Another week passed, and rumors took root—soft and winding, like ivy on old stone. Nursemaids whispered, children echoed. That Arion had been cursed. His eyes turned black when the sky split. That he spoke to things no one else could see. One girl claimed she saw his shadow move when he didn't. Another swore he never blinked.
None of it was true. But none of it was entirely false.
He no longer laughed. No longer ran. His world narrowed to the weight of the sword in his hand and the silence of unanswered questions.
Lady Ariana watched it unfold, her heart caught in quiet ache. She brought him stories from old books, played the harp in his chambers, sat beside him in the dark—but the boy who once cried at scraped knees no longer flinched at bruises. He bled in silence, learned to bind his wounds alone.
She kissed his forehead at night, and he did not pull away—but he did not lean in.
Commander Marius said nothing.
But one cold morning, as Arion collapsed in the dust from sheer exhaustion, the old soldier lifted him—not roughly, but with the solemn care he once gave fallen comrades. He said nothing of training. Nothing of pride.
"You've time yet, boy," he muttered, more to the wind than to Arion. "Don't waste your childhood chasing ghosts."
But Arion only stared at the gray sky, where no stars shone.
"I'm not chasing them," he whispered. "I'm waiting."
At first, Lady Ariana tried to draw him back.
She sang to him as she once had, her voice a gentle balm, laced with lullabies from her youth—songs of gentler times, of summers beneath flowering trees and winter nights beside the hearth. She brought him sweets from the kitchens, rare fruits from across the mountains, silks soft enough to slip through fingers like water. But he did not reach for them. He nodded, thanked her, and returned to his sword.
She read to him then—tales of heroes and kings, of children who rose from nothing to save the world. She watched him closely, waiting for a flicker of joy, a glint of wonder. But Arion only listened in silence, his gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the page. When she finished a tale, he would ask—not how the hero triumphed, but where the monster had come from. Not how the crown was won, but how the enemy was unmade.
He never asked for more stories.
He trained instead.
Each morning she found him in the courtyard before the sun had risen, his small frame already swinging his sword to the wind. Sometimes she called him in. Sometimes she wrapped him in a cloak and sat beside him on the steps, her arm draped around his shoulders. He let her. But he never leaned into her warmth the way he once had. He accepted her nearness as one accepts the presence of a tree or a statue—known, familiar, but untouched by the fire that now burned inside him.
She mourned it in silence.
To the world, she remained composed. Regal. Unshaken. But in private, the mask cracked. At night, when she thought he slept, she would linger at his door, one hand pressed to the wood, her breath catching on a name that once brought joy and now felt like a spell she could no longer cast.
"Arion," she whispered once, not knowing he was still awake. "Please come back."
But the boy she had known—the one who laughed in gardens, who asked how big the world was, who dreamed of exploring it all—was gone. Or perhaps not gone, only buried. Buried beneath terror, beneath silence, beneath the shadow of a god that was not a god, and a father who still didn't return.
He loved her still. That much had not changed.
But love, he was learning, could be quiet. Could be heavy. Could sit between two people like a wall neither dared to breach.
And Lady Ariana, proud and wounded, did not press him. She guarded him like a lioness, fierce and ever-watchful—but the closeness they once shared, the effortless affection, was slipping between them like water through cupped hands.
One day, she reached to brush dirt from his hair.
He flinched.
Only slightly. Barely enough to see.
But she saw.