Ybrahim did not know what day it was.
He’d stopped counting them when the sound of her voice no longer lingered in his ears upon waking. When memory lost its sharpness, and all he had left were fragments — a silhouette in the wind, the echo of a laugh, the ghost of warmth in a bed that had never truly been theirs.
He still ruled, yes. His people called him Rama Ybrahim with the reverence his name had long earned. He still signed edicts and brokered peace and stood tall before armies. For Lireo. For Sapiro. For Lira.
Not for a long, long time.
The years had passed without tenderness.
He wore time like rust — quiet and unrelenting. His hands bore the lines of battles won and hearts broken. His eyes, though still sharp, had dulled. And his hair — once meticulously trimmed — was now long, dark, wild. A wordless testament to how little he cared for mirrors anymore.
Let them think it was a king’s fashion, a warrior’s unruly grace. Let them believe he had outgrown the vanity of youth.
The truth was: he hadn’t cut it since she died.
And in that small, absurd defiance, he clung to her.
Most nights, he was quiet.
Lira had her own wings now — grown and strong and beloved by the realm. She reminded him of Amihan in both the cruelest and gentlest ways. Her spirit. Her fire. Her impossible grace. She made him smile more than anyone else ever could.
No one had made him truly smile since Amihan. Not with his whole soul.
There was always something hollow in his laughter, a hollowness he’d learned to hide too well. The world thought he had healed. That he had survived her.
But Ybrahim had not survived. He had simply… endured.
Some nights he resented the world.
He resented the silence of the castle, the way Danaya no longer flinched when someone spoke of Amihan in the past tense, the way Alena had learned how to smile again, without the wry lines of someone in grief. The way even Pirena has moved on, basking herself in the love of her own family in the way Amihan never could now. Not anymore. As though the absence of the one they had all loved most had become bearable. As though grief had softened in them, worn down into something light enough to carry.
He did not want lightness.
And the cruelty of it — the true cruelty — was not that she had died, but that they had only just begun.
They had stolen kisses. Whispered promises. Secret nights beneath the stars, never long enough.
But not a lifetime. Not even close.
Tonight, he sat in the same tower where they once watched the moon rise together, back when they were only pretending not to be in love. His cloak barely kept the cold from his skin, but he didn’t move.
The wind came in gentle sighs through the open arches.
And for a moment, he imagined it was her.
Not her ghost. Not an illusion.
Her scent. Her breath. Her voice in the hush.
“Amihan,” he whispered, the name like prayer and curse. “I don’t know how to stop missing you.”
It wasn’t grief anymore. Not the sharp, consuming kind that crushed him in the beginning. This was quieter. Deeper. Like a second heart that beat only in mourning.
A stillness that never ended.
He had done all his weeping in the weeks after her fall — when he held her body, warm then cold, as though he could will life back into her with his own breath.
But he looked to the stars like a man waiting for something. A sign. A release. Anything.
He would never love again. He had always known that.
His love did not belong to the future.
It was buried with her, and in her it would remain.
If the wind touched him a little differently tonight — if it curled against his cheek the way her fingers once did — he said nothing.
He simply sat there, eyes closed, letting the ache bloom quiet and wide across his chest.
