44. Julian
Julian
The dust inside the ruined cathedral floated in the shafts of afternoon light like suspended ash.
It smelled of cordite, gunpowder, and the unmistakable metallic tang of a war that had dragged on too long.
I sat on a crumbling oak pew beneath the soaring, eighty-foot arches of the nave, methodically cleaning the bolt of my rifle.
A few feet away, Noah used an overturned ammunition crate as a makeshift desk.
Noah’s voice suddenly broke through the hollow quiet of the sanctuary, the scratch of his pencil echoing faintly against the distant, grit-covered columns.
He was writing a letter to his fiancée. She was six months pregnant with a little girl.
“You know, you should really think about it, Jules,” Noah said, not looking up from his notepad. The stub of his pencil scratched loudly in the cavernous quiet of the nave. “Settling down. Getting out of this hellhole. You can’t play bullet-catcher forever. A guy needs a home.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the weapon in my hands, a bitter ache expanding in my chest. A home. Little did he know, that was all I had wanted for the last hundred years. But not with just anyone. Never with anyone else. Only with her.
“I’m not the settling type, Noah,” I countered, my voice a gravelly rasp that still sounded too much like my brother’s.
Noah snorted. “Right. The lone wolf routine. I’m just saying, one day your luck’s going to run out.”
If only he knew the cosmic joke of that statement. My luck had run out the night Cain drove a silver blade through the only person I had ever loved.
I spent the first few decades after June’s murder out of my mind. My sanity was completely pulverised under the weight of the grief.
I was thrown into a madness so consuming I didn’t know what was real and what was a hallucination.
I would see her in the corner of my room, wearing that blood-soaked dress.
I would taste her on my tongue. I spent years trying to follow her into the dark, trying to undo the Ritual the only way I knew how.
I stopped trying to kill myself when I realised the failed attempts were more depressing than her dying.
The final straw had been pulling the pin on a frag grenade in an empty field.
I hadn’t thought, even Cain’s dark alchemy could knit a man back together from that.
I was wrong. I woke up hours later, my flesh sealing itself over broken shrapnel, sobbing into the dirt because the universe wouldn’t even grant me the mercy of a grave.
After that, I made a choice. If I couldn’t die, and if I was cursed to wait an eternity for her soul to reincarnate, I was going to be ready.
I spent years traveling the globe, studying everything she had ever loved.
I spent decades in the quiet halls of museums, learning art and history, mastering the brushstrokes of the masters she used to read about.
I walked the ruins of the old world, cataloging its lingering beauty so that one day, when she finally came back to me, I could lay it all at her feet.
I wanted to tell her about the world she was robbed of.
But as the years bled into decades, the hope began to thin. The waiting felt like rotting from the inside out. I felt dead, and I needed a place where being a dead man walking was an asset.
So, I joined the military. I figured if I was indestructible, I might as well put this cursed body between the innocent and the gunfire.
Noah was the only real connection I had made since I cut myself off from the world.
Most of the backstory I fed him was fabricated, a patchwork of lies to explain why I had no family, no home, and a face that never aged.
We parted ways, Cain and I, only a few years after the night at the cabin.
His need for control and power had only festered and deepened with his immortality.
For years after that, ending him was the only thing I could think about.
I was consumed by a relentless, desperate obsession to kill my brother—and to take myself down with him.
I tried everything, driving knives and iron into his flesh and my own, day after day, only to watch our bodies stubbornly piece themselves back together.
It became a sickening routine. Cain woke most mornings with a blade rejecting out of his neck, a cold, heavy reminder of another failed attempt to find peace.
I saw him maybe once a decade, usually in passing—two ghosts acknowledging each other across a crowded room before fading back into our separate hells. I chose to keep my distance. I couldn’t look at him without seeing her blood on his hands.
Noah, though, was a good man. Loyal to a fault. He had his suspicions about me, of course. He regularly joked that I was “invincible,” calling me a “war machine” whenever I walked away from blasts that should have left us both in body bags.
He knew I was hiding something massive. Three months ago, during a frenzied ambush in a tight urban alleyway, I had thrown myself over him.
He saw the sniper’s bullet hit me directly in the side of the head.
