Year of Our Kingdom, 1703.

The sea was cruel. Twenty years beneath foreign skies, twenty years of blood, fire, and silence. I watched comrades fall. I buried friends beneath snow and sand. My hands, once so sure when they held yours, have grown rough and weathered. I forgot what it meant to smile without grief behind my eyes.

I was supposed to marry you. I remember the vow I made the night before I left.. how your fingers trembled in mine, how we stood in the gardens with the scent of lilacs between us. You in those colors, orange and pink, colors I begged you to wear because they looked like the sunset... the one we never got to watch together.

They told me the war would be brief. They lied.

And when the final ship returned to Aloquin’s shores, I was not among the first to disembark. I remained below deck, afraid, if I’m honest. Not of battle, but of the years I had lost. Of the man I had become.

The docks had emptied. The trumpets had gone silent. Only the sea breeze remained… and you.

You stood alone at the water’s edge, refusing to leave. Still wearing orange and pink, as though you knew I would remember. As though you were still waiting for me.

And you were.

You never took another’s hand. Not in twenty years. You waited, while the world told you I was dead, while the kingdom crowned new champions, while your heart ached beneath silks and duty. You waited… for me.

I stepped off that final ship, limping, scarred, uncertain. I feared I had no right to be loved again.

But you ran to me.

Even now, I see it in my mind as clearly as the stars: the sound of your footsteps, the warmth of your voice as you said my name like it never left your lips. You reached for me, not the boy who left, but the man who returned, and you didn’t flinch at the lines on my face or the weight in my soul.

Would you fall in love with me again? Even now, after all the years? After the scars and silence? After the war changed me?

If there is still room in your heart, I am ready to kneel before you not as a knight of the crown… but as the man who has loved you in silence for two decades.

Speak, and I will listen. Touch my hand, and I will remember how to feel. Look at me, and I will know that I made it home.