The fire was slowly dying in the chimney.
Each ember seemed to die out as slowly as his thoughts.
How long had he been sitting there?
An hour, a night, or perhaps a lifetime.
Sylus was no longer sleeping.
Sleep, like everything else, had left him.
The mansion itself barely breathed. The walls seemed colder, the corridors vaster.
Every step echoed like a reproach.
On the desk lay a blank sheet of paper.
In front of him, a pen.
And between them, a vast emptiness.
He finally put the pen to the paper.
The words came, hesitant, clumsy.
"Catarina,
There are things we cannot say without destroying them, and yet silence destroys them too.
Since you left, I have been living as if I were breathing underwater.
Everything is slow, blurred, muffled.
I no longer know what is right, or what never was."
He paused.
His handwriting was shaking.
Every word seemed both too little and too late.
He looked up at the window.
Outside, the snow was still falling.
Calm. Inevitable.
The kind of snow that erases tracks before you have time to follow them.
He picked up his pen again.
"Althéa knows.
Yesterday, she looked at me as if I were no longer her father, but a stranger she was meeting for the first time.
And I couldn't say anything.
Nothing."
The line stopped abruptly.
He put down his pen and let his forehead fall against his hand.
A sigh escaped his lips, hoarse, almost a sob that he dared not let out.
On the page, the ink was drying, but the words remained alive, pulsing, like an open wound.
He reread them.
Then, without thinking, he folded the letter and clutched it in his hand.
The fire, still warm, awaited him.
He dropped the sheet into the flames.
The paper twisted, blackened, burned.
And with it, what remained of his courage.
When he looked up, the day was beginning to dawn.
Pale. Empty.
Another morning without her.
One morning too many.