He saw the blood. He saw me drop. And then, he saw me stand back up ten seconds later, the wound already smoking and sealing shut, to return fire.
When he was recovering from his own wounds in the field hospital, he confronted me about it.
I gaslit him without blinking. I told him he was hallucinating from the blood loss and the severe trauma of the fight.
I watched the conflict in his eyes—he knew what he saw, but the reality of it was too monstrous to compute.
He was too good of a friend to push it, choosing to accept the lie rather than lose the brother-in-arms who had saved his life more times than he could count.
Noah folded his letter and tucked it securely into his tactical vest. “Alright. Perimeter check time. You want the west transept or the eastern chapel?”
“I’ll take the chapel,” I said, standing up and slinging my rifle over my shoulder.
“Keep an eye out,” Noah warned. “Some civil asset group moved in this morning to assess the structural damage to the relics. Art restorers or something. Try not to scare them away.”
“I’ll try,” I muttered, turning away.
I walked out of the nave and pushed through the heavy doors that led in the direction of the eastern chapel. It was supposed to be a routine sweep. A quick walk through a ruined sanctuary before the sun set.
The heavy doors of the eastern chapel gave way with a mournful groan, kicking up a cloud of old dust and pulverised sandstone. I stepped over the threshold, my combat boots silent on the damaged marble floor.
The cathedral's roof had been partially blown out during an air strike months ago, leaving a gaping hole where the grey heavens bled into the sanctuary. Columns of late afternoon sunlight slanted through the skeletal framework of the ceiling, painting the debris in streaks of rainbow and gold.
It was supposed to be a quick sweep.
But then I inhaled, and my immortal body simply stopped functioning.
Beneath the scent of burned stone, there was a hyper-specific, terrifyingly familiar fragrance. Vanilla. Coconut. The sharp, clean scent of a coming rainstorm. It was a smell I hadn’t breathed in since a dark, blood-soaked night decades ago.
No. You’re hallucinating again, Julian. The madness is back. I gripped the tactical strap of my rifle so hard my knuckles popped, my jaw clenching as I forced my eyes towards the shattered altar.
There was a labyrinth of steel scaffolding erected against the surviving back wall, framing the towering, empty stone tracks of a destroyed stained-glass window. Standing on the second tier, about ten meters in the air, was a woman.
Her back was to me. She was reaching up, delicately clearing debris from a surviving piece of medieval stonework. She was wearing a loose, oversized white button-down shirt that was covered in grey plaster dust and soot.
My lungs stopped working. The oxygen simply vanished from the room.
As if sensing the sudden, suffocating shift in the atmosphere, she paused. Her hand slowly lowered to her side. And then, she turned around.
The tactical sling of my rifle slipped from my fingers. The heavy weapon hit the stone floor with a deafening, metallic pop that echoed through the cavernous chapel like a lightning strike.
It was her.
It wasn’t a lookalike. It wasn’t a distant relative.
It was the exact, flawless face that had haunted my every waking second for a century.
The same soft, devastating jawline. The same cascade of dark, heavy waves pulled up in a messy clip, a few stray curls falling against her neck.
And her eyes—those deep, ocean-blue eyes that had looked up at me in complete trust and adoration right before Cain took her from me.
My legs, which had carried me through active war zones and walked off exploding shrapnel, gave out.
I stumbled forward a half-step, my hand shooting out to brace myself against a shattered stone pew just to stay upright.
The edges of the world turned blurry, narrowing down to the girl on the platform.
“Hello?” she called out. Her voice. God, her voice. It was softer than an angels whisper in my mind, ringing like a silver bell through the ruined church. “Are… are you okay?”
She looked down at me, her brow furrowing in a mix of mild concern and confusion. She didn’t recognise me. The realisation was a knife twisting directly into the centre of my chest, exactly where her name was permanently scarred into my skin.
She took a cautious step closer to the edge of the scaffolding, leaning over the safety railing to get a better look at the massive, hypnotised soldier staring up at her like a madman.
My knees hit the marble. I couldn’t stop them. The invincible war machine, the immortal man, brought to his knees in the ruins of a church by a girl who didn’t even remember his name.
“June,” I breathed.
