Chapter 8: I'm Back as Lucian Again?! (End)
A soft breeze wandered through the branches of the old tree, lazy as a sigh from the earth's weary lungs, carrying the faint, clean scent of evening dew that clung to the grass like half-forgotten tears. The sun had surrendered to the horizon long ago, dipping below the jagged line of distant spires, and now the hill lay cradled in the moon's silvery embrace—a pale wash of light that turned the world to whispers of silver and shadow. Lucian reclined beneath the great tree's watchful canopy, its roots cradling him like the arms of an indifferent guardian, his eyes half-lidded, adrift in the faint glimmer of stars pricking the velvet dome above.
He wasn't truly asleep, not in the deep, dreamless plunge that offered mercy to the broken. No, this was something softer, more elusive—a gentle drifting, suspended between the tide of tangled thoughts and the quiet shore of silence, between worlds that tugged at him like relentless currents, refusing to grant even the illusion of rest.
The grass stirred nearby, a subtle hush of blades bending under light footsteps that climbed the slope with the caution of one approaching a wounded animal—hesitant, yet drawn by some invisible thread.
"Lucian?" The voice floated on the breeze, gentle as a petal's fall, laced with the quiet worry of shared blood.
He turned his head, the motion slow as honey spilling from a comb, his ashen hair catching the moonlight in faint, ethereal strands.
From the shadowed path emerged a young woman, her long silver hair bound neatly with a ribbon that fluttered like a captured sigh, her pale blue eyes soft pools reflecting the night's quiet concern. She moved with the grace of one born to marble halls, yet her dark gown—simple velvet that caught the lunar glow in subtle shimmers—seemed almost out of place amid the wild hill, the Blackstar crest embroidered at her collar a small, defiant emblem against the untamed dark.
Lucia Samantha Von Blackstar, his older sister—the one constant in this gilded cage of a life, a mirror to his own shadowed grace, yet untouched by the voids that fate had carved into him.
"Lucian, it's already evening," she murmured, drawing to a halt beside him, her skirts whispering against the grass like a secret shared with the earth. "If you're set on sleep, come back to your room. The chill bites deeper up here than it should."
He blinked once, languid as a cat stirring from sun-warmed stone, as though hauling himself up from depths where words and worries dissolved into mist.
"...Alright," he breathed, the sound faint as the echo of a distant bell, carrying no edge, no spark of the old fire that once crackled in his every retort.
He rose without a flicker of protest, brushing the clinging grass from his sleeves with hands that moved calm and mechanical—devoid of the sharp irritation or stubborn resistance that had once armored their sibling spars, as if the gears of his spirit had ground to a halt, leaving only the quiet hum of acceptance.
Lucia observed him, a shadow of sorrow flitting across her features like a cloud veiling the moon. She had steeled herself for the familiar storm—the biting sarcasm that danced on his tongue like lightning, the defiant glare that turned every conversation into a battlefield of words. But this... this quiet yielding, this nod without fire, unsettled her more than any outburst ever could. He turned toward the descending path, his silhouette blending with the twilight as if drawn back to the mansion by some inexorable pull.
She lingered a heartbeat, lips parting on impulse, the question escaping before caution could cage it. "Lucian," she said, her voice a fragile bridge across the growing chasm, "who is... Eun Seoryeon?"
He froze mid-step, the night seeming to hold its breath around him.
The name lingered in the air between them, delicate as a snowflake suspended in winter's hush, fragile enough to shatter under the weight of its own sorrow.
Lucian's shoulders tensed—a faint ripple, like a stone skipped across still water—but it lasted only a breath, melting into the unyielding calm that cloaked him now. He didn't turn, didn't summon words to fill the void. No denial, no deflection, no spark of the old venom to lash out at the intrusion.
The silence bloomed, vast and unbroken, until the wind swept in to fill it with its low, mournful keen through the leaves.
Lucia waited, breath caught in her throat, yearning for a thread to pull him back—some explanation, some flicker of the brother she knew. But he offered nothing, only the steady rhythm of his retreating steps, his figure dissolving into the gloom below the hill like ink bleeding into water.
