Far away from Antia, the capital of Terria slept beneath a thin sheet of mourning. Flags hung at half-mast, and banners that had once proclaimed triumph drooped like tired wings, because three days of official silence had been declared after the death of Marquis Norda Miller. Funeral trains and fleets threaded the sky above the city, bringing courtiers, officers and whispers home to Fansilia. Among them came General Leonora Kaelthorn, because duty had no calendar and the Minister's summons left her no choice. She had a face to show and a salute to make, even if the part of her that mattered was far away, chasing the ghost of an old promise.
Anna was waiting for them at the spaceport, standing beside the car as still and patient as a shadow. When Leonora and Roland came down the ramp with the city's chill already clinging to their coats, she opened the door for them with a soft smile. "Welcome home, my lady. Sir Roland." Her voice was a ritual, and there were a thousand things Leonora might have said in answer, but small courtesies steadied her like armor. "It's good to see you, Anna."
The drive home followed roads folded into her memory. Leonora had not been home in nearly a year; since Orion, five years ago, she had come back only rarely. Loss had a way of hollowing her out and filling the empty space with work. Whenever her grief could not be forced into silence, she hammered it into strategy instead — into campaigns and calculated cruelty. Over those five years she had commanded nearly a third of the Empire's military operations. When she moved across a battlefield it felt like a ghost passing through it: precise, inevitable, impossible to stop.
The gates of the Kaelthorn estate opened in front of them. On the porch, Aurelion sat in his chair looking out at the view with the long gaze of an old man fixed on the horizon, and he rose when the engine died. "So you finally decided to come home," he said, with a smile that time had softened.
Leonora hugged him without any ceremony at all. "I'm sorry, Father. It took me longer than I thought."
"Don't worry about it," he said. "I'm just glad you're here."
The house felt like a held breath, with its elegant furniture wrapped in years of absence and its walls that had long ago learned to fold their grief away politely. Leonora climbed the stairs alone. Her bedroom waited for her like a museum of everything she had left behind — the pieces of a life, the keepsakes she had never been able to move. She stood under the shower and let the hot water cut through the knot in her chest while her silver hair streamed down over her shoulders. Then the dam broke. She cried as though she had been waiting five years for permission. The tears were sorrow and relief at the same time — relief at the news that a man she had buried might still be alive. The rumor had reached her before she left the front, and the hope it brought had lodged inside her like a fragile shard of glass.
Downstairs, Roland and Aurelion were talking about Youri in low, practical voices. Roland's news was the kind that served men in uniform — where, when, how. Aurelion listened while the old lines of worry arranged themselves across his face. "If they catch him," he wondered aloud, "will he be treated as a noble, or as an outlaw?"
The question sat heavily between them. A title decided the length of a leash; the Empire could forgive a noble's crimes in ways it would never forgive a commoner's, and Youri had been a Duke of Kaelthorn before he vanished. But for now those were puzzles for after the funeral.
Leonora came down with a glass of whiskey in her hand. The living room smelled of old wood and faint lemon polish, something domestic and almost startling in a life spent in strategy rooms and around war tables. She sat down across from her father and brother and drew her legs up beneath her the way she had as a girl.
Aurelion asked the question she had known he would ask. "How will you get him back?"
She took a steadying sip and let the burn settle into her bones before she answered. "I don't know how," she admitted. "But I know I will find him. I'll drag him back by his ears through the whole galaxy if I have to."
The bluntness of it made Aurelion laugh — a small, honest sound he had not used in years. "I don't doubt it for a moment."
Roland leaned forward with the clarity of a man making plans. "Their last confirmed contact was ten days ago, near the Pascal region. If we deploy right after the funeral, we should be able to catch up with them within a few weeks. The bounty helps us, too. Information leaks faster when there's money involved." He talked about coordinates and assets and windows of opportunity, the kind of words that turned danger into a job. Leonora listened and plotted trajectories in the quiet between his sentences. "We'll reach him before anyone else does," he promised her, and the certainty in his voice steadied her more than any map could have.
She set her glass down and let the silence sit for a moment. She could taste the sharp metallic tang of fear underneath the whiskey. "I'm sure of that," she said at last. Then her voice dropped. "But there's one thing I'm afraid of." She turned the empty glass slowly on the table. "What if it isn't really him? What if he truly is gone, and I've let myself believe it all over again for nothing?"
It was less a question than a confession. For a breath, in that quiet room, all the practical plans and the grand strategies thinned down to a single human knot: the possibility that hope could be wrong.
Aurelion reached across and laid his old, rough hand over hers. "Then you'll have tried," he said gently. "And that will have to be enough. But I don't think you're wrong, my dear. I met that man. Men like that don't die easily."
Leonora did not answer him. She only turned her hand over beneath his and held on. Outside the window the mourning banners of Fansilia stirred in the evening wind, and somewhere far beyond them, past the edge of the Empire's reach, a ship she had never seen was carrying the only thing in the universe she wanted back.