The Interest on Forever

In a world where time is a currency and memories are the only way to pay for it, Dellus Thorne is a man frozen in his prime. To the common folk of the Thorne Estate, he is a vibrant nobleman of twenty; in reality, he is a sixty-year-old shell of a man who has sold forty years of his history to a crossroads demon known as The Archivist. His goal? To stay young long enough to find Julia, the servant girl he loved and lost in his youth. But the cost of his immortality is high: every year he buys erases the very memories of the woman he is searching for. Julia has been searching, too. But unlike Dellus, she has spent four decades living in the shadows, clinging to a leather-bound diary that contains every secret of their shared past. She has struck her own deal with the shadows to stay young, but she has "cheated" the system—using her diary to anchor her soul while her body refuses to age. When Julia finally tracks Dellus down, she applies to be a lowly housemaid in his crumbling, gothic mansion. She expects a tearful reunion; instead, she finds a man who looks at her with the cold indifference of a stranger. Dellus has sold the memory of her face, her voice, and the very reason he began his quest. As Julia works to make him fall in love with her a second time, she discovers a terrifying truth: The Archivist didn't just take their memories—he swapped them. The "phantom echoes" Dellus feels aren't his own; they are Julia’s. To break the curse and reclaim their lives, they must face a choice that could end them both: Is a lifetime of stolen youth worth more than a single day of growing old together? "The Interest on Forever" is a haunting romantasie about the weight of what we forget and the enduring power of what the heart refuses to let go.