I reached my apartment building and climbed the stairs in a daze, my body moving on autopilot while my mind remained trapped in that café, in that moment, in the echo of his footsteps walking away. I fumbled with my keys, dropped them, swore in a language that hadn't been spoken aloud in centuries, and finally slammed the door behind me with enough force to rattle the pictures on the walls.

  The silence of my apartment was deafening.

  I leaned against the door, pressing my palms flat against the cool wood, and forced myself to breathe. In. Out. The walls were still there. The furniture. The mundane evidence of my carefully constructed modern life. A stack of unread books on the coffee table. A half-empty cup of tea from that morning, a thin film forming on its surface where the liquid had cooled and separated. My laptop, still open to the research I had abandoned hours ago.

  Normal. Safe. Familiar.

  Safe.

  But I didn't feel safe. I felt cracked open, raw, exposed—as if someone had peeled back the layers of centuries, I had wrapped around myself like armour and left the tender, vulnerable core of me bare to the world. The face I had been searching for across millennia had just walked through a coffee shop door, looked me in the eyes, and I had done nothing.

  I pushed off from the door, didn't bother with the lights, just let my bag drop to the floor and walked to the window. I parted the curtains just enough to see the street below, searching for—what? A tall figure in a dark coat, walking away? A pair of star-flecked eyes looking up at my window?

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  Nothing. Just the normal quiet of a city street at night. No kings in disguise. No ghosts from the past. No answers to the questions burning in my chest.

  I let the curtain fall and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. The same gesture I had made a thousand times across a thousand different windows, in a thousand different cities, in a thousand different centuries. Always searching. Always waiting. Always hoping that this time would be different.

  In my mind, I was back on Mount Caelestis-Sol, watching the King turn to face a fourteen-year-old girl who had dared to climb too high. I remembered the way his eyes had widened—just slightly, just enough for me to notice—when he saw me standing there. I remembered the soft smile that had touched his lips, the first smile I had ever seen on that ancient face.

  "You see me," he had said. Not a question. A statement of wonder.

  "Everyone sees you," I had replied, confused by the strangeness of his words.

  "No, little one. They see the healer. They see the stranger. They see what they expect to see—a kindly man who tends the sick, a myth made flesh, a curiosity to be whispered about and then forgotten. But you..." He looked at me with those star-flecked eyes boring into mine with an intensity that should have terrified me but didn't. "You see me. Not the role. Not the legend. Not the surface. You see what lives beneath."

  I had seen him then. I saw him now.

  And for the first time in centuries, I thought—I hoped—that he might be starting to see me too.

  But he was gone.

  I stayed at the window for a long time, watching the city lights flicker and shift like distant stars falling to earth. My breathing steadied. My heart slowed. But the turmoil in my mind refused to quiet, circling the same questions over and over without finding answers.

  When exhaustion finally claimed me, I collapsed onto the bed and stared at the blank ceiling as if it were a scrying pool, hoping to glimpse the future in its emptiness. The white plaster offered nothing but its own blankness, a void that reflected nothing back.

  Instead, I saw only the past. His face imposed over the white plaster.