The price of time

Death had always walked beside her, a shadow stitched to her soul.
She fought. She won.
But what was left to claim?
The castle around her - the only home she had ever known - was crumbling into ruin. Stone shattered under fire. Bodies carpeted the ground, faces she would never forget, lives she had failed to save.
Victory meant nothing when it was built on a graveyard.
She was alone.
And worse, she was alive.
She had died before.
Had died and returned, as if cursed to never know peace, cursed to be the master of death, forever hunted by the thing that should have claimed her.
Death
It was her shadow, her lover, and her tormentor.
It whispered to her in the silence, tugged at her with every breath she drew, a cat playing with its prey, savoring the chase.
She tried to undo it - to tear a hole in time, to claw back 46 hours, to steal even one life from the jaws of death.
But time does not bargain with the broken.
It is a vengeful thing, wild and cold.
It seized her, flung her not back 46 hours but 46 years, into a past dripping with shadows and secrets.
The castle stood whole then - but the rot was already there, festering beneath the stone.
And Death, patient and cruel, was already waiting for her in the cracks of the world, ready to finish what it had begun. Smiling at her from the darkness.
Death wearing the face of Tom Riddle

*Mature themes*
Enemy's to lovers *Tom Riddle*