A Thousand years without you

Misery

The world did not stop when Anya died.

It spun on—merciless and fast—while Lucien remained frozen, anchored to the memory of her blood on his hands, the scent of her hair as it fell forward one final time. Even after the ancient fox vanished, even after her grave had been sealed in stone, Lucien could not move on.

He didn’t leave the kingdom right away. Instead, he wandered its borders for years, always drawn to the magnolia grove where her soul had slipped from his grasp. Villagers claimed they saw a pale man in black walking through the trees at night, whispering to the dead. The priests began calling him a demon again.

He didn’t care. The decade began to pass, but Lucien never aged, never got sick. He still looked like a man in his early 30s, very handsome, strong, well-built, eyes that could cut through soul. His soul was as old as time. His soul was over a thousand years old. He was desired by many, but he only wanted her." Anya". He took on a different identity, moved to different countries, hid himself, could do everything, had wealth he never wanted. fled when people began to suspect what he was.

The First Decade passed like winter through bone—slow and biting.

Lucien thought perhaps he would find her in a child’s face, a flicker in a song, a whisper in temple incense.

But there was nothing.

He watched ten years pass from the shadows: the new queen crowned, the palace repainted, children born who would never know her name. Anya had already become a fading footnote in the royal archives. Died in sleep. No scandal.

He left the city in silence.

And the fire came.

It started one morning with a tightness in his lungs.

By nightfall, it had spread into his chest. Burning. Twisting. Devouring. He fell to the floor of a rented shack on the outskirts of a fishing village, convulsing as if dragged to hell.

His skin blistered without flame. His veins lit up like threads of molten glass. He screamed until the floor split beneath him.

The fox hadn’t lied.

The Eternal Fire was not of this world. It wasn’t pain—it was punishment. It was loss carved into the body of an immortal.

For three nights, he writhed, unable to feed, unable to breathe. The villagers abandoned the house. Some prayed. Others sharpened blades. No one dared go inside.

When the fire faded, he lay still for a day and a half, face pressed to the scorched wood, smelling ash that no one else could see.

That was the beginning.

The Second Decade was quieter. Lucien had learned to anticipate the fire’s return. He kept his body chilled, surrounded by water or snow when possible. He drank little blood—just enough to survive. The less life he consumed, the more the fire seemed to pity him.

He traveled east, to the mountain temples and caves of mystics who worshiped time and memory. There, he hoped to find answers—perhaps even a way to quicken her soul’s return.

But the monks feared him. One called him “a fragment too old for the world to hold.” Another threw salt in his path and offered prayers for the dead that hadn’t yet died.

Lucien wandered through ancient scrolls and incantations, but none could name the soul he sought. Only one blind monk dared speak with him.

“You do not seek her,” the old man said, wrapping incense beads in bone-white fingers. “You seek yourself in her memory.”

“I seek what I lost.”

“No. You seek to make her remember loving you. That is not the same as letting her live.”

Lucien left before sunrise.

By Year 22, he no longer believed in the living.

He no longer stayed in villages or cities. He slept in ruins, fed from wild beasts when hunger threatened to make him mad. The world was changing—roads were paved, oil lanterns replaced candles, steam and engines rumbled through mountain passes.

But he did not change.

Every face blurred together. Every voice sounded wrong. And still, he searched. In markets. At birth records. Orphanages. Women’s shelters.

Each child he stared into, each soul he tasted… nothing was hers.

Until once, in a southern province, he saw a girl in a crowd—hair like Anya’s, laughter like windchimes.

He followed her for three days.

When he approached her at last, she looked up, startled, but unafraid.

She had Anya’s smile.

But not her soul.

When she left, the fire returned that night with twice the fury.

He began to lose track of the years.

Time bled into memory.

By the fourth decade, Lucien no longer believed she would come back at all.

He considered walking into sunlight.

Just once.

The fire changed him.

Each decade carved deeper, not into his flesh—but into the space between his soul and what was left of his hope.

By year 41, Lucien had built a ritual: every decade, on the night the stars first turned red, he would go to a river, submerge himself in freezing water, and wait for the pain to come.

The fire no longer screamed—it whispered. Whispered her name in smoke.

Anya.

No, not Anya.

He didn’t know what name her soul would bear in this life. And that terrified him more than the fire.

He was waiting for someone he might not recognize.

Fifth Decade.

He tried to stop looking.

He abandoned cities. Gave up maps. Burned all the records he had gathered.

He thought: If I’m not meant to find her, let fate deliver her to me.

But the curse didn’t allow for surrender. It punished silence.

The fire came harder this time. Not just heat—it came with memory.

He began to dream of her more clearly. Not dreams he could control—hers.

He saw her walking through a palace again. Laughing. Wearing silver robes with trailing sleeves. But each time he reached for her, blood poured from her chest, and she collapsed again.

Sometimes, she looked at him as if he were a stranger.

Those dreams stayed long after the fire faded.

