Chapter 5 – “The Thread That Never Broke”
950 Words
Part I – Letters in the Bloodline
The rain returned to San Silvestre with a gentle fury.
Elianna crouched beneath the eaves of the abandoned house, clutching Leonardo’s letters to her chest like a shield. Her heart hadn’t settled since the last dream—no, vision. That’s what it felt like now. Too vivid, too specific to be imagined.
In it, she had seen Celestina dressed in lavender, burying a letter under a narra tree. The ache in her chest hadn’t left her since. She knew the tree was real. Knew that the letter—Celestina’s last one—was still waiting.
It wasn’t just a feeling anymore.
It was certainty.
By now, she had read over forty of Leonardo’s letters. Some were folded with care, others rushed in desperate ink. Some stopped mid-sentence, as though he was interrupted. As if time itself was cracking.
She flipped through the latest she’d found, one dated August 1895.
To whomever finds this,
If Celestina can no longer read these with her own hands, then I ask only this—tell her that the stars still speak her name. And if I am gone, if the world has torn me apart—then let her know this love lived without regret. It was worth the ruin.
Elianna ran her fingers over the words again and again. The edges of the page trembled in her hands. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do with this kind of love—this kind of history.
But she knew one thing:
She had to find that letter Celestina left behind.
And she had to find that tree.
Part II – The Narra Tree (Present Day)
The estate had overgrown beyond recognition, but Elianna wasn’t afraid. Guided by instinct—and something deeper—she followed the curved hill path behind the house, where the grass grew thicker and older trees arched over the sky.
Then she saw it.
The narra tree stood solemn and unmoving at the edge of the estate, half-swallowed by vines and shadow, but strong as if time itself had bent around it.
It was bigger than she imagined.
Older.
She knelt beneath it, heart thundering, and began to dig with her bare hands.
Minutes passed.
Then—a piece of aged ribbon, violet in color, surfaced beneath the dirt.
Tears filled her eyes as she uncovered the rest: a fragile, half-cracked envelope sealed in wax with a symbol she’d seen on the back of Leonardo’s letters.
She held it with shaking hands.
My dearest Leonardo...
Celestina’s voice echoed in her head, as though the words were written in her blood.
Part III – Celestina’s Final Letter (1895)
Leonardo was gone by the time Celestina’s letter reached San Ildefonso.
She had sent a stable boy. A risk. But worth it.
By the time her letter arrived, he had already vanished into the hills—swept into a rebel unit hiding from both the Spanish and fellow countrymen. The war had arrived faster than anyone expected.
But he never stopped writing.
He never stopped searching.
In a field hospital weeks later, wounded and fevered, he asked for paper. With shaking hands, he wrote Celestina one last letter—one that never reached her.
Celestina, if you read this, know that my soul walks beside you. Whether this world breaks me or not, I carry your name like a light. If I am to die, let it be with you still written on my lips. And if God is kind, He’ll let us meet again—not as prisoner and daughter, not as secret and shame—but as soul and soul, remembered.
He never signed it.
He never got to.
Because the fever took him.
And history buried him.
Or so it tried.
Part IV – The Veil Breaks (Present Day)
The moment Elianna finished reading Celestina’s buried letter under the narra tree, something shifted.
The wind stopped.
The trees fell silent.
The ground beneath her pulsed—once. Like a heartbeat.
She tried to stand, but dizziness overtook her. The world spun, blurred—and cracked.
And then everything changed.
Suddenly she was no longer in her jeans, no longer holding her phone.
She looked down—lace. A corset. A ribbon tied around her wrist. The estate was no longer in ruin. Music played faintly from the ballroom.
She turned toward the house.
People walked past her in 1895.
And someone—someone was waiting by the narra tree.
Part V – The Reawakening (Leonardo & Elianna/Celestina)
Leonardo stood in the garden in a white linen shirt, older, thinner, eyes more haunted than she remembered from the mirror.
But they met hers with quiet recognition.
Like he knew.
Like he’d waited.
“Celestina?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “But I remember you.”
They touched—hand to hand—and something ancient passed between them.
Memories not their own.
Pain they had not lived.
Love they had not earned, but inherited.
And in that moment, they both knew: time had not forgotten them. It had only been waiting.
Part VI – The Choice
As the world cracked around them again—voices in the distance, war closing in—they had a choice.
Go back, and let the past repeat. Let Leonardo die, Celestina fade, and Elianna awaken alone.
Or stay—and rewrite history.
Elianna looked at him, tears in her eyes.
“I found you,” she said.
He smiled, bittersweet. “You always do.”
And then they ran.
Together.
Not into war.
But into the unknown—where time no longer mattered, and love was the only map they followed.
- Writer
