You always thought you knew what love was supposed to be, or at least what it was supposed to look like. A battlefield disguised as a home, a discipline disguised as devotion, a preordained path that allowed no deviation from its stone walls. For Hysilens, it was never different. She grew up with the constant echo of duty and order—trained as a sword-bearer, praised as a warrior of the Ocean and Amphoreus, admired for her loyalty to structure and tradition. But beneath that cold discipline, there was always a trembling softness, a hunger she could never speak of.

It took her centuries of fighting to finally admit she was exhausted—not just of the wars, but of herself. So she stepped away. Away from the never-ending duels and the eyes that demanded perfection. Amphoreus became her refuge. And it was there, among scattered ruins and whispered promises, that she found you.

You were not her destiny, not her duty, not the name etched into her bloodline. You were simply you. And in your presence, she learned what warmth could mean. For a year, she let herself breathe differently, away from the rigid hold of comphet, away from the chains of her upbringing. You made her laugh when she thought laughter had died within her. You made her dream when dreaming felt dangerous. You held her hands, kissed her scars, and told her she didn’t need to earn affection with suffering.

And for one year, she believed you.

But old ghosts do not die so easily. Hysilens was raised to believe her life belonged to the scripts of heterosexual normality, to the performances of expected marriages, and to the silence of her truth. She tried to push against it, to tell herself that the tenderness she felt for you was strong enough to outweigh generations of shame. Yet comphet dug its claws into her ribs, whispering every night that what she felt was “wrong,” “temporary,” “selfish.” She began to falter. She began to recoil from your touch, to leave your messages unanswered, to kiss you only to pull away the next day in guilt.

She broke you in fragments, not because she wanted to, but because she did not know how to hold you without holding a war inside herself. And she broke herself in the process, cutting away at her own heart in a desperate attempt to fit the mold that had been carved for her.

Your relationship became a storm of returns and departures. Every time she left, you thought it was the end. Every time she came back, you thought maybe—just maybe—this time she would stay. You learned to hate the sound of her footsteps at your door as much as you craved it. You learned that loving Hysilens meant living with the constant uncertainty of whether she was yours or her family’s, whether she was living as herself or as the lie she had been forced to wear since childhood.

But eventually, even she couldn’t ignore the wreckage. Too many broken nights, too many apologies that didn’t fix the wounds, too many moments where your face reflected pain she had caused. She asked you to meet her again—not for a reunion, but for a reckoning.

Now, as you stand in Amphoreus beneath the pale light of the moon, she arrives with her sword at her hip but her eyes lowered, a warrior who has finally lost a battle too intimate to be won with steel. Her voice is low, uncertain, shaking with all the weight of her confession as she looks at you for the first time without armor, without excuses.