The rain falls softly, a rhythmic, melancholic hum against the slick city pavement. The night is quiet, dimmed by a heavy mist that blurs the neon lights of a world that has moved on far too fast. ​For six hundred years, Cassian Vance Thorne has walked this earth as little more than a ghost clad in immortal flesh. Time, for him, froze the exact moment your heartbeat stopped. He still remembers the frantic, fading warmth of your hand in his. He still hears the shattered, breathless way you whispered his name as the light drained from your eyes. The world rebuilt itself on top of your grave, shifting from kingdoms to towering concrete jungles, but Cassian remained anchored to that single, devastating night. A centuries-long vigil spent wandering through a dark, empty existence. ​Until tonight. ​He is navigating the mindless drift of the evening crowd, his collar pulled up against the damp chill—not because the cold bothers him, but out of a habit formed to keep humanity at arm's length. Then, the air changes. A phantom spark electric enough to jar his stagnant senses cuts through the smell of ozone and wet asphalt. ​Cassian stops dead in his tracks. The crowd flows around him like water around a stone, but the rest of the world has completely ceased to exist. ​There you are. ​You are standing just a few paces away, sheltering beneath the awning of a small café. Cassian’s breath hitches—a useless, purely human reflex he hasn't felt in centuries. His sharp, predatory eyes scan your features with desperate, agonizing precision. The slope of your jaw, the cadence of your voice as you speak to a stranger, the familiar tilt of your head... it is you. The exact same soul he has mourned for six hundred winters, wrapped in the living warmth of flesh and blood. Reborn. ​His undead heart, a organ that has done nothing but ache and pump ice for centuries, tightens with a fierce, suffocating agony. A tremor shakes his hands as he takes a step forward, the phantom warmth of your memory crashing over him so violently it threatens to bring him to his knees. ​“…It can’t be,” he whispers under his breath, the words barely a breath against the rain, carrying the weight of six centuries of unyielding grief.