The thousandth anniversary of Kieran's transformation—and the beginning of his curse—arrived without ceremony.
One thousand years of existence. Six hundred years since Adrian's death. Sixteen centuries total if he counted his human life.
Kieran stood in the place where it had all begun—the ruins of the monastery where he'd been turned, where he'd lost his first love to mortality, where the curse had taken root in his soul.
The stones were crumbling now, overtaken by vegetation. Soon, nothing would remain of the place where his eternal suffering had begun.
"One thousand years," he said to the empty ruins. "I've carried this curse for a millennium. And what do I have to show for it? Lifetimes of love, all ending in loss. And now, six hundred years of emptiness, waiting for a soul that might never return."
The wind whispered through the broken stones, offering no answers.
Kieran had planned nothing for this anniversary. No ritual, no ceremony, no marking of the occasion. What was there to celebrate? A millennium of suffering? Six centuries of grief?
But as he stood in those ancient ruins, something shifted inside him. Not hope—he'd abandoned that long ago. But a kind of grim determination.
"I'll wait," he said aloud. "Not because I believe you'll return. Not because I have hope. But because I have nothing else. Waiting is all I know how to do."
It was the saddest vow he'd ever made. Not a promise of eternal devotion, but an acknowledgment of his own inability to move forward.
He was stuck. Frozen in the moment of Adrian's death, unable to heal, unable to grow, unable to become anything except this: a monument to loss, a testament to the cruelty of immortality.
As he left the ruins, Kieran realized he'd reached a strange kind of peace. Not happiness. Not contentment. But acceptance.
He would exist. He would wait. And maybe, in another thousand years, he'd have an answer to whether his vigil had been devotion or madness.