Up on the scaffolding, her breath caught. Her eyes widened as she stared down at the broken man on the floor, her lips parting as if the name had struck an invisible chord deep inside her.
The silence hanging between us was so palpable, I could almost hear the frantic, hummingbird beat of her pulse all the way from the ground. She was staring down at me, lost in a silent question she didn’t know how to ask.
I was drowning in her.
Then, the heavy thud of tactical boots echoed from the corridor, shattering the moment like a brick through glass.
“Yo, Terminator, the hell is taking so long?” Noah’s voice boomed down the hallway, aggressively normal and unwelcome. “You get lost in your own angst again? Tell me the sector is clear so I can eat my lukewarm rations in peace.”
The sound of my friend’s voice was a bucket of ice water. It forced my lungs to work again, and my mind to stop spiralling. I blinked, the ruins of the chapel rushing back into sharp focus.
With a monumental, painful effort, I forced my shaking legs to push me off the marble. I snatched my rifle from the floor and deliberately turned my back to the scaffolding, struggling to smooth the raw devastation off my face before Noah rounded the corner.
Noah strolled through the arched doorway, his helmet tucked under one arm, chewing on a toothpick. He stopped dead when he saw me. His relaxed posture instantly vanished, his eyes narrowing as he took in my rigid stance and the pale, bloodless shock I knew was written all over my face.
“Whoa. Hey,” Noah said, his voice dropping its joking cadence, replaced by the sharp instincts of a combat soldier. He stepped closer, scanning the dark corners of the room before looking back at me. “You good, man? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
The accidental, devastating accuracy of the words made my jaw clench so hard my teeth ground together.
“I’m fine,” I grated out. My voice sounded like it had been dragged over broken glass. “Tripped. Uneven masonry.”
Noah raised an eyebrow, a slow, disbelieving smirk creeping onto his face. “Right. The guy who practically does parkour over active explosive lines gets taken out by a piece of marble. Sure. I’ll make sure to note the treacherous floor in my report.”
“Just drop it, Noah.”
“I’m just saying, Jules, if the architecture is kicking your ass, maybe it is time to retire—” Noah cut off abruptly as his gaze finally drifted past my shoulder.
He spotted the scaffolding. Then, he spotted the girl in the oversized, dust-covered white shirt, who was currently climbing down the metal ladder with a cautious, graceful hesitance that made my chest cave in.
Noah’s entire demeanour shifted. He straightened up, effortlessly transitioning from my obnoxious brother-in-arms to the charming, easygoing guy who could talk his way out of a hostile interrogation.
“Well, now the clumsiness makes sense,” Noah muttered to me under his breath, nudging my arm.
He raised his voice, flashing a bright, disarming smile at her.
“Hi there. Sorry to interrupt the restoration work, and sorry about my oversized friend here. He forgets how to use his words when he hasn’t had his coffee. ”
I closed my eyes for a a moment trying to compose myself, fighting the surge of adrenaline in my veins. “Noah.”
“I’m Noah, by the way,” he continued on, ignoring my warning tone. He walked forwards, offering a friendly wave. “We’re the security detail for this sector. This brooding monolith next to me is Julian.”
She reached the bottom of the scaffolding and dusted off her hands on her jeans. She looked at Noah, returning his smile with a small, polite one of her own, but her blue eyes flicked immediately back to me. They were searching. Wary. Deeply confused.
“It’s nice to meet you, Noah,” she said, her voice soft, melodic, and perfectly identical to the one that had haunted my nightmares for an eternity. She stepped out of the shadows, the late afternoon sun catching the dark waves of her hair. “I’m Sage.”
“Pretty name,” Noah said, oblivious to the fact that I was actively bleeding out internally next to him. “Well, Sage, if Julian here starts glaring at the stone structures again, just throw a piece of plaster at him. He’s practically indestructible.”
“I’ll… keep that in mind,” Sage said slowly. Her eyes remained locked on mine. She took a tentative step toward us, her hand tracing the edge of the stone pew I had collapsed against moments ago. “Are you sure you’re alright, Julian? You looked… like you were in pain.”
Noah glanced at me, his smile fading slightly as he noticed I hadn’t moved a muscle, nor had I spoken a single word since she climbed down.