The Thread Puller

Auren didn't need to be close to her.

At least not yet.

He knew how her days were now, like the way she would kneel in gardens and sooth their sprains with whispered spells. The way she would tuck her hair behind her ear when she's deep in her thoughts. The way she would laugh like she didn't have lifetimes of blood trailing behind her.

He had once loved her laughter more than sunlight itself.

Now, it scraped at him like the thorns of a rose.

It was her, exactly as he remembered, but with none of the remembering.

And yet… she was beginning to feel it.

He was watching her from the high walls of Lysira's oldest ruins, where no one would even dare to venture. All because magic twisted strangely there. It was a leftover battlefield from one of the lifetimes that he had lost her in. He could still taste her death lingering on the wind.

Eliane was undergoing a metamorphosis. Dreaming more. Asking the air questions that she did not understand.

And so, Auren began to pull the threads once again.

Just one at a time.

A merchant she passed by every day suddenly offered her a locket… it was oval-shaped, silver, and it had a symbol etched into its back: a forgotten crest from the life where they were king and queen.

She paused.

"Huh. I swear I've seen this symbol before… it looks oddly familiar.," she murmured to herself.

But when she opened and took a look inside, it was... empty.

Still, she bought it.

Auren watched from above.

She's feeling it.

The next day, a musician began to play an old song in the town square, it was a melody Auren had composed for her almost ten lifetimes ago. Eliane stopped mid-step. Her hands began to tremble.

"Do you know what the song is called?" she curiously asked the musician.

"I believe it was along the lines of 'The Promise Beneath the Rain', ma'am." he said.

She didn't know why that made her cry.

That night, she dreamed once again of someone dying in her arms. Someone with eyes that shined and had blood on his lips.

When she woke up, she whispered under her breath, "Who in the world... are you?"

Auren was already gone from the rooftop, but he had heard her.

He always did.

Back in the sanctuary, Eliane tried to confide in the old caretaker.

"Madame, do you believe in past lives?" she asked her softly while threading the locket onto a ribbon.

The old woman simply smiled at her. "Oh my dear child, we live in a city where wind talks and rivers sing. Of course I do."

Eliane nodded, though her fingers were still trembling.

"I think I'm starting to remember someone. But it's… wrong. I don't really… think I'm supposed to…?"

The caretaker hummed. "Hmm… Perhaps remembering is its own kind of magic."

Eliane didn't answer her.

She felt watched. She felt known.

She didn't know she was being studied like a scripture. That her days were no longer just hers alone.

That night, Auren wrote a letter.

Not in ink.

In memory.

A spell layered in enchantments and dreams, folded into a mere parchment born of old lifetimes. It was a letter designed not to alarm her but to feel like… something familiar. Something that she may have forgotten. Something hers.

He left it in the hollow of the jasmine tree that she would always visit.

She found it three days later.

It had no signature.

Just a line:

"I still remember you, my dear lia. Even if you do not. We have died before. I'd rather we live this time around."

Eliane stared at the handwriting, her heart began to pound out loud.

And though she should've told someone, she chose not to.

She hid the letter in her drawer like it was a sin that she didn't want absolved.

Auren stood beneath her window again that night.

His magic whispered around him like coiled serpents.

"She read it," he whispered under his breath. "And she… kept it."

He tilted his head back, his eyes started to glow gold.

"She is remembering."

Not true.

Not yet.

But she was doubting. Questioning.

And that was all he needed.

All monsters need an invitation.

Even if it starts as a whisper.