STORY 8 :
ASHES & ROSES
PART 1 : WHEN HATE BURNS
BRIGHTER
“HATE is nothing but love, wearing broken armor.”
Rain slithered down the cracked windows of the old mansion, where shadows moved like secrets too afraid to speak.
Eira stood by the ruined fireplace, her dark hair damp and clinging to her face, eyes cold as obsidian.
Across from her, leaning carelessly against the archway, was Rael the man she had sworn to despise more than anyone alive.
Tall, arrogant, and infuriatingly calm,
Rael’s gaze traced her every move.
His presence filled the room like smoke, dangerous yet strangely intoxicating.
“You shouldn’t have come here,”
she hissed, voice low and sharp as broken glass.
“And yet,” Rael’s lips curved into a cruel half-smile, “here I am.”
Their history was written in blood and betrayal.
Two rival families, bound by an ancient feud neither fully understood only that hate was easier than asking why.
Lightning split the sky.
The flickering light danced on his face, showing scars time had failed to erase.
“We wear our wounds like crowns, don’t we?”
“You ruined everything, Rael,” she spat. “You killed”
“I know what I did,” he cut her off, voice suddenly rough, raw.
“And you think I sleep peacefully?”
They glared at each other, breathing heavy, the silence between them loud with unspoken truths.
PART 2 : WHERE FIRE MEETS FIRE
Days turned into weeks, and fate kept throwing them together at secret meetings, on rain soaked roads, inside crumbling halls where the past still whispered.
They fought. God, they fought.
Words like daggers.
Eyes like storms.
Every clash left them bleeding in ways no one could see.
One night, after another brutal argument, Eira shoved him against the wall. Her chest heaved; her heartbeat drummed painfully loud.
“I hate you,” she whispered.
Rael’s breath tangled with hers.
“Then hate me,”
he rasped,
“but don’t lie to yourself.”
“Sometimes love doesn’t ask for permission.
Sometimes it just… devours.”
PART 3 : THE SOFTNESS BENEATH
THE SCARS
Nights grew colder.
And in that cold, they found warmth neither had known.
In whispered confessions under shattered ceilings.
In stolen touches when no one watched.
In poetry scribbled on torn paper, hidden away like sin:
“You burn me,
and yet, without your flame,
I would only be ash.”
He told her about nightmares that left him gasping.
She told him about the ache of losing everything she once loved.
They were still enemies.
But somehow, their hearts didn’t listen.
PART 4 : LOVE, EVEN HERE
One final fight louder, messier, almost fatal.
The weight of the world crashing over them.
“You’re poison,”
she cried, tears mixing with rain.
“You’re everything I swore to destroy.”
“And yet, Eira,”
his voice broke,
“I can’t breathe without you.”
Silence.
The realization they had already chosen each other, long before words admitted it.
She stepped forward, resting her forehead against his.
“Then we burn together,”
she whispered.
…….
Years later, the feud became nothing but a story people told by candlelight.
And in a garden blooming behind the rebuilt mansion, Eira and Rael sat together older, scarred, but alive.
She read aloud from a worn paper:
“What is love, if not the courage
to hold a blade against each other’s hearts
and choose instead to embrace?”
Rael smiled, kissing her temple.
“Enemies once,” he murmured.
“And now?” she teased.
“Now, only yours,” he answered.
The past didn’t vanish.
But love grew anyway….