The day before the tragedy, the house smelled of music and sewing.Low notes spilled from an old record player, the scent of coffee clung to the fabrics, laughter echoed softly, they had just secured a new contract.
Aurora sometimes sang without ever showing her face to the world.People said she had the voice of a secret.That night, she sang for them.
Sylus was twenty-one.He held Aurora's hand the way one holds a promise, unaware that there are cracks no promise can ever mend.They had Niels very young, barely out of adolescence.Life had rushed by, between contracts and stolen kisses in the kitchen.
Aurora was both luminous and dangerous; she smiled as if she were about to take flight.Sylus loved her with the tender fury of those who still believe love alone can be enough.
Then came the pain, sudden, like a sentence breaking mid-word.At the hospital, the lights were white and merciless; the machines clicked with the mechanical indifference of things that do not know how to love.
Aurora was still singing, faintly, between breaths.Her voice trembled, but it did not fall silent.
"Sing for me," she would whisper sometimes, to soothe him more than herself.
And then came forgetting.A minute.A breath.And the voice went out.
Doctors became hurried silhouettes.Words drifted in the air, complications, hemorrhage, too late.
Sylus felt the world dissolve around him.He held the hand of a body leaving, and within that hand, he felt the infinite weight of regret.
At twenty-one, he already carried the guilt of a man who did not yet know how to breathe without another's breath.
When the little girl was laid on his chest, she screamed as if her rage came from another century.He named her Althéa.
Sylus looked at that face found in chaos, and something inside him cracked even deeper.The body that had sung for them was gone, the voice that had begun so many promises would speak no more.
Inside Sylus, a space opened, vast, cold, unfathomable.
In the years that followed, he learned to bury that emptiness beneath meetings, contracts, and numbers.He learned to smile when required, to stay distant when someone reached out.He became a quiet fortress, a powerful businessman whose hands knew the value of things, but not yet the worth of forgiveness or presence.
For Althéa and Niels, he was a loving father in his own way: often present, often demanding, rarely gentle.To the world, he remained Sylus Ashbourne, the man who had everything and spoke little.But to himself, he was still the boy who hadn't known how to protect the singer who once filled his home with light.
And somewhere, in the silence death had left behind, Aurora's music kept trembling, an unfinished melody, destined to become the shadow and measure of all faults,and of all redemptions yet to come.