Dawn was bleeding its pale light through the blinds when a new resolve hardened within me. I could not sit and wait. I could not simply hope and wonder and let the days slip past while he lived his life unaware of what was stirring within him. I had to understand. I had to find him—not as a passive observer in our story, but as an active participant. For the first time in centuries, I had a clue, a thread to pull.

  I went through the motions of my mortal life with robotic precision. I showered, dressed in jeans and a simple sweater, and packed my bag for the library—my alibi for the day. My mythology paper was a convenient excuse to bury myself in research, though the myths I needed to consult weren't in any university archive. My personal collection filled a climate-controlled storage unit on the outskirts of the city, a treasure trove of relics and manuscripts I had accumulated over lifetimes. But first, I needed a different kind of knowledge.

  I found Apple in the student union, surrounded by the cacophony of morning chatter and the smell of stale coffee. She looked tired but brightened when she saw me, her face lighting up with the unmistakable gleam of someone who had been waiting to pounce.

  "G! You look... intense. Did you finish your paper?"

  "Not yet," I said, sliding into the seat opposite her. "Apple, about that guy yesterday. The one who left."

  Her eyes lit up with immediate gossip-fuelled interest. "Ooh, still thinking about Mr. Divine, are we? I knew he got to you! I knew it! You can't hide from me, G. I see all."

  "He got to me," I admitted, the truth hidden in plain sight. "You said he looked familiar. Can you think about it again? Really think? Where might you have seen him? A class? A party? A café? Anything."

  Apple tapped her neon-pink nails on the table; her brow furrowed in genuine effort. This wasn't her usual performative thinking—this was real concentration, the kind she reserved for exams and important decisions. "I've been wracking my brain, I swear. It's not like a 'oh-he's-in-my-psych-101' familiar. It's... weirder. It's like seeing a celebrity out of context. You know their face, but your brain short-circuits because they don't belong in your coffee shop." She shrugged, frustrated. "Sorry, G. That's the best I've got."

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  A celebrity. Or a king. The same principle applied.

  "It's okay," I said, my mind already racing elsewhere. "Thanks, App."

  I spent the morning in a futile daze, my eyes scanning lines of a textbook on Mesopotamian cosmology while my soul wandered the snowy peaks of Mount Caelestis-Sol. The words blurred into insignificance, unable to compete with the memories that kept rising unbidden.

  In the late afternoon, after my classes had ended, I retreated to the university library—my sanctuary when the world became too much. It was the one place where silence wasn't empty but full: full of whispered knowledge, of generations of seekers who had come before, of answers waiting to be found. The high arched windows let in pale autumn light, and the scent of old paper and dust wrapped around me like a familiar embrace.

  I loved Apple, truly. Her chatter was the heartbeat of my modern life, the thing that made me feel almost normal, almost mortal. But today, her non-stop questions and observations had been too much. I needed space. I needed quiet. I needed to think without her voice in my ear, without her concerned glances, without the weight of pretending everything was fine when everything was, in fact, shattering and reforming in ways I couldn't yet understand.

  So, I came here. To the stacks. To the silence. To the place where no one asked questions because they were all too busy with their own.

  I sat by the window on the fourth floor, in my usual corner where the light fell just right and the radiator hummed a gentle counterpoint to the ticking of the ancient clock. Outside, students crossed the quad in ones and twos, their lives small and contained and blessedly uncomplicated. I watched them for a long moment—watched a girl laugh at something her friend said, watched a boy juggle an armful of books, watched the world go on in its ordinary, beautiful way—and felt the ache of separation keenly.

  I was not one of them. I never could be.

  With a sigh, I turned back to my textbook. Mesopotamian cosmology. The words stared up at me—Enuma Elish, Marduk and Tiamat, the ordering of chaos into creation. It should have fascinated me. I had lived through echoes of these myths, had seen the truths that lay beneath the stories. But today, the words blurred into insignificance as memory pulled me under—back to the mountain, back to him, back to the moment everything truly began.