The year was 1614, and the settlement that would one day be known as New York was little more than a collection of wooden structures, mud-slicked paths, and the constant, rhythmic crashing of the Atlantic against the shore of the New Netherland colony. For Faust, the salt air brought no clarity, only the bitter sting of a century's worth of memories.
He had returned to this land two years prior, driven by a ghost-thirst he couldn't quench. He had built a modest house with his own hands on the very edge of the growing town, choosing a spot that his intuition insisted was close to the ashes of a cabin he barely remembered.
But the wilderness of his childhood had been tamed by Dutch fur traders and English explorers.
The towering pines were now masts on ships or floorboards in taverns. He had spent months digging through old records, speaking to the oldest inhabitants, and wandering the woods, but there was nothing.
No trace of a scholar who loved the stars, no record of a cabin fire, no memory of a mysterious woman. The people who might have remembered were long in the earth, their stories rotted away like fallen leaves.
He was a man trapped in a permanent summer of thirty years.
Faust sat in his study, the candlelight flickering over a stack of medical treatises he had written in Latin and French. He was the town's most enigmatic resident—a doctor who spoke nine languages, a scholar of such profound depth that even the local governors deferred to him.
He treated the sick with a skill that bordered on the miraculous, his hands steady and his mind a library of anatomical precision. But tonight, the weight of his "blessing" felt like a shroud.
Mommy. Daddy.
The words felt small and fragile in his mind, the only way he could think of the German aristocrats who had saved him. They had given him everything—an education at the finest universities, a name, a soul. He closed his eyes and could still hear his sister's laughter and the sound of his brothers wrestling in the garden. He had watched them all wither. He had held his mother's hand as her skin turned to parchment, and he had lowered his father into the frozen soil of a European winter.
"Why did you leave me?" he whispered to the empty room. "Why am I the only one who has to stay?"
The thought of his own immortality was no longer a wonder; it was a prison sentence. He suspected his biological parents had been witches. Tonight, the darkness felt heavier than usual. The scalpel on his desk glinted in the candlelight, a silent suggestion of an end he wasn't sure he could even achieve.
Driven by a desperate need to drown the silence, Faust left his home and navigated the muddy streets to the local tavern.
The air inside was thick with the scent of cheap rum, unwashed wool, and tobacco smoke. He sat at a corner table, a bottle of dark spirits before him. He drank steadily, the warmth of the alcohol finally softening the sharp edges of his grief. He was tipsy, the world blurring into a dull, manageable hum, when the heavy door creaked open.
The tavern went quiet for a heartbeat as a woman stepped inside.
She didn't look like the wives of the settlers or the daughters of the traders.
She was dressed in leather and worn cloth that suggested a life spent on the deck of a ship. At her hip hung a sharp, elegant rapier, its hilt gleaming with use. But it was her face that drew the eye—strikingly beautiful, yet marked by a black leather patch over one eye.
The symmetry of her features was broken by that single, dark void, yet it only seemed to enhance the fierce, magnetic grace she carried.
She didn't hesitate.
She walked through the crowded room, her boots clicking on the timber floor, and pulled out the chair directly across from Faust.
He looked up, his eyes unfocused, his mind still half-buried in the 17th-century mud of his own depression.
He noticed the way the light hit the hilt of her blade.
She leaned forward, her one good eye locking onto his with an intensity that cut straight through his drunken fog.
"I heard you are a doctor," she said, her voice like low-tide gravel and silk. "When can I make an appointment?"