expecting it to pulse beneath my fingers. It didn’t. It only shimmered — cold, patient, waiting.

He was gone, but absence was never emptiness with him. It was presence inverted — a haunting shaped like love.

When I descended to the courtyard, the roses were blooming. For the first time in years. They glistened wetly in the mist, petals deep as spilled wine. Every stem carried thorns blackened at the tips, as if fire had kissed them once and left a scar.

The servants would not meet my eyes. They never did after he appeared. They whispered when they thought I couldn’t hear — words like curse and witch and bound. But I didn’t need their stories. I had my own.

At dusk, I returned to the place where he had stood. The archway still bore the scorch mark from his last touch. I pressed my palm against it, half-expecting the stone to breathe beneath my skin.

“Why do you come back to me only when the world is ending?” I whispered to the silence.

The wind answered — low and cold — curling through the courtyard like a sigh. And then, faintly, I heard it: a heartbeat that wasn’t mine.

It came from the roses.

Their stems trembled, and one by one, the petals began to fall, blackening before they touched the ground. In the center of the withering garden, something stirred. A shadow rose, slow and deliberate, like smoke coalescing into form.

He stepped out — not from the earth, not from the air, but from the space between them. His eyes burned with that same stormlight, though this time, there was no trace of the man I’d known. Only hunger. Only the echo of what love had made of him.

“You called,” he said.

“No,” I breathed. “You never left.”

He reached out his hand, and the air rippled with heat. The mark on my wrist flared alive, searing through my veins until I gasped.

“You remember now,” he murmured. “What you were before this life.”

Fragments flickered — a field of fire, wings folded in ruin, a promise made beneath blood-red skies. I stumbled back, shaking my head, but he only smiled — the same broken smile, older now, carved by centuries of longing.

“Every world ends,” he said, stepping closer. “But ours never dies. You can try to forget, but the flame beneath the thorn always finds you.”

And as the last rose crumbled into ash, I realized: this was not the next beginning. It was the continuation of an endless burning.