Conclusion
Inside a prison where every sense of time had fallen away, Ciel Midford stared with clouded eyes at the thin light beyond the iron bars—the only thing still driving the dark back.
With time itself gone, he could not have said how many days ago it had been. Even so, he dimly recalled an encounter: a man whose face he could not place, who had stood before him as if merely passing by and offered him a certain kind of help.
Not a single word had left the man's mouth. And yet that voice, thick with static and ringing low through his skull, was enough to make even him—swallowed whole by despair—lift his head.
The meeting had been an instant. Five seconds, if that. Yet the counsel was enough to make Ciel Midford rebuke the self that had given up and gone slack in the current, content to be carried wherever it pleased.
The man had been right. The longer he thought, the plainer it became that the Ernes Empire would never grant Prince Inas any kindness in a matter like this. The prince's survival would mean he became a piece in the hand of the Elmark Empire; his death, that Ernes could run uncontested through the Kingdom of Robelium.
If he meant to undo, cleanly, the knot that had bound an innocent stranger to the thread of his own life, he had no choice but to mix a lie into the truth. And so, in the further interrogation, Ciel Midford dragged House Alfred in and tangled them with House Brutein—the finest struggle a mere knight of a minor kingdom could manage, once he had been taken as a criminal.
He never set foot outside the prison after that. Still, he was able to set down some of the weight he carried for the Kingdom of Robelium, which had taken him in. And so today—no. Now.
The imperial knights of Ernes stood arrayed beyond the door, colder than they had ever been, and the chill coming off them told Ciel Midford what he needed to know.
Ah...
The end had come.
The lock snapped. The cell door opened, and they hauled him to his feet—limbs already locked in restraints—and marched him off.
A long creak. The prison had never held anything but stagnant air; the moment he stepped beyond it, fresh wind and warm sunlight poured down over him. Ciel Midford winced on instinct. When he opened his eyes again, the place in the Mortal World nearest the world of the dead stood clear before him, thick with the scent of death: the Execution Ground.
"Move. You've no time to stand still. If you want time of that sort, you may have it after you're dead."
"..."
Drawn along by the knights' hands, Ciel Midford set one slow foot before the other, and as he went he burned into his eyes, one by one, the people who had come onto the Execution Ground. The Emperor of Ernes. The King of Robelium. An elder of House Alfred. The head of House Brutein. Ferzen von Schweig Brutein.
And—
Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug.
Looking at her, Ciel Midford lay down upon his last resting place, wrought of black iron and shaped like a coffin. At once another set of restraints clamped his neck, his waist, both hands and both feet, binding him completely. A physician came forward at an unhurried pace and began searching for a vein. The whole of his body was burned, so the search was no easy thing, but the physician found it with practiced skill and carefully lifted his gaze to the Emperor of Ernes.
"Then... we will begin the execution of Ciel Midford, who attempted to assassinate the Count of Ruerug."
A life was going out, and not one person grieved. No—there was one. A faint weeping drifted in on the wind. It was gone almost at once, but Ciel Midford knew whose cry it was. So even with the restraint at his throat in the way, he endured in silence the pain of skin splitting, and turned his eyes toward Euphemia El Lorraine Ruerug.
Was it greed?
If not that—
was it a wish above my station?
Someone had once said that life has an excellent teacher, and that teacher's name is misfortune. If the saying were true, then why—even at the last moment, the moment one graduates from life—did that teacher refuse to teach happiness, and give him nothing but despair?
The drug entered his vein. At first it was quiet. Then it spread through him, and a violent pain climbed up from the inside, and Ciel Midford began to convulse.
"Khak—!"
What burst from the corner of his mouth was not fresh crimson. It was dead blood, black.
Even then, he never took his eyes from Euphemia. Watching him, she covered her mouth with both hands.
My lady...
Meeting you gave me—a man whose every day was stained with misfortune—the most beautiful winter of my life.
Perhaps that is why. The footsteps we walked together, the bond we made together, were as if written into a road of snow. As if they were made of snow itself. Spring has come, and summer is drawing near, and little by little, without a trace, they are beginning to melt.
Thump. Thump...
His heart was failing. Ciel Midford felt how near death had come.
My lady... Someday, if we pass through countless wheels of reincarnation and meet again, let us plant the seed of that bond in spring. Let it sprout in summer. Let it bloom in full in autumn. Let it be a meeting that does not fall, even in winter. And then... let us love.
At last, Ciel Midford's eyes closed.
Yes. The protagonist of the novel was dead.
From a clear, brilliant sky without a single cloud, warm sunlight poured down upon the earth, unchanged.
May 23. 11:45 in the morning.
The death of the condemned, Ciel Midford, is confirmed.
At the physician's single line—indifferent, quietly spreading through the air—Euphemia turned away. She shed tears without a sob. She wanted to break and weep, but she knew well enough that this was not a place where she could.
Of course, no amount of effort could hide it. When Ciel Midford had dragged House Alfred into his perjury, the tale of a commissioned murder required a motive if it was to hold together, and so he had confessed every last thread of the ill fate that bound him to Ferzen. Everyone with a stake in the matter knew why she, Ferzen's wife, was as she was. But they did as her effort asked, and pretended not to see. The weight of the name Brutein had covered their eyes, and stopped their ears and their mouths.
"Then... by cross-verification, we will take the time to examine the testimony of the condemned, Ciel Midford."
A black magician of the imperial house of Ernes. A black magician of the Kingdom of Robelium. A black magician of House Alfred. And Ferzen von Schweig Ruerug stepped forward.
In turn, each black magician enslaved the corpse of the dead Ciel Midford and, working from what he had testified, submitted it to the verification of Feedback.
"It is perjury."
"Perjury, then."
"It was perjury."
When every judgment had come back the same, Ferzen, last of all, released his mana, enslaved Ciel Midford, and raised the body. The testimony had of course been perjury, and so no Feedback returned. But he did not end it there. Slowly, he reached toward Ciel Midford's head.
If he had meant to give that testimony from the start... would he not have given it from the start? Why flesh it out only later?
It could be called the fruit of long thought. Anyone with even a modest grasp of the situation could see, without much difficulty, that the Ernes Empire would gain more by killing Prince Inas here than by handing him over as a piece to the Elmark Empire. Even so, a shapeless wrongness had settled in Ferzen, a lingering unease, and he judged that he could not let the matter pass.
Whatever means was used to induce suspended animation has never been precisely known... but if it took the form of a drug—
Blessed by the goddess who governs protection, and in a mere few months having brought the mana knotted inside him into bloom—was this not the perfect chance to take in hand the sharpest dagger that asks no price, and drive it into the heart of the villain who had plundered the heroine?
A soft tap. Ferzen's hand came to rest on Ciel Midford's head. And if this were truly a dead corpse, then once—and only once—the core memory from life that had most deeply shaped the self could be read.
Once only, upon a corpse: the core memory of life that most greatly shaped the self.
"..."
It was not read. And there Ferzen was certain. Ciel Midford was not dead.
"Count."
The emperor called to him, where he had kept his mouth shut for a long while. Only then did Ferzen come back to himself. He drew his hand away and spoke.
"Perjury... so it would seem."
The testimony.
And—
even the death.