The castle had grown unbearably quiet since Seloria's departure.
Every sound—each creak of the old timbers, each sigh of the sea beyond the windows—seemed to echo too loudly now, filling spaces once softened by laughter and light. The air smelled faintly of salt and dying roses. Even the servants moved more softly through the corridors, as though not to disturb a spirit that lingered unseen.
Lyrielle spent her days in the northern library, a place few others entered. It was a chamber of high, arched ceilings and long-forgotten books, where dust floated in the sunbeams like drifting ash. She sat by the window most mornings with parchment before her, though the words that came were not meant for any living reader.
She wrote to Seloria.
Each letter began the same way—My heart, my moonlight, my Seloria—and ended the same, sealed with trembling hands and pressed lips. She never sent them. There was nowhere to send them to; no courier would travel so far, and no answer could ever find its way back across the mist. Still, the act of writing steadied her heart, gave form to the longing that would otherwise consume her.
You are everywhere, one letter read. In the silence of the halls, in the echo of footsteps that are not my own. I close my eyes and I see your hair in the waves, your breath in the wind. The sea speaks your name, Seloria, again and again until I can hardly bear it.
At night, Lyrielle would wander the halls, candle in hand, tracing the familiar path to the balcony overlooking the sea. There, the world seemed suspended between waking and dreaming—the waves reflecting the moon in fractured silver, the mist coiling like ghostly ribbons across the cliffs.
It was on one such night that she first heard the whisper.
A sound so faint it could have been imagined—a breath against her ear, her name spoken from somewhere behind her, though she was utterly alone.
She froze, her candle flame wavering. The wind had stilled. The sea had gone strangely quiet, as though holding its breath.
"Seloria?" Lyrielle whispered, her voice breaking the silence like a prayer.
No answer came, only the faint cry of gulls far below and the low murmur of the tide. Yet the feeling remained: a presence near her, invisible but unmistakable, as if the air itself remembered the shape of the girl she loved.
When she returned to her chambers, Lyrielle could not sleep. She sat by the window, eyes fixed on the restless horizon, and began another letter—this one shakier, the ink blotted by trembling hands.
I heard you tonight. I swear I did. The wind spoke my name and for a moment, I believed it was you. If you are out there, if you can hear me, then know I am waiting. I am always waiting.
She sealed the letter, though it would join the others in the carved wooden box she kept beneath her bed—her small reliquary of faith.
Days passed. The world carried on its quiet rhythm, yet Lyrielle could not shake the feeling that the sea itself had changed. When she leaned over the cliffs, the waves seemed to form patterns she almost recognised, curling shapes that mimicked Seloria's runes or the delicate loops of her handwriting. Once, she found a petal—white as bone—floating in a tide pool, though no such flowers grew anywhere near the shore.
Her heart told her these were signs, even as her reason whispered that grief had made her see ghosts.
But Lyrielle no longer cared for reason.
It was love that ruled her now—love vast enough to bend the edges of reality. And when, one twilight, she returned to her desk to find a page of her own handwriting that she did not remember writing—a fragment of a poem, written in her own ink but in words that were not hers—her breath caught.
'Beyond the sea, my heart will call, Through shadowed tide and silver squall. The moon remembers what we've sown, Come find me where the winds have flown.'
The letters swayed slightly in the candlelight, as though alive.
Lyrielle pressed her palm over the page, whispering Seloria's name until the candle guttered out and the room fell into darkness. And though the night was cold, her heart thrummed with the faintest warmth— as if somewhere, across the sea and mist, a soul had heard her and whispered back.