The Ghost of the Past
Emperor Albrecht first stopped before his parents' graves, placing a bouquet of white roses upon the cold stone.
His father, the late Emperor, had been an incompetent ruler. He was a man plagued by suspicion yet utterly devoid of resolve, and even that suspicion was never directed toward those who truly deserved it. He had relied far too heavily on the Schwaben Duchy—his wife’s family—entrusting them with power, pardoning their every crime, and shielding them from consequence.
His mother, who had come from the Valtarion Kingdom across the sea, had been a timid soul, living only among the small circle of Valtarion people she had brought with her. She had never once exercised the dignity of an Empress, and in truth, she likely never wanted to.
Thus, Albrecht’s life, even as a Crown Prince, had been a relentless, solitary struggle against the Schwaben. For a very long time, he had resented and rejected his father, and when he lost his wife and daughter, he had coughed up blood and sworn never to return to this graveyard again.
But now, twenty years later, his heart was softer than it had been then. Perhaps it was due to a terrible, lingering loneliness. Or perhaps he simply wanted to believe that his parents had cherished him just as dearly as he cherished his own daughter. Regardless, he missed them.
“I find myself thinking that perhaps there is such a thing as an inescapable fate,” he murmured, watching a stone dove perched lightly atop his mother’s headstone. Beneath it, the inscription read: May your soul fly to a place of happiness. His mother’s soul had surely flown back to her homeland.
A person cannot live as they please, especially when born with a noble status and the duties that accompany it. And so, Albrecht was still resisting. He had to fulfill his duty as the successor of Sirach until the day he died.
Yet, he could not help but wonder if this was his destiny all along.
When he lost Via, the Sirach Imperial family had effectively come to an end. Even if Roella was born of his blood, she was not a Princess of Sirach; she was merely a stepping stone intended to hand the crown over to the Schwaben.
He bowed silently before his father’s headstone. The late Emperor could never have imagined things would reach this point. He had truly believed that the Schwaben were the greatest power he could bequeath to his son.
They say stupidity is a sin, but how could he, his own child, condemn him? Resenting the dead would not bring his wife and daughter back.
“If there is an afterlife, I beg you, look after my wife and child.”
He muttered the words under his breath and lifted his head. Good grief, they were people he couldn't even trust to grant such a simple request.
He turned his footsteps and slowly headed toward his wife’s grave.
The area where Adelaide was buried held two headstones. One was a standard-issue Empress’s headstone, and the other was a small, crystalline marker carved into the shape of an angel. On it, only the name Via was inscribed.
He placed red roses before his wife’s headstone and pink roses before his daughter’s.
Ordinarily, a child’s grave was not made separately like this. Two out of every ten children died before their second birthday, and many more perished in the epidemics that swept through every winter. While the wealthy and the nobility fared slightly better, the God of Death was notoriously fond of young children.
Because of this, there was a custom in Sirach of not giving a child a formal name until they reached the age of five.
The Imperial family was no different. Even if they were of royal blood, children who died before the age of five were not recorded in the genealogy; instead of a grave, they were cremated and interred in the ossuary where the remains of young royals were sent.
But Albrecht could not do that. He could not bear the thought of his daughter, who had died so miserably, lying alone in an ossuary, nameless and torn from her mother’s arms.
So, he had built this separate grave. The opposition had been fierce, but he had ignored it all. He had buried her here, telling himself that even if he were to exhume her remains and send them to the ossuary after his own death, he needed a place to remember his daughter while he still lived.
He remembered how much he had wept while lowering the small coffin into the pit with his own hands and covering it with earth. Even now, Albrecht felt a lump forming in his throat.
He lifted his chin. He would not collapse, weeping, while clutching his wife’s headstone. Had it not been twenty years already? He had become indifferent to all things, and he would not be broken by grief.
That was when it happened.
“Have you come to beg for forgiveness?”
A refined woman’s voice spoke from behind him. Albrecht turned around in surprise.
And he froze in place, stunned.
