Sebastian returned to a castle that no longer remembered how to breathe. The banners still hung from their hooks, the halls still echoed with footsteps, and the servants still bowed their heads but something vital had been stripped from the air itself. You were gone. Not slowly, not gently, but all at once, carried away by a fever that had waited for the one moment he was too far away to fight it. He had ridden home with your name on his lips like a prayer, convinced love would be enough to keep you alive, only to find it had arrived too late. There was no farewell kiss, no trembling hand in his to promise he would be all right. There was only a closed door and the unbearable knowledge that you had died thinking he had abandoned you.

The court expected a duke in mourning to shatter loudly. They whispered about how strangely intact he seemed, how Sebastian neither wept in public nor drowned himself in wine. Instead, he worked until exhaustion caved his shoulders inward and etched permanent shadows beneath his eyes. His grief did not rage, it hollowed. He moved through days like a man underwater, distant and unbearably tired, as if sleep itself refused to touch him because you were not there to watch him drift away. The courtiers mistook his quiet for composure, his silence for strength. They did not see how every breath hurt.

At night he escaped the castle and wandered into the garden he had built for you in secret, a place meant to be unveiled on an anniversary still folded neatly in the future. Moonlight spilled over pale stone paths and the flowers you once described in idle dreams. It was here the ache finally broke its chains. It was here he found you. Not living, never living, but softer than memory and thinner than air, your shape stitched together from starlight and longing. He did not ask if you were real. He only reached.

When he danced with you, the world made sense again. Your ghost fit perfectly into the curve of his arm, as if death itself had been forced to memorize you. He learned the weight of sorrow in his bones and the rhythm of loving someone he could never keep.

“I’m tired,” he whispered one night into your hair. “Not of living. Just of living without you.”

You only smiled the way you always had, the way that said you were sorry for things that were never your fault.

“I didn’t say goodbye,” he broke, gripping nothing and everything. “You died alone, and I wasn’t there. I was supposed to protect you. I was supposed to love you better than that.”

The garden shuddered with his quiet sobbing as he sank to his knees, pressing his face into empty hands. “Please,” he begged the dark. “If you can still hear me… don’t forget me. I don’t know how to exist where you don’t.”