28/10/2025
The Undying Bond
Elara opened her eyes. She wasn't cold, but she wasn't warm. She was just... there. The world was a little muted, a little gray, like looking through a dusty window pane. She turned, and saw Lyra.
Lyra looked just as she had in life, only her skin had a faint, ethereal glow. The angry contortion of her face was gone, replaced by a profound, hollow stillness.
"You killed me," Lyra's voice was a dry, breathy rustle, like wind over sand.
"And you killed me," Elara replied, the realization washing over her with terrifying finality. "For a fisherman."
They hovered there, two nascent spirits bound to the place of their demise. Kael never even noticed their disappearance for a week. When he did, he grieved, then moved on, marrying a girl from the next village within the year.
As they watched him, unfeeling and unseen, the weight of their sacrifice—their double murder-suicide—crushed them.
"We destroyed everything," Lyra whispered one evening, as the moon cast their shadows long and faint across the water. "For something that was never truly ours."
"We had everything," Elara said, her ghostly hand reaching for where Lyra's should be. "We had us. We threw it away for a flicker."
The silence that followed was their apology, their confession, their shared sorrow. They realized that Kael had just been a catalyst, a beautiful, meaningless thing that had exposed the true, essential love they had for each other—a love so vast, so demanding, that it had choked itself to death.
Now, as ghosts, that love was all they had left. They couldn't touch, but they could sense each other's presence like a constant, gentle warmth. They were bound, not by the shore, but by the cord of their lifelong bond, stronger in death than it had ever been in life.
"When we come back," Lyra breathed, her voice filled with a desperate, new resolve. "In the next life, we won't let anyone come between us. We'll find each other, Elara. We have to."
Elara felt the spectral echo of a smile. "We will," she promised. "We won't look for the fisherman. We'll look for the girl who knows my secrets. We'll look for us."
And so they waited, two best friends, two lovers in a way neither of them had ever understood, their shared existence as ghosts a solemn vow to find each other when their souls were finally ready to be reborn.
In Frame : Preslyn & Melrose
Location : Bay Laguna
Co Photogs : Joseph Jamile Hikari Project
Leslie Jamile BLACK MEDIA