A woman dressed in black mourning clothes, with a black veil draped down to her chin, stood beneath the clematis arch that marked the boundary of the gravesite.
For a fleeting moment, Albrecht thought she was the ghost of Adelaide. But that was impossible. Ghosts did not appear in broad daylight, and looking closer, it was clearly someone else.
“How did you get in here?”
“Are you not curious about who I am?”
“I am curious, but if I learn ‘how,’ the question of ‘who’ will likely be answered as well.”
“I was already inside.”
“There were guards, and the Imperial Guard would have conducted a search.”
“The entire Imperial Guard does not stand in a single line to search every nook and cranny, you know.”
The woman replied in a calm voice. Albrecht looked at her, a flicker of interest piercing his cold expression.
“And you even discovered the holes in the Imperial Palace’s surveillance network?”
“Many people were replaced when the Empress was deposed. It seems that no matter how powerful the Schwaben are, they couldn't fill every single position of the newly replaced senior staff with loyalists.”
They say the Schwaben’s spies are everywhere. Stories of parents going missing due to their children’s tip-offs, or people who went out for a drink with friends and never returned home, were not ghost stories—they were common, everyday realities.
And the place where those spies were most numerous was none other than within the Schwaben faction itself. The Duke of Schwaben from two generations ago had expanded his power through legalized violence, and the previous Duke had established a system of mutual surveillance and reporting, creating a structure from the top down to the lowest ranks where no one could betray the Schwaben.
However, with the Empress’s deposition, a massive number of people had been replaced. The Chief of the Imperial Household, who had taken over palace management in place of the Head Lady-in-Waiting Sophia, had chosen to operate with a smaller staff rather than bringing in unverified people, but that had created security issues of its own. It was impossible to reduce the number of low-level laborers who handled chores like cleaning and laundry, so the small number of managers were forced to take on too much work, causing the palace’s mutual surveillance system to cease functioning properly.
Albrecht had also deduced this process. Perhaps Ezekiel had allowed his outing for this very reason—to prevent him from finding a larger hole and escaping through it.
Even so, someone of ordinary capability would not have been able to penetrate this far.
“I know you are not one of the Duke of Schwaben’s people. Now, it is time to hear your business.”
For a moment, he had wondered if Ezekiel had gone out of his way to find a woman who resembled Adelaide and pushed her into his path to unsettle his mind. But that did not seem to be the case.
The woman asked in a quiet voice.
“Do you love your late wife?”
“Do you even need to ask?”
He felt the woman watching him steadily from behind the veil. Albrecht was dumbfounded. This woman hadn't even offered a proper greeting, and now she was holding her head high and staring him down.
“How rude. Do you know who I am?”
“You are the Emperor. And a man who took another woman and had a child not long after his wife died.”
“That…!”
He was about to flare up in anger, but suddenly, he was struck by the absurdity of it all and let out a dry laugh. It had been so long ago for him that he found it ridiculous to be having this conversation again—and at his wife’s grave, no less.
“I don’t know why you are curious about such things. If I said that I still love my wife and that there were circumstances behind that event, would anything change?”
“It will change. At least for me.”
“Who on earth are you to…”
The woman slowly lifted her veil. Albrecht forgot to finish his sentence.
It was not an identical face. People in the world who had forgotten Adelaide’s face might not recognize her. But he, who still looked at his wife’s portrait every single day, knew.
The elegant jawline, the shape of the full lips, even the sharp, graceful line of the nose—they were exactly the same. Her eyes were that longed-for turquoise, and the hair revealed from beneath the lifted veil was of a high-purity golden hue.
“Our daughter is so beautiful. When she turns five, I will name her Flavia.”
He had agreed with that opinion. There were many children with golden hair, but his daughter’s hair had been an exceptionally sparkling blonde.
Albrecht took out his pocket watch with trembling hands and opened the compartment on the back.
He had cut a lock of his daughter’s hair as a keepsake when she was young. He had kept that hair for a long time, but the color had faded, and now, he could no longer compare them.