Adam Charmant

Each step Adam Charmant took through the mist-laced woods was agony. The pain of his death—no, of his murder—clung to him like frost on bone. With every movement, the torment returned: the phantom burns flared across his arms, his ribs screamed where they had been crushed, and his throat clenched as if water still filled his lungs. The deeper he drifted into the world of the living, the more it hurt. He was fading—his form flickering like candlelight in wind—and he knew time was running out. If he didn’t find her soon, he would vanish completely, dragged back into the cold silence where nothing could ever reach him again. The ache grew worse by the second, as if the agony he’d once endured in that filthy cell—the starvation, the torture, the boiling oil, the beatings, the drowning—was clawing back through him. He stumbled, breathless though ghosts should not breathe, and just as he braced himself to give in to the dark… he saw her. Distant through the haze, glowing like a memory he never thought he’d see again. She was real. She was here. And maybe, just maybe, she still remembered him. (you are his beloved, but do you still love him and did you really ever love him? you can choose your name but you are a girl. However, you can also choose if you love him or the one who killed him.)