By year 61, Lucien returned to the cities.

Not to search, but to lose himself.

He fed more. Disguised himself as a noble, then a priest, then a historian. He told himself he didn’t care anymore.

But every time he walked past a girl with long lashes, or heard the name “Aya” or “Lin,” his heart stopped.

He didn’t believe in coincidences.

He still believed in her.

Once, in a modern city wrapped in neon lights and endless rain, Lucien met a boy who claimed to dream of blood.

“He said I look like a queen,” the boy laughed nervously, drunk in an alleyway. “Said I died in silk. Weird, right?”

Lucien stared for a long time.

But the boy’s soul wasn’t hers.

Just a broken dreamer, haunted like so many.

Lucien left him in the rain.

Seventh Decade.

Lucien stopped keeping count.

He had crossed continents by then, wearing a hundred faces and speaking twenty tongues. He became a myth in one country, a nightmare in another, a whispered warning in others. Some thought he was dead.

Part of him was.

In a forgotten monastery high in the frozen mountains, he stayed for five years without speaking. He did not feed. He did not sleep. Monks thought of him a ghost.

There, he wrote Anya’s name on the wall once a day in charcoal.

No one knew what it meant. It didn’t matter.

He knew.

During the eighth decade, the fire began burning even without the decade’s mark.

It would come randomly—sometimes in his dreams, sometimes in the middle of a street. His skin would blister. His eyes would bleed.

There was no more warning.

No more mercy.

Lucien collapsed in a hospital stairwell in northern Korea, blood on his lips, visions of Anya’s smile behind his eyes. Someone tried to help him.

He bit them.

Not for blood.

But so they’d stop.

One night, in a thunderstorm in Tokyo, Lucien saw a girl who looked exactly like her.

Not similar. Not reminiscent.

Her face.

She was sitting in a café, sipping from a glass, eyes fixed on the window.

His heart stopped.

He walked toward her, trembling.

But as he got closer, she turned her head—and the spell shattered.

It wasn’t her.

A face stolen by fate.

A trick.

Lucien fled the café and ran in the alley.

He punched brick until the bone split in his hand.

That night, the fire came again.

This time, it spoke.

“One more cycle,” it whispered in his mind, in the fox’s voice. “One final decade.”

“After this... your eternity ends.”

He awoke in a hotel bathtub filled with ice.

A note stuck to his mirror in blood:

“Ten years remain.”

Lucien stared at it.

And wept.

It was the last 10 years and Lucien had still not found the soul he longed for the soul he exchanged his immortality for, the soul he searched for in every city, town, country.and village.

Current date: 23rd July 2025

The world was unrecognizable.

Steel towers rose where temples once stood. The night no longer held silence—only sirens, LED haze, the flicker of synthetic moons. He moved through it like a ghost, invisible despite his beauty, ageless beneath the modern mask he wore.

And yet… Lucien had found a way to endure.

He had become a writer.

Not of prophecy. Not of curses.

But of longing.

Over the decades, he'd begun to write—to bleed through paper, to shape his agony into prose. What started as ramblings became novels. And when those novels reached the world, they spread like wildfire.

They called him a genius. A myth. A master of timeless romance and tragic fantasy.

His books were translated into thirty-seven languages.

They won prizes.

He never once stepped on stage to collect them.

A man named Elian did that in his place.

A man in his mid 40s, a lover of nature and ancient things. Lucien had met him in the eight decade when he was still in his 30s during a fire in a the city hospital . Elian had seen—no, sensed—what Lucien was and never asked questions until Lucien told him what he was and what fate awaited him if doesn't find his one true love. He became the closest thing Lucien had to a brother. To family.

The other was Sera, a retired folklorist in her late 60s who once translated ancient Eastern scrolls. She once found Lucien lying helpless on the street when she was still in her 40s. She has known Lucien for 20 years, watched him suffer for his love his yet to find. She now manages his royalties, copyrights, and the rare phone calls from publishers. Sometimes, she edited his manuscripts and left him cryptic margin notes like: “Too tragic. Again. "Let them kiss at least once, Lucien.”

He never did.

His readers devoured his books.

One in particular—titled Blood in Moonlight—became an underground cult favorite.

They wept over a scene where a princess died in the arms of a faceless man, whispering: “Find me again.”

Lucien didn’t know why he published that one.

Maybe because it hurt too much not to.

And somewhere—he didn’t know where—one of those readers was a young man named Rei.

A fan.

A believer.

And, though Lucien did not yet know it… the one soul he had spent ten lifetimes searching for.

That night, after the ripple—the flicker of her soul waking somewhere in the world—Lucien returned to his apartment, high above the river.

He stared down at the glowing city.

Behind him, on a desk littered with typewritten pages and ink stains, sat his next manuscript.

Untitled.

Unfinished.

Waiting.

He picked up a pen, and wrote

“Ten years remain. And this time… I will find you.”