Prologue
There are souls who, upon meeting, seem to remember one another.
Some are drawn together with a tenderness that needs no reason. A glance becomes affection; a stranger becomes dear; kindness rises in the heart as naturally as breath.
And then there are those whom the soul refuses.
No reason. No history. No wound shared between them, yet something deep within recoils at the other’s presence. The body knows it before the mind does: a restless crawling beneath the skin, a tightening in the chest, an instinctive urge to turn away. As though some ancient part of them whispers, Not this one.
Such was the bond between them.
From the very moment their eyes first met, there was disgust.
Hatred came soon after, swift, furious, and strangely intimate. Yet beneath it lived something neither could name: curiosity. A maddening need to understand why the sight of the other stirred such violence within them.
At first, they searched for a reason.
Had they met in another life?Had one wronged the other before memory itself began?Was there some forgotten oath, some ancient grievance buried beneath the turning of ages?
They searched their histories and found nothing.
No betrayal.No blood between their houses.No debt.No cause.
Nothing.
And somehow, that nothing was worse than any answer could have been.
For how could two souls despise one another so completely without ever having been given a reason to do so?
In time, they ceased to ask.
They simply accepted what seemed to be an unalterable truth: that they were made to be at odds.
Yet acceptance brought no peace.
The closer they were forced together, the more unbearable it became. Every word was sharpened by suspicion. Every silence felt like a challenge. Even the smallest glance carried the weight of an insult. They tried, in their own ways, to understand the other, to find some hidden virtue, some explanation, some thread of reason that might make the feeling less senseless.
But every attempt only unsettled them further.
The more they looked, the less they understood.
The less they understood, the more they hated.
And so their hatred grew, not like a flame that consumed itself, but like an ancient tree, sinking its roots deeper with every passing year.
Neither knew what had bound them together.
Neither knew why their very souls seemed to reject one another.
They knew only this:
Of all the people beneath the heavens, there was no one they could despise quite as fiercely as each other.
