Five Winters With The Spirit

Elijah Morrow is nineteen years old and has only one reason left to keep breathing: his terminally ill mother. In a small, suffocating apartment filled with the scent of medicine and withered flowers, Elijah watches his mother slowly fade away before his eyes. He gives up college, friends, and any semblance of a life of his own, wearing a fragile smile just to spare her a little more pain. But his mother has been hiding a secret for twenty years. Late one evening, just as night begins to settle over the city, Elijah receives the phone call he has been dreading for months. His mother is gone. Shattered by grief, he returns to the apartment they shared, expecting silence and emptiness. Instead, he finds a stranger waiting for him. Tall, impossibly beautiful, dressed entirely in black, with molten gold glimmering across his fingers and a gaze far too ancient for any human being, the man introduces himself as Syalas . And then he says something impossible: "We are going to be married." Elijah thinks he is insane. Syalas refuses to explain. The answers come later, hidden beneath old secrets, forgotten promises, and a mysterious lamp concealed inside a box of black gold beneath his mother's bed. Twenty years ago, desperate to save her unborn child, Elijah's mother made a bargain with a being imprisoned within that lamp. In exchange for Elijah's life, she asked for one final wish: "When I die... marry my son." Now Elijah and Syalas are bound by a cursed agreement neither of them can escape. They must remain married for five years. If Syalas fulfills the terms of the pact, he will finally earn his freedom after centuries of captivity. If the bond is broken before then, he will remain imprisoned forever. The problem is that Elijah doesn't even know what Syalas truly is. And Syalas has spent so many centuries separated from humanity that he barely understands human emotions at all. As grief turns into routine and the two begin sharing the same home, the same table, and eventually the same bed, something dangerous begins to grow between them: attraction, dependency, and perhaps even love. But Syalas is hiding far more than his true nature. He is a being cursed by gods, hunted by ancient creatures who would kill to possess the lamp. And the truth behind Elijah's mother's bargain is far darker than either of them realizes. Because some wishes were never meant to be granted. And love may be the deadliest magic of all.