The night in Virelia was unusually still.
The moon hung high—round, silver, and silent—casting its glow across the gardens of the royal estate where Aurean had taken to walking in the late hours. He wore a loose robe of pale silk, the hem brushing dew-kissed grass. The Virelian healers had insisted on comfort, on softness. Even the fabric seemed to whisper instead of rustle.
But tonight, there was no comfort. Not really.
He paused beneath a flowering tree, its blossoms pale blue in the moonlight, his breath clouding faintly in the night air. The leaves trembled faintly, though there was no wind.
And then—
A deep, distant toll.
Aurean lifted his head.
The sound echoed across the sky, slow and low, as if the earth itself mourned something unseen. Another toll followed. Then another. Rhythmic. Heavy. A funeral bell.
But not from Virelia.
His heart clenched.
He shouldn't have felt anything. There was no way to hear such a thing from the empire, leagues and oceans away. And yet, he knew that sound. The cadence. The tone. The imperial mourning bell.
"Someone is gone," he whispered.
Not just someone.
Something.
He didn't know how he knew. He only knew that the pain in his chest flared anew. As if something sacred had finally been spoken aloud. As if a secret that had been held in darkness had been named.
And honored.
He dropped to his knees in the grass.
His hands folded together instinctively, though no one was watching, and his eyes turned upward to the glowing moon. His lips moved without sound.
He didn't know what words Rythe might have spoken. But he knew, somehow, that Rythe had finally spoken them.
And so he whispered into the wind:
"Caelum."
It came to him—effortless. A name carried by the breeze, as if the stars themselves whispered it.
Aurean bowed his head.
"Your name was Caelum," he said again, voice shaking. "Your name was always Caelum."
The tears that followed were not from pain alone. They were not the same tears he had shed in chains, or in silence, or in shame.
These were tears of remembrance. Of a bond never given time, but never severed. Of a grief that—at last—had space to breathe.
Somewhere in the palace behind him, a candle was placed by one of the Virelian staff, a tradition of their kingdom when distant mourning was sensed.
But Aurean remained in the garden, kneeling under the moon, whispering the name again and again into the night.
And the bell kept tolling, even if only in his soul.