Novel & Cerita Rewriting My Third Life

I lean my forehead against the cool surface, breathing through the roar of my wolf. “Fuck you,” I mutter. To the Moon Goddess. To fate. To whatever sick bastard keeps rewriting the same ending where I end up standing over a casket. I’m done. I told myself I was done. I’ve tried everything to break the Legacy Curse. In Life Three, I locked her in a safe house; she still died. In Life Four, I tried to stay away entirely, thinking I was the poison; she died anyway. And both times, she wasn't alone.

See him fall in love with Riley Parker and spend two years with her. And lived with him crying when she moved away and their relationship fell apart. I held him while he sobbed and told him it would be okay. Because that's what best friends do. But I was lying to him the whole time. Breaking Rule Two every single day by keeping the biggest secret of my life. And tonight, I'm going to break Rule Three. We're both freshmen at Kalewood University now. New school, new life, new chances. I spent the entire summer planning this moment. I ditched my glasses for contacts.

I stand on the pavement in Paris with the printout in my bag and three futures assembling themselves somewhere inside me and I start laughing, the real kind, the helpless kind, and my mother starts laughing too, and we stand there, her in San Diego and me on a pavement in the eleventh arrondissement, laughing at the absolute enormity of my life. I go home, open my laptop, and start a new document titled, simply, Bellamy Inc. If I am building something, I am building it all for three.

She could hear some worried noises disappearing slowly and slowly. The third life began… Without her knowing, she might have died in her second life while staring the shore but what amazed her was that she woke up when she was 18 in her first life. Gasp! Waking up in her first life seemed more like.. Amazing! Elin, who was sulking over her regrets near the beach got one more chance to live her first life to her fullest. Her mysterious life once again began for the third time.

Before I could kidnap Elan, though, he pushed through the crowd and walked straight toward me. Seeing the urgency in his eyes, I stared at him in disbelief. "You…" He nodded and said the answer I had already expected, "I was reborn too." My emotions tangled instantly. I could not tell whether I felt sorrow or relief. Sorrow, because the ending still had not changed. Relief, because so many things had clearly changed. Elan now carried memories from his previous life. That alone was a massive turning point. I gripped his hand tightly, overwhelmed with excitement. "Since you’ve been reborn too, there’s no need for me to explain everything. Tell me the truth!"

I asked, watching as the space around us turns clear, with only a slight fog. "I just want to say that this; giving you a chance to come back to life was one of the greatest decisions I've made. Not only have you gone off the rails, you also have managed to carve your own source of happiness." I said nothing, as out of nowhere, he began to float, laying back with his arms down to his sides, the scythe keeping him balanced. "But I know you have something up your sleeve. So please, make it worth my while." he said, as a skeletal version of himself walked out from him and disappeared.

Blood spilled from his body, soaking through my blouse. In the second life, we got married. We didn’t go on a honeymoon, so the car accident never happened. Instead, fate arrived in an almost ridiculous way. When he came to pick me up after work, a billboard overhead suddenly crashed down. It hit him squarely. I watched with my own eyes as that tall man was crushed until nothing remained, as if heaven itself had decided he had to die. I refused to believe it. So there was a third life. In that life, I quit my job. After we got married, I stayed glued to his side, barely leaving him for a moment, terrified that the slightest lapse would lead to another accident.

She thinks for a moment. Then writes: The third book. The full version. The specific story, not just the argument. The first life named — not the mechanism, which remains mine — but the quality of it. What it is to be the person who was not unhappy and did not know that not-unhappy was insufficient. What it took to understand that. What the second life built from the understanding.

Every heartbeat of this new Thalia, every shallow breath she draws today, is paid for with the constant, searing agony that crawls up my spine through this cursed mark. ​Perhaps to Thalia this is merely her second life, but I have been reborn three times—and finally, in this third cycle, I have her. I orchestrated her death in the second life so she could be reborn in conditions I could control. I manipulated every thread of her fate until she was cornered, until she had absolutely no escape but into my arms. It was cruel, yes. I know. ​But every second of the pain I feel in my spine is a bargain, a small price to pay to see her breathe once more.

It was a new chapter of my life. （THE END）