Cecilia stood at the window of the empty room. Her reflection in the glass was pale, overlaid on the world outside, where snow fell in a silent, perpetual curtain.
It dusted the pines, filled the footprints on the path below, buried the memory of steps taken just days before.
This was it. This was the world he had wished for.
A world where he quietly disappeared.
No war would be fought over his bones. No one would wear his name as a banner of vengeance. There would be no graves to tend, no portraits to avoid, no empty spaces at a dinner table that ached with absence. There would be no absence at all.
No one was hurt.
It must have been so terrifying, she thought, for him to imagine a world otherwise. To picture his death not as an end, but as a catalyst for endless, bloody consequence. Or to know that his love for her, for his brothers, for the world itself, could be the very thing that doomed it all over again.