He moved like a man unmoored from his own soul—a shadow that recalled the warmth of humanity once, in lifetimes long faded, now adrift in the echo of what had been.
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Lucia's POV
The night wind loitered long after Lucian's footsteps faded into the earth's quiet murmur, a cool caress that raised gooseflesh on her arms and stirred the grass into restless waves. Lucia remained rooted to the hilltop, her gaze tracing the shadowed path he had vanished down, the faint rustle of leaves overhead weaving a lullaby laced with unspoken questions.
She couldn't unravel what she had glimpsed in his eyes—the hollow depths that stared back at her from beneath the tree, not with the blaze of old wounds, but with an emptiness that swallowed light whole.
Her brother had always been a tempest in human form—arrogant as a crown prince unchallenged, temperamental as summer storms, unyielding as the Blackstar steel that bore their name. Even when the world had turned its blade upon him, when scandal had draped his name in chains of whispers and shame, he had burned on—fierce, unquenched, a flame that defied the downdraft.
But now...
Those eyes. They had met hers earlier, in the tree's dappled shade, and found nothing to reflect back—no flicker of anger to ignite the fray, no undercurrent of sorrow to tug at shared blood, no stubborn pride to build walls of words. Not even the faint guilt that sometimes softened his edges in rare, unguarded moments.
Just... void. A hollow chasm, yawning and infinite, that drank in the moonlight and offered no echo, no purchase for hope or hurt.
She rubbed her arms, the night's chill seeping into her bones like ink through parchment, chasing away the last warmth of the fading day.
"...Eun Seoryeon," she whispered to the empty air, the syllables foreign on her tongue—delicate as porcelain from distant shores, distant as a half-remembered dream—yet uttering them stirred a strange pang in her chest, as if the name bore a burden too vast for Lucian to carry alone anymore, spilling over into the quiet spaces between heartbeats.
"Lucia."
The voice pulled her from the reverie, soft but steady, like an anchor cast into turbulent seas.
She turned, skirts swirling faintly in the grass.
Damon stood a few paces off, his usual mask of stern command softened by the moon's forgiving glow, his golden hair a halo of silver threads, his uniform rumpled at the cuffs as if he'd stormed from the mansion's warmth in haste, drawn by the same invisible tether that had led her here.
"You're out here too," he observed, his tone quiet as the settling dusk, stepping closer with the measured gait of one who carried the estate's weight on shoulders already bowed.
Lucia nodded, her gaze drifting back to the path's shadowed mouth. "I found him here. Dozing under the tree again, like the hill's his confessor."
Damon exhaled, a sound halfway between sigh and scoff, raking a hand through his tousled locks. "That idiot... even as a noble of the blood, he beds down on dirt and dreams like some wandering beggar."
The barb was sharp, honed on habit's edge, but the undercurrent ran softer—worry veiled in the armor of brotherly disdain, a shield against the unease gnawing at them both.
Lucia glanced sidelong at him, her blue eyes searching his face in the lunar half-light. "You saw him today, didn't you? Crossed paths in the halls."
Damon's jaw clenched, a muscle ticking like a clock's reluctant hand. "Yeah. I cornered him—tried to shake some sense into that thick skull of his."
"And?" she prompted, tilting her head, the ribbon in her hair catching a stray moonbeam like a captured star.
He fell silent, gaze wandering to the horizon where the estate's lights began to prick the gloom like hesitant fireflies. When he spoke, the words emerged measured, reluctant. "...He's different, Luce. Not just the surface frost—it's deeper, like the roots have withered."
"Different how?" she pressed, though a part of her already knew, the echo of those empty eyes lingering like a chill draft through an ill-sealed window.
Damon uncrossed his arms, letting them hang loose at his sides, vulnerability cracking the heir's polished facade. "It's not the shouting matches we used to have, the barbs that left blood on the tongue. He doesn't rise to it anymore. Doesn't argue, doesn't spit fire. It's like... all the blaze that fueled him just... guttered out. Left ashes where there used to be a forge."
