“I am aware,” he said again, his own voice a calm, steady echo of her own. A long, profound silence stretched between them. He could see the war that was raging behind her icy, composed facade. The daughter’s desperate need to act, warring with the queen’s cold, pragmatic understanding of the necessity of this sacrifice. Finally, she gave a single, almost imperceptible nod, a gesture of concession so subtle it was almost invisible. “Very well,” she said, the words a surrender, a transfer of command. “You will go alone.” She then turned, not to him, but to her sister. “Mina,” she commanded, her voice regaining a fraction of its familiar, authoritative chill. “I will need a full intelligence dossier on the current internal political climate of the House of Garcia. I want to know every faction, every rivalry, every secret debt, and every hidden ambition. I want to know the name of every servant who has a grudge, every captain who has a weakness. If he is walking into the darkness, we will, at the very least, give him a map.” It was a brilliant move. She could not be his sword, so she would be his spymaster. She was not abandoning the fight; she was simply changing her role in it. Mina, who had been a silent, horrified observer of the entire, tense exchange, simply nodded, her own face a mask of worried, but resolute, determination. She immediately left the room, her movements once again a testament to her own brand of no-nonsense, practical efficiency. The war council was in motion. Lloyd was left alone with Rosa once more. The tension in the room had not dissipated, but it had changed. It was no longer the tension of conflict, but the tension of a shared, high-stakes mission. “The Don Garcia,” she said, her voice now a low, conspiratorial whisper. “He is the true obstacle. He is not just a man; he is a symbol. The living embodiment of his house’s pride and its pain. He will not be swayed by logic, or by pleas for mercy. He is a king in his own, forgotten kingdom, and he will demand a tribute. A price.” “I am prepared to pay it,” Lloyd stated simply. She finally looked at him then, truly looked at him, and her gaze was a thing of profound, and deeply unsettling, complexity. “Be careful, Lloyd,” she whispered, and for the first time, she used his name without its formal, distancing title. The sound of it, from her lips, was a strange, beautiful, and utterly foreign thing. “The ghosts of that house are old, and they are very, very hungry.” With that final, cryptic warning, she turned and swept from the room, leaving him alone with the maps, the silence, and the weight of her unexpected, and deeply unnerving, concern. He was going alone. But for the first time, he felt as if he was not just fighting for her mother. He was fighting for her. And that, he realized with a sudden, chilling certainty, was a far, far more dangerous mission. The night before his departure was a restless, turbulent affair. A sudden, unseasonable rainstorm had descended upon the Siddik estate, a violent, percussive assault of wind and water that mirrored the chaotic, churning tempest in Lloyd’s own mind. Sleep was an impossibility. His thoughts were a tangled, chaotic mess of ancient politics, of mythical trees, of the cold, hard calculus of the coming war, and of the two beautiful, brilliant, and utterly impossible sisters who had so completely and so irrevocably upended his world. He found himself pacing the confines of his small, book-lined study, the room a cage that was too small to contain the restless, predatory energy that was coiling in his gut. He needed air. He needed space. He needed a moment of quiet, a brief reprieve from the suffocating weight of his own relentless, strategic mind. He opened the doors that led from his study to a small, covered balcony, and stepped out into the cool, damp night. The storm was a magnificent, violent spectacle. Rain lashed down in thick, silver sheets, turning the formal, manicured gardens below into a dark, churning sea of green and black. Lightning, in brilliant, silent flashes, would periodically illuminate the scene, freezing the chaotic, wind-whipped dance of the trees into a series of stark, beautiful, and ghostly tableaus. He leaned against the cold, damp stone of the balustrade, the cool mist a welcome, grounding sensation on his face. He was a man standing on the precipice of a dozen different wars—a war for a kingdom, a war for a cure, a war for his own fractured, multifaceted soul. And he had never felt more profoundly, more absolutely, alone. It was then, through the rhythmic, drumming cacophony of the rain, that he heard it. A sound. A single, pure, and impossibly clear note that seemed to cut through the very heart of the storm. It was the sound of a flute, a simple, silver flute, and it was playing a melody that was so achingly, so heart-breakingly beautiful that it seemed to stop his very breath in his chest. The melody was a lament. A quiet, sorrowful, and deeply personal song of loss, of loneliness, of a profound, and unbreakable, solitude. It was a melody that spoke of a heart that had been encased in ice, of a soul that had learned to sing only to itself in the long, cold, and silent winter of its own making. Content orıginally comes from 𝔫𝔬𝔳𝔢𝔩·𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖·𝘯𝘦𝘵 And it was, to his own profound, and deeply unsettling, shock, familiar. The notes, the phrasing, the very structure of the melody—it was a song he had heard before, a ghost of a memory from a lifetime ago. A strange, and utterly illogical, impulse seized him. He had to find the source. He had to know who was playing this impossible, beautiful, and hauntingly familiar song. He turned from the balcony and, moving with a silent, almost spectral grace, he began to follow the sound. It led him from his study, through the dark, silent corridors of the sleeping manor, to a part of the estate he had not yet seen—a long, open-air colonnade that overlooked a small, moonlit courtyard where a single, ancient, and weeping willow tree stood, its branches a cascade of silver in the rain-swept darkness. And there, standing in the shelter of the colonnade, her form a slender, elegant silhouette against the stormy, moonlit sky, was Mina. The silver flute was in her hands, its polished surface gleaming in the faint, ethereal light. Her eyes were closed, her expression one of deep, profound, and utterly personal sorrow. She was not just playing the notes; she was breathing her own soul into them, her own lifetime of quiet, pragmatic, and deeply buried grief. She was playing for her lost husband, for her sleeping mother, for the joyful, carefree sister she had lost to a decade of cold, hard duty. She stopped, the final, sorrowful note hanging in the damp air like a perfect, fragile, and shimmering tear, and then, slowly, she opened her eyes. She saw him standing there, a silent, shadowy figure in the darkness, and a soft, sad, and welcoming smile touched her lips. “I did not mean to disturb you, my lord,” she said, her voice a quiet, melodic whisper that was a perfect, spoken echo of the song she had just played. “You did not,” he replied, his own voice a rough, inadequate thing in the face of such profound, and unexpected, beauty. A strange, and utterly reckless, impulse, the same kind that had led him to mock Rosa after her first, fragile compliment, seized him once more. It was an impulse born not from strategy, not from calculation, but from a deep, and profoundly human, place of shared, unspoken loneliness. “May I?” he asked, the words a quiet, hesitant request. He gestured, not to her, but to the silver flute in her hands. “I… I used to play. A long time ago.” It was a lie. A beautiful, simple, and utterly unnecessary lie. But it was a lie that, in that moment, felt more true than anything else in his chaotic, fractured world. Mina looked at him, a flicker of genuine, gentle surprise in her dark, intelligent eyes. She had known this man, this strange, paradoxical brother-in-law of hers, as a warrior, a genius, a strategist. She had not, for a single moment, considered that he might also be… an artist. A musician. A man who understood the quiet, sorrowful language of the soul. Her welcoming smile deepened, becoming a thing of genuine, disarming warmth. “Of course, my lord,” she said, and she held the silver flute out to him, not as a precious artifact, but as a simple, shared offering. He took the instrument, its polished, silver surface cool and smooth against his fingertips. It felt… right. Familiar. A ghost of a memory, a muscle memory from a life he had lived a thousand years and a world away, stirred within him. He raised the flute to his lips. He did not play a song of this world. He did not play a classical sonata or a courtly air. He played a song of his own. A song of a different time, a different place. A modern, melancholic, and deeply personal ballad from a world of steel, and glass, and a profound, and uniquely human, kind of loneliness.