Chapter 43 – A Shadow in the Shape of a Boy
They stopped sending escorts after the second month.
No one volunteered anymore.
Not out of fear for their lives—but for something stranger. He didn't speak. He didn't sleep. He didn't eat with the rest.
Sirius von Ross existed in the camp like fog: always near, never touched. Unreachable.
Yet his presence cut sharper than any blade.
Wherever he went, the fighting ended before it began.
Twelve enemy battalions surrendered without being seen. Four cities opened their gates without a siege. And in the ashes of a fort burned overnight, they found no blood—only a blackened crest carved into the stone:
A star without a name.
By the third month, whispers had taken shape.
"Not a magician," the eastern scouts muttered. "A weapon."
"Not human," murmured the old guard in taverns. "He never sleeps."
"He walks into enemy fire like it's mist."
But the most persistent rumor came from a captured commander, trembling beneath interrogation:
"He looked at me. Just once. And I forgot how to speak."
The general had scoffed.
Until the man's tongue shriveled into dust before their eyes.
In the empire's capital, the reports arrived like myths. The nobles called it fortune. The people called it divine punishment.
The Emperor said nothing.
The Grand Duke read each letter in silence, one hand resting on the map where his son's progress carved a slow, brutal arc through the western resistance.
The Grand Duchess read them too.
But said less.
Only once did she break her silence, gazing at the untouched scrolls on her desk.
"Does he even remember what warmth is?"
Her husband didn't answer.
He only closed his eyes.
In the west, snow had begun to fall.
Winter came early that year—unnaturally early.
Soldiers claimed they saw it in his eyes first. The frost.
It spread wherever he went. They started calling him Whitefall, Winter's Heir, The Silent Star.
And none dared speak the name Sirius too loudly.
Because that name belonged to a boy.
And this… this was something else.
Yet beneath the weight of victories and shattered enemy lines, Sirius kept to himself.
Each night, when the fires dimmed and only the wind remained, he sat alone, pen in hand.
Not for strategy. Not for war.
But for memory.
Pages filled with moments no one else knew. With laughter that hadn't echoed in this world. With her name—unspoken for a year and sixteen more before that.
Abylay.
The silver-haired girl who never came.
The goddess who once pulled him from death—not in this life, but long before it.
No one saw what he wrote.
No one asked.
He burned every page before morning.
The war would drag on for another nine months.
But the Empire had already won something far greater than territory.
They had found a myth.
A sixteen-year-old myth, silent as snow, cruel as moonlight, loyal to nothing but a name no one knew.
And soon—
The world would remember that legends don't rise with fanfare.
They rise with silence.
And fall with none.