They had never meant for Serena to exist.

Not in the way she did: stuck somewhere between life and death, reality and make-believe.

She was an accident, a ripple in the fabric of things best left unsaid and untouched. But fate, curses, and cranky old witches rarely care about what's meant to be. Mostly, the cranky old witches.

The first memory to flicker across Serena's mind wasn't of a cradle or a warm face. It was of cold stone, flickering candlelight, and the sharp metallic taste of magic gone wrong.

That kind of memory clings to you even if you can't die. Especially when you can't die.

She had been human once, though even that memory felt distant and blurred, like trying to recall a dream after waking.

The victim of the first curse, a prototype of suffering. She did not become a monster like the others, instead, she became something different: an echo between heartbeats, a fragment the universe forgot to erase.

The crone termed her unfinished business, a shadow with too much memory and too little purpose. Serena didn't eat, didn't sleep, didn't age. She simply existed, like a scar on the world that refused to fade.

Fast forward a few centuries...after all, time is irrelevant when you're an immortal mistake. She found herself summoned.

Not in a grand, ceremonial fashion with chanting monks and golden relics. No, this was more of a sloppy, desperate spell scribbled in blood by someone who didn't read the fine print.

The crone.

That's how she was known by the whispers of forgotten names, though Serena had known her by other names long before wrinkles claimed her face and bitterness soured her heart. The Crone was the kind of woman who held grudges like sacred relics and hurled curses as if they were love letters. She'd summoned Serena for one purpose only:

"Fix it," the crone had rasped, her voice like dry leaves scraping over stone. "Or watch him drown in his darkness."

Serena tilted her head; her smile was thin and distant like it had been borrowed from someone else long ago, "Darkness doesn't drown you. It waits until you forget how to breathe."

But of course, it wasn't that simple. It never was.

The 'him' in question was Ashen. A name like that practically guarantees brooding and bad decisions and Ashen was no exception. He was cursed, naturally. People like him don't just wake up one day and decide to be cursed. No, it takes a special blend of arrogance, poor choices, and ticking off the wrong people, in this case, the crone herself.

Ashen had once been a soldier, not for honor or glory, but for the thrill of it, the power. In arrogance, he stole something sacred: a relic bound to an ancient force that was never to be touched by the hands of mortals.

It was a vessel, a fragment of darkness entombed long before man had learned to fear the night. Ashen broke it, thinking he might harness its power, and control it. But darkness is never controlled. It simply waits.

The crone placed a curse on him, but not with death.

Oh no, that would have been too easy. She cursed him with something way worse. A curse that hollowed him out, his very blood turned on him and chained his soul to the very darkness where he had thought to be at the helm commanding. It worked beneath his skin, whispering, hungering, until eventually, he no longer knew where Ashen ended and where the curse began. 

And Serena's job? To prevent him from unraveling completely. Basically, to babysit. For a man who was an utter, accursed, brooding, self-destructive mess.

Although...

Falling in love hadn't been part of the plan. Not that Serena had a plan, really. Immortality tends to erode things like structure and purpose. But if she'd had one, it wouldn't have included Ashen.

Love is a fragile, ephemeral thing, meant for those who can bleed without the world noticing. Serena didn't bleed. She fractured.

It was simple at first: Keep him alive. Watch him unravel just enough to stop him from falling apart completely. But somewhere between the broken nights and silent dawns, between the fights he couldn't win and the ones he didn't bother trying, she realized something terrifying:

She cared.

Not in that far-off, removed way she might feel about the ruins of some forgotten city or the faint sparkle of stars. This was different altogether. Sharper. A thread sewn through the marrow of her being yanked tighter with every heartbeat he fought to hold.

But love isn't kind to either cursed men or immortal mistakes.

The crone had warned her, "You may stitch up a wound, girl, but you can't sew together souls."

She never had, and she never did.

The first time Ashen looked at her as if she was something more than a shadow, a long-unused muscle in her chest did something it hadn't in centuries.

It remembered how to break.

And that was the real curse. Not the darkness in his veins, not the hollow in his chest. It was the knowing, the impossible knowing she'd never be able to save him.

But she would try.

Even if it destroyed her.

Especially if it did.

The last time she saw him, the sky was bleeding. Ashen stood at the edge of something vast and hungry, his back to her, his shadow stretching long and thin across the ground that remembered every footstep like a scar.

"Don't," she whispered, but her voice was too small against the roar of fate unraveling.

He didn't turn around.

And then he was gone.

Just like that.

But this is not the end.

Not yet.