The blue ocean engulfed me, a constant stream spiraling down into my soul. Whether his words were a genuine question or a provocation, she could no longer tell.

“Why stand again on the soil that handed you over like an offering?”

From a diplomatic standpoint, Reina owed him no answer. 
But instinct slipped through the cracks of her composure, stirring something raw beneath her ribs.

Johannes von Eisenwald was a master tactician, a brutal man.
The son of the general who toppled the monarchy and built the new age people called “the modern world.“


A man raised to hate the crown.
A man raised to hate her.

She straightened her back. Her voice, clear and dignified, her native tongue wrapping around the words like armor.

“I believe I have no obligation to answer you, Lord Eisenwald.”

He scoffed, an almost-laugh.
 For a heartbeat, the death-angel’s face cracked; his blue eyes softened. Her chest tightened at the sight.

“It’s been a while since anyone called me that,” he murmured in Falkenic.

He let his shoulders ease and let his gaze slip around the room, absorbing the scene. 
Across from him, near the fireplace, an Elyndrian and a Seiryan couple shared their morning, hands brushing, rings glinting, sunlight gilding their faces.

Reina followed his gaze.

“Two and a half years ago, that scene would’ve been impossible.”
His voice deepened, gentler, like he was speaking to an old friend.

“The world moves quickly, doesn’t it? So quickly you forget that not long ago, that woman would’ve been the man’s enemy.”

His gaze didn’t leave the couple.

“Or perhaps..” A shadow passed through his eyes,

“The man would’ve been assigned to deliver the woman to the Falkenreich post. 
An offering to never return.” The sky blue had turned into the night.

To Johannes, the room felt foreign, almost surreal.
The soft laughter.
The radio murmuring about the upcoming opera. 
Jazz curling from the gramophone like smoke.

The world had reshaped itself, moved forward, yet he remained unchanged, trapped in his gray night realm.

But for Reina, it wasn’t the world that puzzled her. 
It was him. The man who was always an enigma.

Eyes that could be the deep, cold ocean, or the bright, golden sky.
 A man who drowned her and saved her in the same breath.

She closed her eyes, clasping her hands, and inhaled slowly. Coffee and musk filled her lungs.

Then she opened her eyes, full of dignity and almost kind.

“Johannes… the world can change,” she whispered.

His reply came without even a breath of hesitation:

“Then why didn’t you..”

He returned his gaze to her, cold as a blade, deep and distant at once, searching her soul.

“…Your Majesty?”

And it was this part of him she despised most: 
the master composer who knew every string in her, and played them without mercy,
 engulfing her back into the deep ocean where he once ruled.

Just like the day she woke like a blank canvas, ready to be molded within. 

*****

Time spiraled into a dimension where clocks no longer ticked, a moment suspended between life and death, night and dawn.

In that borderless realm, she heard the rolling of carriages, the rhythm growing louder, faster…
then the hushed panic of voices, and then..

Gunshots.

Darkness.

And suddenly time moved again.

She opened her eyes to a foreign world.
 A chandelier. A golden sunset. The scent of wood and antiseptic.

“She is awake!” a young woman’s voice echoed through the room.

Falkenic? It sounded like it.

Footsteps approached, a warm presence nearing her.

“Miss, can you hear us?” another voice asked, hesitant, gentle, in a language that wasn’t hers.

She didn’t answer.
 Her hand rose slowly, heavily to touch her face.
 Her fingers moved.
A small relief settled in her chest.

This wasn’t a dream.

A door creaked open. Heavy steps approached. Murmured reports filled the air.

She forced her dry throat to shape a sound.

“Wh…ere am I?”

Sunset light dipped her hand in gold. 
For a fleeting breath, something like joy warmed her chest. A small smile tugged at her lips.

“You are somewhere on the border, miss.”
A man’s voice, low and husky, answered in the foreign tongue.

“Do you remember what happened?” he asked again, tone formal and precise.

