Chapter 987

Viola broke again, pressing her forehead to his chest.

Luna squeezed her hand and looked toward the rain beyond the shelter, where enemies still searched and the future waited like a blade.

Her smile faded. But something in her eyes had changed. Not certainty. Something better. A choice not yet made, but no longer buried.

Torvares’s eyes shifted back to Viola. The movement was slow now. Too slow.

Every breath seemed to cost him more than the last, but his gaze still carried that stubborn Torvares weight. The kind that had bent nobles, silenced rooms, and made grown men reconsider whether greed was worth losing teeth over.

“Viola.”

She lifted her head immediately.

Her face was a wreck. Tears, mud, snot, rainwater, grief—all of it mixed together until she looked nothing like the proud young lady of House Torvares and everything like a girl desperately trying to hold the world in place with both hands.

“Yes?” she whispered.

Torvares touched her cheek again.

“Tell Ludger something for me as well.”

Viola’s lips trembled.

“You can tell him yourself.”

His smile was small. Painful. Patient.

“Viola.”

The word broke whatever denial she had left. She closed her eyes, tears falling again. Then she nodded.

Torvares breathed in carefully.

“Tell him… If you focus too much on the future out of fear,” he said, “you will lose your present.”

Viola stilled. Luna looked toward him as well. Torvares’s fingers brushed lightly against Viola’s cheek, barely strong enough to move.

“He should continue working hard for a better future. That is who he is. I would not ask him to stop.” A faint trace of amusement passed through his eyes. “Even if the boy should learn the meaning of moderation before he terrifies every reasonable adult in reach.”

Viola gave a broken laugh that collapsed halfway into another sob. Torvares smiled at the sound.

“But there is no point,” he continued, “if he sacrifices too many parts of his current life to build it.”

His voice weakened. He paused. Breathed. Then forced himself onward.

“Tell him to enjoy what he has right now. Not later. Not after the next wall is built, the next enemy killed, the next threat solved.”

Viola gripped his hand tighter.

“Right now.”

Torvares’s gaze softened.

“Tell him not to take for granted the people he has in his life.”

The shelter went quiet except for the rain. For a moment, Viola could almost see Ludger’s face when told that. The flat stare. The quiet irritation. The dry comment he would probably make to avoid admitting the words had landed somewhere sensitive.

That made her cry harder. Torvares watched her with weary tenderness.

“Because once they are gone,” he whispered, “if he does not live that way…”

His eyes drifted slightly, as if looking at every ghost he had carried for too many years. Melody. Viollet. His parents. All the people he had loved while preparing himself to lose them.

“All he will have in the end,” Torvares said, “are regrets.”

Viola pressed his hand against her cheek and nodded again and again, because words had stopped working.

“I’ll tell him,” she managed.

Torvares’s eyes focused on her once more.

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“Good.”

His hand slipped slightly, strength fading. Viola caught it before it fell. Torvares’s smile remained, faint but real.

“He will pretend not to need hearing it.”

Luna wiped at her eyes quickly and muttered, “He does that with everything.”

Torvares’s smile deepened by the smallest amount.

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“Then make him hear it anyway.”

Viola bowed her head over his hand.

“I will.”

Outside, the rain kept falling over the hidden shelter, over the enemy patrols, over the road to Lionfang, over the war waiting beyond the hill. Inside, Viola held her grandfather’s hand and carried one more message she wished she would never have to deliver.

Torvares looked at Viola again.

The movement was small, almost nothing. Just a slow turn of his eyes, a faint adjustment of his head against Silva’s fur and the bundled cloth beneath him. But Viola saw it. She saw everything now. Every breath. Every twitch. Every moment that proved he was still here.

She leaned closer immediately, both hands wrapped around his.

“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m right here.”

Torvares’s smile softened.

The old sharpness was gone now. The Bull of Torvares, the powerful lord, the man who had stared down nobles and border wars and imperial rot with dry amusement and iron patience, had been reduced to a pale, dying man in a small shelter of earth.

And yet, somehow, he looked more himself than ever. Not because he was strong. Because he was honest. His fingers moved faintly around hers.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Viola shook her head, tears already spilling down her cheeks again. “Don’t.”

“For being born, Viola.”

The words struck her so deeply that she forgot how to breathe.

Torvares looked at her with eyes full of everything he had never said enough. Pride. Sorrow. Regret. Love so large and quiet that it hurt worse than any wound.

“I love you.”

Viola broke. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out at first. Only a broken sound, small and raw and helpless, escaping from somewhere too deep to control.

