Snow cushioned his back.
For a moment, Rodrik Vanhart had the absurd thought that the land he had bled for was finally willing to hold him—now that he had nothing left to offer it.
His breath left him in uneven clouds, fading quickly in the frigid air. The world above his gaze was a white sky cut by the leaning ruin of the watchtower, its broken teeth biting into the pale light.
His sword lay half-buried at his side.
His hands, stripped of strength, trembled where they rested on the snow.
The battle had ended.
He had not died.
That was what hurt most.
"…Kill me."
The words came out ruined and thin, almost swallowed by the wind.
Rodrik's voice cracked.
He stared upward, but in truth, he saw nothing of the present. The snow above him was a canvas where his life flickered in jagged fragments—campaigns, nights in armor, Elira's face at a banquet, Sera's first sword swing, Lysenne's scream.
"Kill me," he repeated, louder, throat burning.
Tears pricked the corners of his eyes. The cold did not let them fall easily. It turned them into a stinging ache instead.
"At least…" His chest shuddered. A short, broken laugh escaped, ugly and raw. "At least then—I become worth something—as a villain."
His lips twisted.
"As someone the world bothered to erase."
The snow around his head sank as he dug his fingers into it, clenching until his nails scraped frozen earth beneath.
He had chosen betrayal.
Drunk a curse.
Crippled a child.
Joined hands with people who wanted the world bent into violent shapes.
If that didn't make him worth killing, what did?
Why was this boy—this impossibly calm boy—still standing there, unblooded sword at his side?
Rodrik's breath turned more ragged.
The wind bit at him.
The sky above did not answer.
But Kel did.
His shadow fell across Rodrik's vision, blocking the washed-out brightness.
Kel's voice, when it came, was soft.
Too soft.
It slid through the air like a knife wrapped in silk.
"Elira," Kel said slowly, "loved you until the day she died."
The snow…
stopped falling.
Or perhaps Rodrik simply stopped seeing anything else.
His eyes—dull and resigned a moment ago—widened with naked, almost feral sharpness. He turned his head slightly, grinding ice beneath his cheek, and stared at Kel.
"Don't," he rasped.
His voice shook.
It was no longer the tone of a fallen commander.
It was the plea of a man dragged barefoot across old wounds.
"At least," Rodrik forced out, "do not soil her name… to throw false hope at me."
His lips bared in a mirthless smile.
"I may be wrong. I may have done unforgivable things. But I loved her—with everything I had." His throat constricted. "She did not choose me. She married someone else. That is fact. Everyone knows this."
He laughed again, bitter frost.
"So don't you stand there, boy, and tell me stories to make my death… cleaner."
Kel did not flinch.
Did not soften.
He only lowered his gaze slightly, lashes shadowing his eyes.
Without a word, he reached into the inner fold of his coat.
Rodrik's body tensed reflexively, expecting a blade.
Instead—
Kel drew out a bundle of parchment bound in a faded, pale ribbon.
The paper edges were worn, corners softened by countless touches that never reached their intended destination.
Kel knelt.
The movement was quiet, unhurried. Snow crunched lightly beneath his knee as his coat settled around him like a dark curtain.
He placed the bundle on Rodrik's chest.
The weight was almost nothing.
Rodrik felt it like stone.
"These," Kel said softly, "are Elira's letters."
Rodrik's fingers twitched.
Kel continued, his voice steady but low.
"She wrote them to you. One after another. After your proposal. After her refusal. After her marriage." He paused, watching Rodrik's eyes. "Letters she never sent. All of them hidden away in her room."
Rodrik's throat worked.
"Liar," he whispered. But the word had lost its teeth.
Kel's gaze did not waver.
"She was forced to marry by her father," he said. "He feared binding their house to Vanhart's instability. To the man he thought would be ground down by an empire that only remembers convenience."
Rodrik swallowed hard.
Kel's tone remained measured, but there was a faint undercurrent—something like distant sorrow.
"Even after the marriage," he said, "she never shared a bed with her husband. She never let him touch her. She refused him, again and again. Because in her heart, she had already accepted only one man as her husband. As her life partner."
Kel's eyes darkened, pupils contracting slightly.
"You."
Rodrik's breath hitched.
The chill sank deep into his bones, but not from the snow.
His fingers crept shakily up to the letters resting on his chest, as if afraid they would vanish if he gripped them too quickly.
Kel continued, voice quiet, precise.
"She died yearning for you. In her last days she asked, again and again, if anyone had seen you. If there was any way to send a message." The faintest shadow crossed Kel's gaze. "She wanted only one thing: to tell you the truth."
Rodrik's hand froze over the parchment.
Kel's words pressed slowly into the air, each syllable landing like a weight.
"That she loved you."
"That she had always loved you."
"And that the peaceful life you dreamed of…" his eyes lowered, "…was the life she had wanted, too."
The world tilted.
Rodrik sat up abruptly.
His muscles screamed.
The movement tore pain through his chest and back, but he didn't feel any of it clearly. He only felt the rustle of paper under his fingers.
His breath came in shallow bursts as he untied the ribbon with clumsy hands.
The knot resisted for a moment, stiff with age.
Then it loosened.
Thin sheets fanned open like pale wings.
Kel stood.
He stepped back without a word, giving Rodrik space, and turned his gaze away—granting him a privacy most men didn't receive at the end of their lives.
Rodrik's hands shook as he lifted the first letter.
Elira's handwriting stared back at him.
Not the formal strokes used at court.
The script here leaned slightly, curves gentler, pressure changing where her breath likely faltered while writing.
