Prologue
Even death could not erase the love that bound their souls.
Pillyse Loventhal thought her suffering had ended with her last breath her father's cruelty, her lonely life, her broken heart. But death was only the beginning.
She awakens in another woman's body, in a mansion alive with whispers, shadows, and secrets that claw at her mind. There, she sees Elarion Ashenveil, a man whose eyes hold centuries of longing, whose touch ignites a fire she doesn't fully understand. He claims they were lovers in another life, torn apart by betrayal and cursed to search for each other across time.
But there is a price she cannot yet see and a darkness that threatens to consume them both. As passion ignites and danger closes in, Pillyse must choose between survival, love, and the fate of her soul.
Chapter One: The Night the World Split
The rain had been falling for hours, relentless as if the heavens themselves grieved for her. Each droplet hit the windowpane with the rhythm of a slow, cruel lullaby. In the dim light of her candle, Pillyse Loventhal sat at the edge of her narrow bed, her hands clasped so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
The house moaned in the wind, a lonely, and aging creature that had seen too much pain. The walls bore witness to years of arguments, to glass shattering, to the quiet sobs muffled behind locked doors.
She had long since stopped hoping for peace.
From the parlor below came the sound of her father's boots striking the floorboards like gunshots. His voice followed, harsh and venomous.
"You think your silence makes you better than me?"
Her mother's softer voice replied, trembling, a thread fraying under too much weight.
"Please, not tonight… she can hear you."
"Let her!" he snarled. "Let her know how useless she is in this house! Just like how useless you are! I never wanted this to happen......I never wanted that thing to be born in the first place!"
Pillyse pressed her palms to her ears. The words still found her. They always did.
The wind outside shrieked through the cracks in the window. It sounded like laughter, cruel and distant.
Her breath trembled as she whispered into the empty room,
"I didn't ask for this life.... I didn't ask to be born here. I don't know what to do.....i don't even know who i am or what i am anymore."
Pillyse is slowly breathing just to avoid gettting her father's attention.
" Please...just make it all stop!"
"The candle flickered violently, its flame bowing low, as if the air itself pitied her.
She lay back, staring up at the cracked ceiling. She could still smell the smoke from the fire her father had nearly caused the night before. The scent clung to the furniture, to her skin burnt wood and bitterness.
"Just one quiet night," she murmured. "Please."
But the quiet that came was wrong.
It was the kind of silence that pressed against the chest, thick and heavy. Her eyelids fluttered. The exhaustion that had stalked her for days finally pulled her down yet something was different this time.
Her breath hitched.
Her fingers wouldn't move. Her body had become stone. Panic surged in her throat.
"Mother?" she tried to whisper, but the sound was thin, strangled.
No answer.
"Father?"
Nothing.
Only the soft hum of the storm outside and the eerie groan of the old clock downstairs.
At the edge of her vision, shadows stirred shifting across the walls as though alive, pooling into corners, whispering. Their murmurs were faint, like a language remembered only by the dead.
Her pulse pounded in her ears.
"Who's there?"
The whisper grew clearer. Not one voice, but many.
"You've waited long enough."
Her eyes widened.
"What do you mean? Waited for what?"
"To be free."
Her body trembled though it could not move. The air around her grew colder, dense, alive.
"No," she gasped. "Please...what are you doing to me?"
"You have cried too long in silence. Let us take it away."
The walls seemed to pulse. The ceiling melted into smoke. The bed beneath her dissolved, leaving only a sensation of falling and floating at once.
Her tears hovered in the air, glistening like tiny stars before vanishing into nothing.
"Stop!" she cried, voice breaking. "I don't want to die!"
A pause. Then a softer voice emerged—a single voice, close to her ear, calm and steady.
"You are not dying, Pillyse."
She froze. That voice was unlike the others warm, human, mournful.
"Who are you?"
"Someone who has been waiting for you… across time, across death."
Her heart faltered. "Waiting… for me?"
"You were never meant to suffer alone. But to find me, you had to let go."
Her tears blurred the fading world around her. "I don't want to let go. I haven't lived. I've never been happy. I've never even—" she swallowed, her words collapsing "I've never even been loved. I want to be someone.... just someone who matters. Can't i? even just for a moment?"
The voice sighed a sound full of sorrow.
"Then you shall be given a chance to make your own path. To be someone."
The shadows began to twist into light, forming shapes hands, faces, fleeting memories that weren't hers. The sensation of her body peeled away like silk unraveling. She saw her own reflection hover above the bed still, pale, lifeless.
"What's happening to me?" she whispered.
"You are being rewritten," the voice said. "The pain you carried will become the strength to walk again."
"I don't understand…"
"You will."
The voice faded, but warmth bloomed in her chest, a pulse of something ancient and familiar.
And then came stillness.
The world exhaled. The rain slowed. Her final breath never left her lips, it drifted upward, glowing faintly like the ghost of a sigh.
The light flickered once, twice, and then vanished into the darkness.
All that remained was her empty shell and the echo of her whisper
"There must be something more."
Outside, the wind carried her words away. Somewhere beyond the storm, another heart stirred a man's, distant yet tethered to hers. He woke with a start, breath sharp and eyes wide, whispering into the night as if he had just heard her name.
"Pillyse…"