Curiosity stirred.

She lowered her hand, searching for the voice.

By the side of the bed stood a young man possibly in his mid twenties against the sunlit window—broad-shouldered, wearing a western military uniform in deep blue.

But what stunned her was his unfamiliar physical features.

Ash-brown hair, a sharply cut jaw, a tall bridge of a nose, and eyes glimmering somewhere between forest green and ocean blue.

He didn’t look Seiryan.

“Miss, do you hear me?”
“Can you tell us your name and age?”
Questions flooded toward her, but her mind was silent.

Utterly silent.

She reached inward, searching for anything, any word, any memory and found only blank pages.

A blank, empty book.

The void birthed a sharp, rising fear.
 Her breath quickened; her lungs tightened.

She could not breathe.
She could not remember how to breathe.

The golden sunset felt like a sting on her skin, burning her from within.

*****

Then time warped again…
unzipping itself into a series of repetitions, hollow and trembling.

The moon rose, then the dawn arrived, followed by soft morning light and, inevitably, a golden sunset.

And every day,

the same man entered the room with the same questions, and her answers…

Silence,
always silence.

Time moved, but her mind stayed stranded in a place where clocks didn’t tick.

All she knew was this: she was the only one who looked different, who spoke differently, who breathed like a foreign note in a familiar song.

A stranger.

Until one day,

When the air felt dry, and the evening light bathed the room in a golden orange. In that glow, dust drifted like sparks suspended in silence.

The door finally creaked open, without a knock.

A long shadow spilled across the floor, slicing through the ethereal moment and painting the room in darker hues.

Her breath hitched as she followed the movement of that shadow,

her heartbeat rising like a drum and froze almost immediately.

A man stepped inside.

His hair golden as the sun.
White shirt, collar undone.
No tie. Yet, his presence was heavy enough to bend the air itself.

And eyes cold yet deep as winter ocean water.

Drowning her.

She held her breath. Her chest tightened. Her fingers curled into fists.

“I heard you had trouble walking and nearly made the nurse lose her hearing with your scream.”

His voice was too deep for the softness of his hair, rich, resonant and commanding. His accent carried the unmistakable sharpness of Falkenreich, no matter how neatly he shaped the Seiryan words.

She turned her gaze away.

He scoffed in amusement and dragged a wooden chair to her bedside. The creak of the wood scratched the air with a high, uneasy note.

“Or did you hit your head so hard you forgot how to speak?”
His tone was strangely lukewarm, neither cold nor kind.

“Where am I?” she said quietly, in her native tongue.

“In the border.”

“They all say that.”
This time she replied in Falkenic, fury hiding behind the polished syllables.

His ocean-cold eyes widened for a heartbeat.
Then a soft laugh broke from his lips.

“You speak perfect Falkenic, young lady.”
He switched to his mother tongue without hesitation.

The corner of his lips lifted, forming a grin.
The golden light fell behind him, shadowing half his face.
Dust shimmered around him like sparkles.

“Are you here to kill me?”

Her tone was clear, steady. She wondered what her eyes looked like to him, was it red as the sunset or icy blue as the moonlight.

But, his grin cracked into laughter.
His eyes deepened, blue flickering under the sunset glow.
And it stirred her.. uncomfortably.

That eyes again.

Finally he replied,
“Why would I kill you?”

“Because I am Seiryan.”

“Do you think that’s enough reason to kill someone?”

Silence spilled between them.
She could even hear the wind rattling the window glass.

Ever since she woke, her mind had been a blank canvas with no memories, no faces..only the undeniable fact that she was Seiryan.

And that Seirya was under the occupation of Falkenreich for a while.

And somehow, she had fallen into the hands of the enemy, for reasons she didn’t know, yet she needed to know.

“What is your name?”

His patience thinning, he asked again, probing the mannequin, a still woman before him.

“I’ve told the other soldier many times.. I don’t know.”

