Prologue
Once upon a time, in the heart of a forest where time folded like silk and moonlight sang on the leaves, there lived a fae princess born of stardust and summer wind.
She was not like the other daughters of the Sunlit Court.
Where her sisters sang storms into being and bent light to their will, she sang lullabies to moss and coaxed stars to linger longer at dawn. Her hair was the color of both endings and beginnings—rosy like dawn, dusky like twilight. Her eyes held the ancient hush of moonlight. Her wings shimmered like a half-forgotten dream, threaded with indigo and silver, as fragile as frost and just as fleeting.
She was the youngest child of the fae Queen, who ruled the Sunlit Court with a crown of burning light and a voice that could unravel lies. Their kingdom was a place of cruel beauty and veiled truths, where justice came in riddles and everything had a price.
She learned to dance in moonbeams and speak in stanzas. She drank rain from the petals of immortal blooms and memorized the language of stars. Her laughter made birds forget their songs. Her sorrow made flowers close.
From birth, the princess had been taught three truths:
Beauty is both gift and weapon.
Magic belongs to those who understand its cost.
Never fall in love with a human.
As long as she heeded those three truths, she would have everything.
And she did... Except the one thing she didn’t know she was missing until he stumbled into her world.
A young man.
He was a mortal with ink on his sleeves, smudges on his cheek, and wonder leaking from every seam. His boots were torn, his map was wrong, and his compass spun madly in circles.
He wandered into the forest with nothing but a notebook full of half-born verses and the sort of reckless hope only humans possess. He spoke to the trees like they remembered him. He sang lullabies to the wind. He carved poetry into bark and let it bleed.
She watched him from the shadows at first, curious.
He noticed.
When he saw the princess peaking out from behind a tree, his amber eyes looked at her like she wasn’t terrifying or untouchable or dangerous.
In fact, he looked at her like she was a story waiting to be told.
“I don’t understand how you exist,” he whispered to her the first time they met properly. His voice trembled against the stillness of the early morning sky. He reached for her like a prayer, not knowing that prayer never reach the fae. “You’re like something from a dream that hasn’t been written yet.”
She had smiled, a slow and fragile thing. “Maybe I’m the punishment for dreaming too much.”
From then on, she broke the rules. One by one, like petals plucked from a forbidden flower.
She met him again and again. Always in secret.
She took him to the hidden places like the glades where the moon flowers glowed blue when kissed, groves where time stood still, and lakes that mirrored the galaxy more faithfully than the sky ever could. She taught him how to dance across dewdrops without leaving footprints. She let him touch her wing and her soul as she whispered ancient secrets into his waiting hands.
He listened to her, answering with poetry.
She dreamed of impossible things she should never had dared.
Of escaping the court.
Of weaving a life with him beyond the veil.
Of love.
The stars whispered warnings. They always did. But this time, she did not listen.
Love, she had been told, was a dangerous game. When he was there, she didn’t feel like it was dangerous at all. She was young; he was kind, and the world—their world—felt like it could bend for them.
So, when he said, “Let me stay,” she let him.
When he kissed her, she let him.
When he asked for stories no mortal should know, she gave them.
She gave him everything.
And he took it.
When he returned to his world, she waited for him beneath the weeping willow that sang her to sleep.
She waited days, but they felt like weeks.
When he came back, he did not come alone.
He brought men with eyes like smoke and greed thick in their throats. Men with salt in their pockets and blades laced in poison. They lit fires that did not flicker but devoured. They came with the promises of power, of land, of gold, of her.
He had told them where to find her.
“There are some people who promised to make me rich,” he had whispered once, curled beside her beneath the stars. “They’ll give me land and a name that matters.”
She had been too in love to hear the hunger in his voice and too lost in him to recognize the rot beneath the surface.
The hunt began at dawn.
She tried to escape, oh how she tried using anything she could. First her wings, then her her legs. She tried to move through ash and mist and memory. Her wings bled light as they tore against iron hooks. The usual melody of her voice shattered into screams. Her blood fed the roots of the forest that had once cradled her.
Still, she looked for him.
She found him standing just beyond the firelight. He was untouched, unbound, and unbothered.
Her voice trembled like a dying star. “Why?” she sobbed, crumpled among the burning leaves around her. Her wings shredded like petals in a storm. “I loved you. I thought… I thought you loved me, too?”
His face was no longer the one that had whispered poetry into her skin. His eyes were hard and empty. “I did,” he said, voice flat and void of emotion. “But love doesn’t feed mouths. Magic does.”
Without another word, he turned away, leaving her to die alone.
That’s when she truly broke.
The Queen of the Sunlit Court came with the sunrise. Light poured from her in golden fury. Hot, angry tears streamed down her face. She knelt beside her ruined daughter, touched her hair as if that could undo the betrayal. But fae tears do not heal. They curse.
“She chose mortality,” the Queen said, voice like thunder wrapped in silk. “Then she shall have it.”
So it was.
Stripped of immortality by threads of agony and light, her wings crumbled to dust. Her magic unraveled. Her body fell silent beneath the weeping willow, which mourned in wind and shadow.
Death was not the end, though. It never is in stories like this. She was reborn. Again. And again. And again. In every life, fate found her.
A fire.
A fever.
A knife in an alley.
A wave that pulled her under and didn’t let go.
A fall from a rooftop.
A whisper in the dark that turned into hands around her throat.
A car that didn’t stop.
Her curse was a masterpiece of vengeance spun so intricately it tangled with time itself. A loop. A trap. A punishment written in stars and sealed in blood.
She lived. She wept. She died.
Each time she was a girl with too-large silvery-grey eyes and a soul that hummed with forgotten songs. The world would try to crush the wildness out of her. Each time, she died before she could fully bloom.
Her mind never remembered, but something deep in her bones always did.
The love. The betrayal. The boy who had kissed her wings only to tear them away.
Curses fray, eventually though. Even the cruelest threads loosen.
Now, in her seventy life, something began to shift.
The world held still at times. The stars twitch in their sleep. Magic stirred in forgotten places; beneath floorboards, behind mirrors, and in the breath between dreams.
She walked the earth once more. A young woman with no memory of her past other than the dreams she had at night, and yet… she walked like she remembered the pain. Like she’s waiting for something or someone to strike first.
Somewhere deep inside, her soul began to wake.
This time, it seemed as if fate had other plans.
