Chapter 1101: Chapter 1101 - Taming the Wall - Excruciating Love
Sirius prepared to make his final stand.
Perhaps futile... Yes, probably futile.
But he had already decided it at some point during the climb, wordlessly, something someone like him couldn’t help but decide: he would fight to the end.
Every instinct carved into his brain confirmed that doing this instead of a last, full power push of wind, was undeniable suicide.
But the decision hadn’t been made out of logic. It had been forged silently, somewhere in the dark, suffocating depths of his determination.
Again and again... It was the only choice a man like him could ever make: he would fight until his heart literally stopped beating.
He would burn the absolute last, smallest fraction of his life force to try and save this world. To preserve a future where his daughter might, by some impossible miracle, finally get to see her mother again.
His daughter...
She was the single most valuable treasure in his existence. And simultaneously, she was the source of the most excruciating pain he had ever known.
♢♢♢♢
Sirius fiercely loved, and utterly dreaded, looking at Luna’s face.
Just looking at her tore him apart.
He didn’t even need to speak to her... A passing glance was enough.
The simple, passive act of letting his eyes rest on his daughter’s face squeezed his heart with such a violent, crushing pressure that later, when he was finally alone, he would completely fall apart. Far from the scrutinizing eyes of the tamers under him, far from the exhausting performance of maintaining the stoic, iron-clad mask everyone expected of him, he would collapse. He would weep like a newborn child.
That terrifying, imposing commander. The living legend who could instantly silence a crowded war room just by stepping across the threshold.
It was a fake... All fake.
A flawless, necessary lie.
In reality, Sirius Starweaver was the most ridiculously, hopelessly sensitive man currently breathing inside the world’s last manaless bastion for humanity.
Every hardened soldier who saluted him, every politician who feared his unyielding glare, they all would have laughed in his face if they could see what he did in the dark.
He would routinely retreat into the spatial dimension of his own shadow-beast. He would hide in the pitch black, where absolutely no one could perceive him, and let the crushing facade shatter. The tears would flow uncontrollably, gushing violently, without his permission.
Only Selphira had ever seen him break. It happened once, entirely by accident, during those first agonizing days when the wound of losing Lykea was still raw and bleeding. Selphira had never spoken a word of it. She had never used it against him... But it was very possible that witnessing that pathetic, devastating image, a sobbing man entirely stripped of his armor, that broken man she shouldn’t have seen, was the catalyst that drove her.
Seeing his hollowed-out soul was likely what fueled her relentless, years-long obsession with investigating Orion.
So many years had passed since that day, that tragedy for his small family. And absolutely nothing had changed.
Sirius still wept like a child in the dark.
Luna simply reminded him too much of Lykea. His wife’s genetics had been overwhelmingly dominant. Luna had inherited almost everything from her mother: the exact structure of her cheekbones, the elegant slope of her jaw, even the highly specific reactions, like the stubborn way her chin tilted up exactly one degree whenever she was challenged.
She was a ghost walking in the daylight. The only exceptions were her hair and the color of her eyes.
Those two traits were the only half contributions Sirius had made. They were the only two places on his daughter’s face where he could look and see her, rather than the phantom of the woman who had been violently ripped away from him.
But it wasn’t just the physical resemblance that destroyed him.
Sirius wasn’t just hyper-sensitive. He was cursed with a profound, suffocating level of empathy too, a trait his rigid posture and cold eyes made impossible for anyone to guess.
No matter how perfectly unreadable Luna made her face, no matter how flawlessly she maintained the icy composure of a high-house princess, Sirius could feel the agony radiating beneath her skin.
He felt her pain as if it were his own flesh burning.
The loss of Lykea still lived inside Luna with a violent intensity that she violently refused to show the world. But Sirius could always feel it.
Every single time they stood in the same room, her masked grief wrapped around his throat like a tightening noose. Her silent agony stacked on top of his own, compounding the grief until the sheer emotional weight became physically unbearable.
The only way he could function without completely shattering was by creating distance.
He couldn’t look at her directly... Feeling her mana signature from the distance was enough to assure him she was safe. It was the only way he could watch over her without the act tearing him to pieces. He rewrote the same letter every single week, meticulously crafting word after word, ensuring she knew she was still in his mind without ever having to force his trembling face to look into hers.
When absolute duty demanded they meet in person, he prepared for hours. He would bite down on his own tongue until his mouth tasted of iron. He spoke the absolute minimum number of words required to avoid a breakdown. He held the stoic facade together through sheer, bleeding willpower, counting the seconds until he could escape to a dark space, summon his shadows, and finally let the dam burst.
He allowed his work to consume him entirely for one very simple reason.
It was the best distraction this hellish world of pain had to offer.
It was a brutal, agonizing world for a man whose deep empathy meant he had loved with the same intensity as Lykea, internalized and combined with his own.
♢♢♢♢
The memory violently dissolved, snapping him back to the bleeding present.
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