“I love you too,” she finally managed. “Grandfather, I love you too. Please—”

His hand shifted against her cheek one final time.

“Go,” Torvares said, voice barely more than air now, “and create your own future.”

He smiled at her once more. A real smile. Not forced. Not bitter. Not the expression of a man trying to comfort someone while lying about how much pain he was in.

Just love. Then his eyes closed. At the exact same moment, Viola felt his pulse stop. No dramatic final breath.

No last-minute miracle. Just a quiet absence beneath her fingers. One heartbeat there. Then none. Silva’s ears dropped.

His tail, which had been tense and still behind him, lowered to the wet ground. The great direwolf bowed his head slightly, his pale eyes closing for a long moment as if even he understood the weight of what had just left the world.

Viola stared. For a second, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t even cry.

Her hands remained wrapped around her grandfather’s, waiting for something that would not come. A twitch. A breath. A pulse. Anything.

Nothing. The hole opened then. Not in the shelter. Not in the ground. In her.

A giant hollow space at the bottom of her stomach, cold and endless, spreading through her chest until it felt like she had been carved open from the inside. It was not pain in the simple sense. Pain was too small a word. Pain had edges. Pain told you where something hurt.

This had no edges. It just kept falling.

“Grandfather?”

Her voice was barely audible. No answer.

“Grandfather.”

Still nothing. Viola’s fingers tightened around his hand.

“No…”

The word came out broken. Then again.

“No. No, no, no…”

Her shoulders began to shake.

At first, the sobs were small. Stifled. Desperate attempts to hold back something far too large for her body. Then they tore through her all at once, uncontrolled and ugly and full of everything she had been refusing to feel for two days.

She bent over him, pressing his hand to her chest, as if the warmth of her own body might force life back into his.

It didn’t.

That made the sobs worse.

Viola cried until she could no longer breathe properly. Until every inhale hitched. Until her throat hurt. Until her face was soaked with tears and snot and rain and grief.

Then she lifted her head toward the sky. Eyes closed. Mouth open in a silent cry that became sound a heartbeat later. A raw, broken wail tore out of her and vanished into the rain.

She held her grandfather’s head against her chest, cradling him like he had cradled her when she was too young to remember. Her arms wrapped around him with shaking desperation, careful even now, even when control had shattered, because some part of her still refused to hurt him.

Even though he could no longer feel pain. That thought made her cry harder. Luna could only look to the side. She stood there with her arms wrapped around herself, nails digging into her sleeves, body rigid as if moving even slightly would make the moment more real. Her eyes burned, but she did not cry the way Viola did.

She couldn’t. Something cold had opened inside her too. Not the same as Viola’s grief. Not as deep, not as old, not built from years of being loved by the man now lying still in front of them.

But cold all the same.

A hollow, unfamiliar chill spreading through her chest as she watched the closest thing to a grandfather, patron, and flawed guardian she had ever known leave the world after finally telling her she was allowed to choose her own life.

It felt cruel. Not dramatic. Not poetic. Cruel. To give freedom with one hand and vanish before anyone could decide what to do with it. Luna hugged herself tighter.

Her jaw clenched until it hurt. Silva let out a low, mournful sound. Not a howl. Something quieter.

A rumble of grief from a creature that had carried Lord Torvares through rain, mud, poison, and war, only to arrive at the same helpless end as everyone else.

Viola kept sobbing, her face turned up toward the unseen sky while her arms held Torvares close.

Outside, the runic golems still searched. The rain still fell. Lionfang still waited. The war did not stop. The world did not pause. That was the worst part. The world had lost Lord Torvares, and it kept moving anyway. Viola lowered her head again, pressing her forehead against his. Her voice came out in shattered whispers between sobs.

“I’m sorry… I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

For not being faster. For not being stronger. For not having enough mana. For not reaching Aronia. For every impossible thing no one could have asked of her but that grief demanded she answer for anyway.

Luna finally turned back.

Her eyes were wet now, though no tears had fallen. She crouched beside Viola and placed one hand on her shoulder. Viola did not seem to notice. Or maybe she did and simply could not respond. Luna looked at Torvares’s peaceful face, at the faint smile still lingering there despite everything, and swallowed hard.

Then she whispered, mostly to herself.

“We’ll get her there.”

Silva opened his eyes.

Luna’s hand tightened on Viola’s shoulder.

“We’ll get her there,” she said again, voice steadier this time.

Viola clung to her grandfather and cried beneath the small shelter of earth, while the last warmth faded from his body and the future he had told her to create waited outside in the rain, merciless and unfinished.