Chapter 19: When the Past Begins to Stir
The moonlight no longer simply watched him.
It whispered.
Softly, beneath the silence, beneath the cold wind and the rustling of curtains, something ancient stirred within Sirius Farah Von Ross.
It began the night after his most recent poem. He had just placed the scroll beside the others when the world shifted.
Not visibly. Not violently.
But internally—like a ripple beneath still water.
A name…
A city of black marble…
A scream he had once silenced not with rage, but with a single glance.
He clutched his head—not from pain, but from clarity that arrived too quickly.
The ink on the scroll was still wet. The moon still hung in the sky. And yet… he was somewhere else.
For a breath, a blink, a heartbeat—
He stood atop a throne of bones.
The stars were dead above him.
And she stood before him. The same face. The same eyes. The same light.
"Abylay," he whispered aloud, though the room was empty.
His hands trembled—not from fear, but familiarity.
That vision, that moment—it wasn't new.
It had happened.
Once, long ago, before this body, before this world, before the memory of mortals faded into dust.
For the next several days, Sirius became quieter than usual.
He trained still. He studied. He sat beneath the moon each night as he always had. But now, sometimes, his crimson eyes would unfocus—like he was listening to something others couldn't hear.
Because he was.
He began seeing flashes during the day, brief and intense, like fragments of dreams he never remembered falling asleep in.
A girl weeping beneath a silver tree.
His own laughter—dark, dangerous, from a voice deeper and older than his own.
A blade, blacker than night, slicing through the sky as empires fell.
They didn't frighten him.
They felt… right.
Like pieces of a story that had been waiting for him to return.
He never spoke of them—not to his father, not to his mother. Certainly not to the priests or the nobility who sought his favor.
Because he knew instinctively—this was not for them.
This was his alone.
A gift.
A curse.
A remembrance.
One evening, as moonlight poured across his desk, Sirius sat without drawing, without writing, without moving.
His eyes were open.
But what he saw was not his room.
He saw a ruined temple, thousands of years old.
Banners of obsidian silk fluttering in a dead wind.
His old name, spoken by a voice soaked in venom:
"King of the End."
He blinked.
The vision shattered.
And yet the feeling remained.
He had been a king.
He had ruled not just cities, but fates.
And the gods had feared him.
Except for one.
The one who stood beside him even as the heavens burned.
The one who reached for him when the others turned away.
Abylay.
She hadn't been just a goddess.
She had been his.
Not his to command. Not his to possess.
But his to love.
And she had loved him back.
Even as the stars betrayed them.
Even when the world could no longer hold him.
Even when he fell—sealed, erased, forgotten.
She waited.
And now, as memories bled through the walls of time, Sirius understood one thing more clearly than ever:
He had never truly been lost.
Because as long as she remembered him, he would return.
That night, he did not write.
He simply sat beneath the moonlight, hand pressed over his chest, and let the silence speak to him.
The past was waking.
And it had not forgotten his name.