The moon was thin now, a sliver that cut the sky like a scythe, but its will was enough. Adrielle felt it everywhere—under her skin, in the tremor of her hands, in the taste of metallic air she hadn’t known could exist beyond the meadow. The Keepers moved with a purpose that had nothing to do with mercy. Their cloaks swallowed the light; their intent did not.

Alex was a storm contained. He struck not with reckless force but with practiced economy—parries, a step, the coin flashing like a punctuation in the dark. When he moved, Adrielle could see the history in each motion: not merely a man trained to fight, but a man who had learned the same dance many times before. Each brush of his sleeve at her cheek was both protection and apology.

One of the cloaked figures lunged, and Alex met them with the sigil raised. Light spilled and pushed the figure off balance, but there were too many. The Keepers pressed like tide: patient, inevitable. Adrielle could feel the threads of the curse tugging at her again—soft at first, then like an animal waking and pulling at its collar. Pain licked up her arms. She tasted moonlight on the back of her teeth.

“Adrielle—now!” Alex barked, and for the first time his voice cracked in a way that split her bones. He shoved her toward a battered path that led deeper into the wood, toward the hollow that might hold the ancient oak. “Run to the hollow. Don’t stop.”

She ran because he told her to, because his hand had been a map of safety, because the world had narrowed to him and the clamour of the Keepers behind. Leaves slapped her face; roots grabbed at her ankles. Somewhere behind, a sound like a bell broke—Alex’s shout, the collision of bodies, a word torn into pieces.

Her breath came ragged. Panic rose, sweet and hot, and then a new sensation: a whisper, threaded into the frantic wind. Remember. It was not a voice so much as a memory nudging at the edges of now. The coin had thrummed against Alex’s palm—she could see the faint glow through dark, threaded like veins of silver light.

She reached the hollow and found the oak larger than any tree she’d seen before; its bark was furrowed with ages, its roots like sleeping beasts. Dawn had not yet come, but a weak grey seeped into the sky. She pressed her palm to the trunk because Alex had told her to, because the memory felt like a latch that might open.

The wood was cold and older than any chill she had felt. She closed her eyes and let the forest swallow her breath. Images came—fragmented, glossy: a woman’s laugh in a high courtyard, a hand splayed over the same sigil that now glowed in Alex’s coin, a scream that rolled like distant thunder. A name slid through her, not in speech but as if carved into the hollow of her chest. Maren.

Her stomach dropped. The chant from the Keepers rose and then faltered; somewhere out in the trees, a sound like breaking. She shoved her hand harder into the bark and felt, at the end of her fingertips, not wood but a warm pulse—like a heartbeat that matched her own.

“Adrielle!” Alex’s voice thundered. She turned toward it and saw him through the trees, battered but unbroken, standing between two fallen Keepers and a figure who moved differently—someone who did not stagger with the rest.

The new figure tore back their hood. Moonlight struck a face Adrielle recognized without knowing why: sharp cheekbones, a scar that ran like a river from temple to jaw, and eyes that were cold with a history she couldn’t yet grasp. The face was familiar in an aching way that felt like someone’s name on the tip of her tongue—Maren. The memory fit into place like a lost puzzle piece sliding in.

“You,” Adrielle breathed, and the syllable was a key and a wound at once.

Maren’s mouth twisted. “You always find a way to return,” she said. There was no mercy in the voice, but it trembled with something else—regret, or recognition. She stepped forward, and the air between them thickened. “Do you not remember the price you set, Adrielle? Do you not know why we were chosen?”

Alex went rigid. The silver in his eyes flared. “Maren,” he said carefully, as if balancing a blade. “You always were the first to listen.”

Maren’s stare cut to him and softened for a breath—just long enough for Adrielle to see that behind the hard line of the Keepers’ duty there was a fracture. “And you,” she said to Alex. “You wanted to break it.”

“Not all of us did,” Alex answered. “Some of us swore to keep the balance. Some of us swore to protect what we could not change.”

Anger rose in Adrielle at the thought of being a thing to be kept or balanced. She stepped forward until she stood in the thin ring of light, and something in her shifted. The curse had always felt like a chain; now it felt also like a question. If the Keepers bound fate, then maybe remembering was the first offense.

“Why us?” she demanded. “Why are we cursed to hurt for loving?”

Maren looked at her then—really looked—and the expression that crossed her face was not triumph but something raw and dangerous: sorrow braided with duty. “Because once, long before your lifetimes, love toppled an altar meant to feed the sky,” she said. “You and he sang your vows on a night when the stars were young. The cosmos shifted, and a law was made: if love ever tried to undo what the heavens had ordained, it would be punished. We were created to remind what the law forbids.”

Alex’s jaw clenched. “And you—what did you do, Maren? Were you the one who decided to make the Keepers human?”

Maren’s hand, for the first time, trembled. “I was the one who begged mercy for you,” she said quietly. “And they turned mercy into watchfulness. They carved us between duty and compassion. We remember what we watched, Adrielle.” Her eyes found Adrielle’s with an impossible tenderness that broke her own anger for a second. “I remember you as a child who laughed like wind. I remember promises told under a willow. We were all changed, and now we carry that change.”

A sudden, sharp cry rose from the line of cloaked Keepers—someone had breached the outer ring. Alex moved like a man whose entire life had been honing this single response: he pushed Adrielle behind him and turned to meet the new threat. Metal rang; the sigil flashed; the weak sky leaned toward light.

Adrielle’s hand found Alex’s again, fingers lacing through each other as if to anchor reality. “If they’re bound to the deed, maybe remembering is the key,” she whispered to him, more to herself than to anyone. The oak’s bark had imprinted warmth into her palm; the images that flowed had left a thread of something like a map.

Maren watched them with a look that might have once been pity. “Do not mistake me,” she said softly. “I will not help you break what I swore to guard. But I will not let them rend you without a witness to remember your truth.”

The words came wrapped in a paradox—an admission and a cruelty. Alex’s eyes met hers, and in them she saw the fight and the fatigue and the fierce, stupid hope that had kept him alive through lifetimes.

“Then remember me,” he said, placing the coin into her hand without ceremony. The metal was warm from the heat of battle; it hummed like a captive thing. “If you must run, hold my name. If you must fight, hold my name.”

Adrielle wrapped her fingers around it. The sigil glowed faintly against her palm, answering the oak’s memory with a pulse that felt like a heartbeat. Around them the Keepers surged like a breaking sea. Maren lifted her chin and joined the line, her face unreadable.

Adrielle realized then that the curse did not just punish love—it required witnesses. It fed on forgetting and fear. If she could remember, perhaps the bond could be redirected. Perhaps memory would rewrite the pattern.

She didn’t know the answers. She only knew this: Alex’s hand was fire in hers, the coin a star in the dark, and the oath that had slipped from her lips—“I won’t let you go”—was more than sentiment; it was a weapon.

The first cut of dawn sliced the sky open. The Keepers howled and then faltered as light touched their cloaks. For a heartbeat, the world held its breath. Then Maren lifted her head and mouthed a word—an old injunction she had not spoken in centuries—and the earth beneath their feet seemed to shift.

Adrielle tightened her grip on the sigil, the name Alex had given her like a prayer on her tongue, and ran.

Behind her, in the forest that had been both cradle and cage, a voice—soft, almost human—breathed a question to the wind: “Will you remember us when the stars forget?”

The answer was not yet certain.