Epilogue

Gabriel had been bestowed with a curse. The curse of memories. Memories he shared with no one now. Memories he'd once shared with someone he loved. Someone he'd always love. Someone who'd never even remember ever loving him back again.

He'd watched his dead lover for hundreds of years now as he'd always done. Sometimes from afar, at other times when he'd mustered the courage to bear the brunt force of longing, he could do it from up close.

This spring morning, she had watched him back. They'd sat merely a few feet apart on opposite benches on the small park she often visited every spring in Asador as they had once done long ago together, in a faraway memory she could not remember and one he would never forget. When his gaze had finally become unbearably noticeable, she'd lowered the book she'd been reading and simply stared at him. Seconds had turned into minutes. Minutes into hours. He could see the tumultuous storms brewing in her gaze, the many questions she had but unable to recall the answers she'd once had for all of them.

He could swear flashes of pain marred the colour of her irises; a haze of tears had glazed them from frustration.

Her lips parted and she made to speak words she merely couldn't recall. Her teeth dug on the corner of her trembling mouth as she struggled with the words, "I know you, don't I?"

His heart painfully pounded against his ribs, begging to be let out, begging to be handed back onto her gentle hold. "You do."

She swallowed, a tear escaping from her eye, and she sucked in a shaky breath, her lip quivering. "Who are you?"

And he'd introduced himself to her again, for the hundredth and hundredth of times. On a spring morning like many spring mornings before over the years. And like every other time, when day would fade, when light would start to disappear into midnight, she'd forget him. And once again, he'd be a stranger to her, and she'd be the creation he'd beheld with such violent hands.

Tales would follow for years, and they would tell their stories each with a different path, but always the same ending. That Gabriel had loved the ghost of a woman Silene had been after her bargain with Death for endless years, and that she had never loved him back for longer than a day.

Despite it, no one would speak of what the fates had decided for them at the end of her second curse. They only knew that life had gone on, and that he'd never quite forgiven himself for that.