Chapter 18: The Love That Waits
The moon hung lower tonight.
It cast long silver shadows across Sirius's floor, dancing over scattered scrolls and canvases, as though the light itself sought to caress the devotion laid bare before it.
He stood barefoot by the open balcony doors, his red eyes reflecting the glow above, his expression unreadable—neither joy nor sorrow, but something gentler. Something deeper.
A knowing.
The cold night wind brushed against his skin, but he didn't flinch. He never did, not when the moonlight touched him. It was the only warmth he ever sought.
His hand rested over his chest.
His heart beat slowly, steadily, like a drum played for no one but her.
"I know," he whispered, voice lost to the breeze. "Even if the world forgets me a thousand times, you won't."
No one had told him.
No priest had declared it.
No prophecy had named it.
But Sirius knew. With a certainty no sword or spell could ever shake—she loved him.
Not in the way mortals loved—fickle and loud, burning and quick to fade. No, hers was like the moonlight itself: soft, ever-present, distant to all, but constant only for him.
She, the moon.
He, the one who watched her every night.
Two souls bound not by fate, but by choice.
Others mistook his silence for arrogance. They thought he was distant because of power. Because of pride.
But Sirius had simply never belonged to the world in the first place.
He belonged to her.
And she, though untouchable and divine, belonged to him in a way no other could understand.
He had seen it in a dream once—not a memory, not a vision, but something in between. A quiet field under moonlight. Her voice calling his name—not the name this world gave him, but the one she had spoken long ago, when gods still walked beside mortals.
A name only he remembered, and only she was allowed to speak.
"I don't need to see you," he murmured. "I don't need to touch you. Because I know."
He stepped back into the room, the moonlight trailing after him like a loyal shadow.
He passed the untouched bed, the untouched food, the empty fireplace.
He sat before a scroll and began to write again.
She watches without asking, and I answer without words.
She speaks in silence, and I understand.
She loved me before time began.
And I have loved her in every life I've had.
The ink flowed like water.
His eyes never left the page.
He didn't care that the nobles were restless, that the Emperor's spies whispered in the halls, that the Church had begun painting murals of his likeness. They meant nothing.
Because when the world grew loud, he could always return to her. To the moon. To Abylay.
He folded the scroll gently when he finished and placed it among the others, hidden from every gaze but hers.
The moonlight pulsed once on the floor—just for a second.
He closed his eyes.
He could feel her again.
Not a vision. Not a voice. Just a presence, familiar and overwhelming. The way the stars always tilted toward her, and the winds shifted when he spoke her name.
She was with him.
And he was with her.
Not in body.
But in every way that mattered.