His blue eyes cooled for an instant, sharp as shards of ice, then softened back into their deeper, unreadable hue.

“If you’re not going to kill me,” she said, her voice crisp as frost, “then why does a Falkenreich man keep me here?”

The wind rattled the window.
The sunset retreated into darker blues, heralding the coming night.

His answer finally came, deliberately slow, that it shivered her core:
“Because while you were sleeping, the war had erupted. If you go back now, you will die.”

His eyes dimmed, twilight settling in them.

The occupation that had begun a year earlier had escalated into a raging war.
And from that simple, quiet answer delivered in a tone neither cold nor warm, one truth emerged:

She was no longer in Seirya.
And she could no longer return to the place she barely remembered.

Reality tightened around her like an unseen current, drowning her. Her breath started to shorten, suffocating her.

“But you may stay here until your memory returns. It’s safe.”

His voice softened, not warm, but steady, like a breeze slipping into her lungs, pulling her up from the deep sea.

Her eyes trembled.
Reason and instinct clashed inside her, waging a silent war she could not name.

“But first,” he murmured as he rose, “we start with your walking therapy.”
He moved toward the door, his shadow stretching long across the floor, a shifting silhouette.

“Why save a Seiryan woman?”

Her voice followed him, quiet, edged with something both fragile and fierce.

He paused and turned slightly towards the woman, the mannequin sitting on the bed.

The last golden light, now molten and fading, cut across his face, sharpening the line of his jaw. His blue eyes flickered, trembling with a faint emotion, revealing a layer of him she hadn’t known existed.

“I don’t know either,” he said softly.

“Maybe… the color of death doesn’t suit you.”

He didn’t know it then, but she would never forget that twilight.

The way the sunset carved its gold into his silhouette, the way his blue eyes shifted with colors she had never known existed.

Pushing, and pulling…
a tide on the shore that drowned, then revived,

Never revealing when it would come again.

And today, that same eyes gazed at her, in a different room and time.

No..Reina knew it wasn’t only him who had been shattered by time and war, trapped in the space between what was and what could never return.

The world had moved on, leaving the relics of their past buried in a place where the clock no longer ticked, yet there they remained, lingering beneath the same twilight, unable to fully leave nor fully belong.

“Your Majesty.”

A soft voice pulled her from the echo of that suspended moment.

“It is time for your next meeting,” her attendant murmured, bending slightly toward her ear, though his eyes remained fixed on the man seated before her.

The café had grown full..sunlight scattering across glassware, conversations blooming, chairs scraping.

A living world.
A stark contrast to the man before her, whose presence felt carved from shadow and memory.

Reina drew a slow breath, steadying the tremor inside her, and let her gaze soften on the man watching her with those storm-blue eyes.

“Johannes, I need to go,” she murmured, managing a small, practiced smile. “Let’s meet again… another time.”

She left the ending open on purpose and lifted a hand to call the waitress.

But Johannes stood before she could move further.

“You may be the queen,” he said, voice low, “but I am still a gentleman, Reina.”

He pulled out his wallet and stepped toward the waitress.

Before he left, however, he paused, turning back to her, his eyes fixed, that same ocean eyes piercing her soul.

“Sunday,” he said quietly.
“Noon. At the piazza.”

His steady steps echoed through the hall, leaving her alone in a world bathed in sunlight, yet she felt engulfed, as if pulled into a constant stream spiraling down into her soul.


I once thought I couldn’t breathe because you drowned me, but no. 
I wasn’t breathing because you had become the air I breathe. 

*****

Author’s note:

 I wrote this chapter imagining the beautiful contrast between the twilight and the devastating situation Reina fell into, both equally extreme, equally jarring. I imagined how Reina would feel meeting a man who looked startlingly different from her, a man from a different nation and ethnicity.

I think this song fits their moment under the twilight perfectly.

ECHO – Grace Davidson