His vision blurred.
He blinked, breathing hard.
The first line struck him like a blow.
"Rodrik,"
"Forgive me for lying."
His eyes darted across the page, greedily, desperately.
He inhaled sharply.
She apologized.
For the refusal.
For the words she had chosen.
For the truth she had been too afraid to hold between them.
"I said I did not see a future with you," she wrote, ink slightly thicker on that line—as if she had pressed the quill too hard, hating each word. "The truth is… it is the only future I ever saw."
His grip tightened, crinkling the parchment.
Snow fell on the page.
He didn't notice.
She wrote of the conservatory with frost and roses.
Of his quiet wish for a hearth, for boots drying near a fire.
Of children learning to walk on creaking floors while he returned from the night patrols.
She wrote of all the things he had only dared imagine in the privacy of his own exhaustion.
Elira had written them as if she had watched those dreams through his ribs.
Rodrik stared.
His lips parted silently.
His pulse pounded in his ears.
He turned to the next letter.
Then the next.
And the next.
Each one carved another line across his soul.
In one, she wrote:
"They say he is a good man."
"I do not deny it.
But he is not you. And I cannot speak another's name when your shadow already fills the space beside mine."
In another:
"I have not shared his bed. I cannot. It is selfish. Cruel, even. But how can I give him what already belongs to you, when you were the one who laid your honesty before me first?"
In another:
"If I had been braver, I would have run to you that night."
"If I had been braver, I would have risked everything and chosen you over security."
"If I had been braver… we might have been miserable together."
"And yet—my heart says that even misery with you would have been gentler than peace elsewhere."
Rodrik's shoulders shook.
The letters blurred until ink and tears became one.
His breath hitched, broke, turned into sound.
It wasn't a scream.
It wasn't a sob.
It was something caught between both—raw and hoarse and years late.
Kel remained a distance away, arms at his sides, face unreadable. Snow collected on his hair and coat, melting slowly as it touched the faint heat of aura wound tight beneath his skin.
He did not interrupt.
He did not comfort.
He stood witness.
That was all.
Rodrik crushed the last letter to his chest, as though trying to force it into his skin, into his bones, into all the hollow places where resentment had gnawed for too long.
"I… was wrong," he choked out, the words tearing his throat.
He wasn't sure who he was speaking to.
Elira.
Kel.
The snow.
Himself.
"I… thought she turned her back…" His voice broke. "I thought—everyone left. That I had been… cast aside. Forgotten."
He squeezed his eyes shut.
Tears finally fell, hot trails carving through the chill.
"But she… she…!"
The words failed him.
He bowed his head over the letters, shoulders folding inward.
For a man who had built himself as a wall, he now looked smaller than the ruins behind him.
Kel watched, expression stern—but there was a shadow behind his gaze. Understanding. Not sympathy.
He had seen it before.
In players who lost everything because they never saw the full picture until the game over screen.
Rodrik was like them.
A man who had been given only fragments of truth and filled the gaps with bitterness.
And then—
He had let that bitterness guide his sword.
Rodrik's voice came again, hoarse, quieter.
"I damned myself," he whispered. "Over… a lie I told myself."
His fingers clenched around the pages, crumpling them.
"She… loved me… and I repaid that love by becoming the reason her niece can't walk… the reason her name is tethered to a villain."
He lifted his head slowly.
His eyes found Kel.
There was no defiance left.
Only ruin.
And clarity.
"Do you see now?" Rodrik asked, voice a frayed thread. "There is nothing left in me worth saving."
The snow swirled gently between them.
Kel's gaze did not soften.
But he finally answered.
"…That is not my choice to make," he said. "It never was."
Rodrik stared at him.
Kel's eyes lowered to the letters in Rodrik's grasp.
"All I have done," he continued, "is return to you what should have been yours long ago."
Rodrik looked down at them.
The pages shook in his hands.
Not from cold.
From weight.
The weight of being loved.
The weight of knowing.
The weight of realizing every monstrous step he'd taken had been built atop a corpse of truth he never bothered to dig up.
He laughed once more.
It sounded broken.
"…Then what am I now?" he asked quietly. "A villain who was once loved?"
His fingers loosened.
The letters slid from his grip and fell into the snow, edges darkening with moisture.
He stared at them.
At the life he could have had.
At the peace he had wanted.
At the quiet he had destroyed with his own hands.
His shoulders slumped.
"I asked you to kill me," he whispered. "Not for justice."
His eyes closed.
"…because I did not want to live knowing all this."
Snow landed on the letters, gentle, almost apologetic.
Kel remained silent.
Rodrik lowered his head.
"And yet," he said, "you gave it to me anyway."
He let out a slow, shuddering breath.
"…Cruel child."
Kel's expression did not change.
But his answer came soft.
"No," he said. "Just honest."
The wind moved across the tower ruins.
The world felt very quiet.
Rodrik's tears fell freely now, landing on Elira's ink, blurring her words in small, uneven circles.
He wept, not like a condemned man.
Not like a general.
But like a boy.
Like the version of himself who once believed that fighting hard enough meant someday being allowed to rest in warm arms.
Kel watched.
He allowed him to break.
Without interruption.
Without comfort.
Without denial.
Because before judgment—
truth had to finish its work.
And nothing broke a man cleaner than a truth that arrived too late.
in that last moments while laying down on snow rodrik learn that he was not cast aside that he also was loved that his love for elira was not only one-sided but two-sided it was just that elira never conffess her love and he never new that she loved him.