The bell above the door chimed again—or perhaps it had never stopped chiming, and I was only now returning to a world that had continued spinning without me. The frozen moment shattered, and time rushed back in like water through a breached dam.

  Apple's cup clattered onto its saucer. The coffee that had been suspended mid-drip splashed across the table, and she swore with inventive creativity while dabbing at it with napkins. The café's ambient noise resumed its normal volume. The world, in short, returned to its mundane existence.

  But I was no longer part of it.

  My gaze—I couldn't stop it, couldn't control it, couldn't do anything but let it be drawn as if by gravitational force—tracked across the room to the counter where he now stood.

  He was ordering coffee. Just coffee. As if he were an ordinary person in an ordinary café on an ordinary day. As if the universe hadn't just cracked open and reformed itself around his presence.

  He was tall—easily above 6ft tall—taller than I'd expected, though I should have known. The King had always been tall, even in his human forms, as if no mortal vessel could quite contain him. His dark hair was cut in a modern style, shorter than it had been on the mountain, but it still held that same unruly wave, that same refusal to be tamed by mortal grooming. His jaw was sharp enough to cut glass, and his shoulders—Gods, his shoulders—still carried that ancient weight, even if he no longer remembered what it was.

  He wore a tailored coat of dark charcoal, simple and expensive, the kind of garment that whispered wealth rather than shouting it. His hands, resting casually on the counter as he waited for his order, were the same hands that had healed the sick and held me through the night and cupped my face with impossible gentleness as he whispered words in a language that had died before Babylon rose—the same hands that had commanded armies of spirits and warriors and beings that most mortals would never see, that had held back the darkness between worlds for millennia.

  And his eyes.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He turned.

  Our eyes met across the crowded café.

  And I saw it.

  Not recognition—not yet, not fully. But something. A flicker. A hesitation. The way his body stilled for just a fraction of a second, the way his gaze sharpened, the way his pupils dilated as if responding to a sudden flood of light.

  He felt it too.

  I knew it with the same certainty that I knew my own name, that I knew the shape of my own soul. Across centuries, across continents, across every life and death and rebirth that had torn us apart and brought us back together—he felt it.

  And then—

  He turned away.

  Not casually. Not naturally. He turned away, deliberately, forcefully, as if breaking eye contact required physical effort. He didn’t accept his coffee from the barista, his movements stiff and controlled. And before I could move, before I could breathe, before I could do anything but stare in frozen disbelief—

  He walked out the door and disappeared into the city.

  "Oh my God, G! Are you alright?" Apple was at my side, her hand on my arm, her face etched with genuine alarm. Her earlier teasing had vanished, replaced by the sharp concern of a friend who had just watched someone she love fall apart in real-time. "You look like you've just seen a ghost. What's going on? Talk to me."

  I looked at her, my breath coming in short, ragged gasps that I couldn't seem to control, tears streaming down my face. A ghost?

  No.

  It was so much worse than a ghost.

  A ghost is an echo. A faded photograph. A whisper of someone who once was, haunting the edges of the world without substance or power. A ghost cannot hurt you because it has already left, already moved on to whatever waits beyond. A ghost is memory, and memory can be managed, contained, set aside when it becomes too painful to bear.

  But what I had just seen—what I had felt—was not a ghost.

  It was the living, breathing shape of something impossible—the one I had loved from the very beginning, walking through a coffee shop door as if he had every right to exist in this mundane world, in this mundane century, in this mundane life she had carefully constructed around the ruins of her heart.

  And he did have every right. He always did. The curse didn't banish him from existence—it merely banished him from memory. His own memory. His own knowledge of who he was, who he look like, who we had been, what we had meant to each other across the endless sweep of years.

  But this time—

  This time, something was different.

  "He left?" The question was a gasp, torn from somewhere deeper than my throat. I was on my feet before the thought had fully formed, my chair screeching backward across the floor with a sound that made heads turn. I sprinted for the door, shoved it open, and burst onto the bustling sidewalk.