Lucia nodded, slow as the tree's sway in the breeze, her fingers twisting the fabric of her gown. "I felt it too—the hush around him, like walking into a room after a storm's passed, but the air still hums with lightning's ghost."
He met her eyes then, the blue ice in his softening to something rawer, more human. "When I laid into him about the court, the annulment—expecting the old venom, the vows of ruin—he just... looked through me. Like I was a shadow on the wall, not the brother standing in his path. It felt like talking to a husk, Luce. A corpse that hasn't caught the scent of its own grave-dirt yet."
Her lips quivered, a tremor she couldn't quite still, the night air turning sharp in her lungs. "You think... something happened to him? Broke him clean through?"
Damon drew a long breath, the sound ragged at the edges. "Has to be. Folks don't rewrite their bones overnight. Not Lucian—not our storm of a brother."
Lucia lowered her gaze to the grass at her feet, blades silvered by moonlight, each one a tiny sentinel guarding secrets of the soil. "He... said nothing when I asked about that name. Eun Seoryeon."
Damon's brow furrowed, a crease like a blade's nick. "Eun... what?"
"A name I've never heard," she replied, her voice soft as the rustle of hidden wings, "like a whisper from some far-off tale—delicate, laced with frost. But when I let it slip... it was like dropping a stone into still water. Ripples went through him, deep ones, and something inside just... fractured. Quiet-like, but you could feel it."
Silence wove between them then, thick as the night's deepening veil, broken only by the distant call of a night bird—a lone note of melancholy threading the dark.
The siblings stood shoulder to shadowed shoulder beneath the moon's watchful eye, words failing them like bridges half-burned. The air hung cool and weighted, the trees' faint sighs mirroring the quiet grief that pooled in their chests, unspoken yet shared like a heirloom too heavy for one set of hands.
Damon broke the hush at last, his voice threaded quieter than the breeze. "Whatever ghost that name summons... I reckon it hails from somewhere beyond our maps. Beyond the empire's ink and seals."
Lucia lifted her chin, meeting his gaze with eyes clouded like a sky before rain. "What do you mean?"
He shook his head, the motion weary as a traveler's at journey's end. "Can't pin it exact. But when he looks at us—at these walls, this life—it's like he's peering through a veil, seeing shores we can't chart. Something vast and vanished."
Her hands tightened on the velvet of her dress, knuckles paling like moonlit bone. "Then what do we do? How do we pull him back?"
"...Nothing," Damon murmured after a pause that stretched like twilight's linger, his tone a reluctant anchor. "Not yet. We watch, Luce—we stand sentinel in the quiet. If he's shifted, carved himself anew... maybe it's no curse. Maybe he's finally leashed the wild in him, learned to walk without setting the world ablaze."
Lucia turned her gaze away, toward the hill's shadowed descent, her eyes misting with the unshed weight of it all. "Leashed? Damon... he doesn't even feel anymore. It's not control—it's... absence."
Her brother offered no rebuttal, his silence a concession heavier than words. He pivoted toward the path winding back to the mansion's glow, his profile etched sharp against the night, unreadable as a closed book.
Lucia tarried a moment longer, alone now with the great tree's gentle sway, its leaves murmuring faint benedictions under the moon's pale vigil. She conjured Lucian's eyes once more in her mind's eye—how utterly vacant they had been, how profoundly still, a hush that echoed not with the serenity of mended wounds, but the stark quiet of a man who had wagered all and held naught in return.
"Lucian..." she breathed, the name a tremor on her lips, fragile as a prayer flung to indifferent stars. "Where did you wander... before you found your way back to us?"
The wind stirred in answer, a fleeting caress that ghosted her skin with borrowed warmth—gone as swiftly as it came, leaving only the night's cool embrace.
And somewhere down the hill, in the mansion's labyrinthine heart, a single light flickered to life in the window of Lucian's room—the faint, solitary glow of a soul ensnared between twin lives, between the irretrievable past and an uncertain present, between treasures lost to frost and those that could never quite be reclaimed.