Chapter I — The Memory That Burns

...Sephera's POV...

...****************...

The candlelight quivered as if it, too, were afraid.

I stood across from Dante, in the shadow of the velvet-draped stage, the scent of greasepaint and forgotten scripts thick in the air. Rain lashed the wooden shutters behind him, yet I felt no chill — only the rising heat between us, the fire of something that had once been love, and now... whatever this was.

He was pacing again, the way he always did when he was angry — not reckless, but like a man dancing on the edge of a blade.

"So you think I’ve stopped loving you because I offered Serina a cloak in the rain?"

His voice, low but trembling with thunder.

I clenched the folds of my skirts in both fists. "No, Dante. Not because of the cloak. Because she touches your arm when she speaks and you let her. Because your eyes don’t find me anymore when you laugh. Because your words have been... empty."

He turned, the candlelight catching the sharpness in his cheekbones, the wildness in his stare.

"Serina listens when I speak. She doesn't question every kindness I offer. She—she cares for me, more than you ever let yourself."

I flinched.

He didn’t mean it. Or maybe he did.

The silence was unbearable. I couldn’t breathe, not in this room that once held our whispered lines and soft embraces. Now it was full of splinters, and I was walking barefoot through all of them.

"Then go to her, Dante," I whispered. "Let her have what I could never be. You always loved the theatre more than me anyway. Now you can have both — the stage and your new leading lady."

His jaw clenched. For a moment, I thought he would come closer, maybe to shout, maybe to beg. But he only turned away.

"You’ll regret this," he said, his back to me. "One day, when there’s no applause left. When the lights die and no one is waiting."

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I gasped awake.

The sheets were tangled at my feet, the night air damp with the echo of a storm. My throat burned as though I had screamed — but I hadn’t. Not this time.

The dream again.

Or the memory. I no longer knew the difference.

The same argument, over and over. The same wound.

I sat up slowly, brushing my hair from my damp forehead. The old stone walls of my chamber stared blankly back at me. Outside, the sky was beginning to pale, rain tapping gently on the windowpane — not unlike the night it had happened.

That was two years ago.

And still, my soul had not moved.

Dante’s words played in my mind like a dying actor reciting his final lines:

"She cares more about me than you ever let yourself."

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps I had held too tightly to his fire, tried to shape it instead of letting it burn. I was young. I was proud. I was in love with a man who could set the world ablaze with a monologue — and leave it all in ruins with a single glance.

Now there was only silence.

I rose from the bed and walked to the window, pulling back the curtain with tired fingers. The garden was misted with morning. Somewhere in the world, Dante was breathing, laughing, living.

And I... I was still caught in the moment he stopped looking for me.

That takes me back to the time where i haven't met Dante yet. They say sorrow makes you softer.

But I only ever grew quieter.

Before Dante, there was another kind of silence — colder, older. One that settled into my bones like winter and refused to melt.

I remember my childhood as one remembers a painting they’ve seen too many times: soft colors, happy faces, and a stillness too perfect to be real. My sister, Liora, was the beloved first bloom, full of grace and golden hair. I, the second — quieter, smaller, always two steps behind her in the halls, in our mother’s eyes, in everything.

But back then, I was still loved.

Before I turned twelve, I remember my father carrying both of us across the fields, laughing as we shrieked in joy. I remember my mother’s gentle hands, her voice singing us to sleep with old verses in Latin. I remember the scent of lavender and lemon cakes, and how my grandmother would stroke my hair and call me her little storm. She said I always had a storm behind my eyes.

She was the first to go.

It was sudden. A fall in the orchard, they said. One moment she was with us, and the next, laid out in a white dress with rosemary in her hands. I stood at her funeral, pressed between crying women and men who muttered prayers, and I felt… nothing.

Not grief. Not confusion.

Just the rain tapping on my shoe.

I watched my sister weep and cling to our mother’s skirts. I watched my mother’s face crumble like old parchment. And I remember thinking — Why do I feel so calm?

Why does this not touch me?

I thought something was broken in me.

When I was thirteen, my father left on a voyage to Naples. I kissed his cheek goodbye and asked him to bring me a book of sea myths. He promised he would.

He never returned.

The letter arrived in midsummer. A storm at sea. No survivors.

Liora collapsed. My mother didn't leave her room for days.

I sat beside the window and reread the last book he'd given me. A story about sirens who sang men to their deaths. I remember tracing the printed words, mouthing them to the wind, and wondering what it felt like to drown.

Again, the storm inside me did not rise. It stayed still, like the eye in the center of a hurricane.

My mother changed after that.

At first, she tried — gods know she tried — to keep us close. But the weight of widowhood pulled her deeper into grief, and then into bitterness. When Liora caught the eye of a wealthy heir from Milan, everything shifted.

Suddenly, my mother’s sadness had purpose again. Liora was her hope. Her legacy. Her reason to be proud.

And I? I became a shadow. A whisper too loud. A reminder of the past she wanted to forget.

I rebelled, of course. I raised my voice. I stayed out too long. I tore the ribbons from my gowns and refused to attend gatherings.

But it didn’t bring her back to me. It only made her stricter. Colder.

By the time I turned fifteen, I had stopped fighting. I learned to survive her words like one learns to survive winter — quietly, carefully, waiting for spring, though knowing it may never come.

That was the girl Dante met.

The one who already knew how to live without being seen.

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