After crying their eyes out, Kael, her face still puffed and damp from tears, looked at Elias with a half-smile. Her voice was still fragile, but warm.
"You know," she said, brushing away the last traces of her tears, "you really do look like Mother. There's not even a glimpse of Father in you."
She let out a small, amused laugh, and Elias responded with a faint smile of his own. "King Eldrin and Queen Vanyriel remind me every time."
His smile lingered, but there was a quiet sorrow in his eyes. "I wish I could see a portrait of them... to remember what they looked like. Their faces have completely disappeared from my memory."
Kael's heart sank.
She saw the sadness in his expression—the hollow ache of a boy who had grown up trying to grasp the face of the parents he lost too young. Her hand instinctively reached for the pendant at her neck, the one she had worn since that fateful night. For so long, she hadn't dared to open it. It was too heavy with memory, too dangerous to her fragile hope.
But now…
She unclasped the locket, opened it carefully, and handed it to him. " Our parents gave this to me before that night. I've kept it ever since."
Elias took it with trembling fingers. He stared at the tiny image inside—Lucian,Sereïna and their younger faces together, smiling, frozen in time.
His lips parted with a soft inhale. "So that's what they looked like…"
Tears welled up in his eyes again, but he smiled. "They were so beautiful."
Kael nodded, her voice quiet. "They were."
He turned to her again, eyes still glistening. "You really do look like them. Like… both of them, somehow. But mostly Father."
Kael chuckled gently. "Maybe. But you… Even if you look like Mother, you have Father's smile. And I look like Father, but I have Mother's smile."
That made Elias laugh through his tears, and for a moment, all the sorrow turned into something lighter. He looked back down at the pendant, brushing his thumb over the image.
"Do you think they'd be proud of us?" he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Kael didn't hesitate. "I know they would."
They stayed like that a little longer—wrapped in silence, comforted by shared memories and the quiet ticking of time.
Then Elias spoke again, a little brighter, trying to shift the atmosphere. "You should probably go greet their Highnesses properly. They left because they wanted to give us some privacy but we can't stay inside that long, it's the King's study after all"
Kael smiled and rose with him. "I didn't even notice that we were in his study."
They both chuckled, wiping their faces clean, and slowly walked out of the study together, hand in hand—siblings reunited at last, carrying the past but no longer crushed by it because the presence of each other is what there were missing.