The grave was empty.
Yet flowers covered it.
White lilies, placed carefully by hands that trembled—not from cold, but from restraint. The stone bore a name carved too deeply, as if the one who carved it wanted the world to remember forever.
Sir Alaric Vayne
Knight of Eldoria
Missing. Presumed Fallen.
Elara stood before it, unmoving.
People had told her to cry.
To scream.
To accept.
She did none of it.
Because how do you mourn someone when your heart refuses to believe they are gone?
The days after the bells blurred together.
Elara returned to her cottage, but it no longer felt like home. The walls were the same. The forest still whispered. The candle still burned at night.
But the warmth was gone.
She stopped walking to the forest path.
Hope, she learned, could be more painful than grief.
At night, she spoke to him anyway.
"You promised," she whispered into the darkness. "You promised you'd come back as a man."
Silence answered her every time.
A few weeks later, the king's envoy arrived.
He wore fine clothes and carried finer words.
"The kingdom honors Sir Alaric's sacrifice," he said gently. "He died bravely."
Elara looked at him sharply.
"You said missing," she replied. "Now you say dead."
The envoy hesitated. "There was… a witness."
Elara felt her chest tighten.
"Then why does the grave have no body?"
The man had no answer.
That night, Elara took out the silver-thread charm.
The matching half—Alaric's—was gone with him.
She tied the charm around her wrist and made a promise of her own.
"I will not belong to anyone else," she said aloud. "Not in this life."
Not out of bitterness.
Not out of pride.
But out of loyalty.
Years passed.
Proposals came.
A merchant's son.
A minor lord.
Even a fellow healer who loved her quietly.
She refused them all.
Some called her foolish.
Some called her broken.
Elara did not argue.
Love, she believed, did not need proof of life to remain alive.
On the anniversary of the battle, Elara returned to the empty grave.
She knelt and placed fresh flowers.
"I'm still here," she whispered. "Just like I said I would be."
The wind passed gently over the stone.
For a moment—just a moment—she felt as if she was not alone.
Far beyond the mortal world, beyond pain and time, something stirred.
A soul that had never stopped listening.