Uriel Wayne Dana Alfred
"……"
Looking down at Uriel where she had collapsed into his arms, Ferzen opened a subspace and drew out the coffin that held Isabel's corpse. She had said she stayed behind for the sake of preparing the final exams, but for that to be the whole of it, the professor's office showed a few too many traces of a life being lived.
That old monster Coleone... seems to have dealt out a rather childish punishment.
Clicking his tongue, Ferzen reached out and carefully stripped her clothes away.
This is... The moment he stepped into the room, the wrongness of the scent had already let him guess. Fragrance fruit. A sweetness like peach. The instant he undid the buttons of her shirt, the body-scent sealed inside clothes soaked through with cold sweat burst up along the cleft of her breasts.
Ferzen's nose had always been keen. Before he knew it he had lost himself in the smell, burying his face against the nape of her neck and catching the soft skin lightly between his teeth.
"Nn...! Ah..."
Uriel flinched at the pain and let a moan slip even while unconscious, but for a while he could not drag himself free of her scent. A person who smells the same odor again and again comes, in time, to take it for no smell at all. A body-scent warped by fragrance fruit does not work that way. Only after he had left a scatter of red marks and faint tooth-prints along her nape could Ferzen barely cage his desire and lift his head.
"……"
He frowned. He did not much care for this sort of disgrace—the failure to govern his own feelings. Then, meekly, he went back to what he had been doing and drew the rest of her clothes away.
She has... changed a great deal.
Set beside the Uriel of childhood that still lived in his memory, the body she wore now, fully ripened, held something that unmistakably stirred a man's hunger. Even those large breasts—which had hurt his eyes by swaying without rest whenever he deliberately let his focus blur—looked quite luscious.
"Nn..."
Gently he slid his palm up from the base, closed his hand with care, and still could not properly hold one. A softness his fingers seemed to sink straight into, and an elasticity with no hint of sag.
"Ah... hurts..."
But around this time of the month Uriel always suffered from aching breasts, and at his touch she murmured a faint pain, her brows trembling.
"……"
What was he doing. With a sigh, Ferzen at last laid her stark naked. Then he enslaved Isabel's corpse, transmuted mana into water, warmed it a little, and drew it over the whole of her body in a sweeping wash.
Blood that began at her groin and ran down her thighs mixed into the clear sphere of water and spread like pigment. Wanting to be sure no dried stain remained, he bent her forward, spread both legs wide, and checked with care—then, at the sight of her anus and her sex clenched desperately tight and twitching, he let out a dry little laugh.
He had not the slightest intention of forcing the door, and yet the one inside seemed to have misread him and was gripping the handle for dear life. Did it take after its mistress? The extremely defensive posture struck before him made him want to prod it with a finger, but there was no point in toying with a sick woman, so he quietly wiped her wet body clean and brought over the spare clothes that had been set out.
No underwear, then.
For the moment he tied clean cloths together into a triangle and laid them over her groin, then dressed her himself in the one-piece that looked the simplest. Fortunately the color was black; even without anything to cover her breasts, the pink of her areolae and nipples did not show through.
Once he had finished clearing away the strewn clothes and the bloodstains, Ferzen gathered Uriel into his arms, carried her to the infirmary, and laid her on a bed. It was his watch, and he had been away from his post too long. He had to go back.
Perhaps because she was on a drip, her face looked a good deal more at ease. There seemed no great cause for worry. They could finish their talk in the morning.
"Rest easy."
She would not hear it, but he left the words behind and walked on.
Uriel Wayne Dana Alfred.
She was dreaming of her childhood.
Born already under the blessing of mana, she had caught Coleone's eye and been raised with doting care as a vessel meant to take in the seed of Brutein. From the age of five she ate fragrance fruit to warp her body-scent, and from eight she learned, from the courtesans whose bodies fetched the highest price, the small arts of tempting a man.
She had originally preferred a bob that fell only to her shoulders. They forced her to grow it long all the same. Long hair, they said, made a kind of sex appeal possible—showing the line of the nape under the pretext of tidying it, or tying it up so the parted cloth at the side of the chest could be offered with a calculated casualness. And once Jeremiah was settled upon as heir, she was taught one refinement after another aimed at nothing but Ferzen's hobbies. The more they had in common, the easier it would be to answer each other.
In a word, the identity of the woman called Uriel Wayne Dana Alfred was a human being made to order for the man named Ferzen.
Because her life had been aimed that way, her childhood was not happy through and through. Everything given to her, and everything taught to her, was not for herself but for Ferzen. That she could not be master even of her own life was more painful than one might think. Yet a penance with an ending always leaves a person room to hope, and so Uriel endured without a word.
Once she became Ferzen's wife, all of it would end of its own accord. Knowing that well enough, she made the dream of a happy marriage—indulged each time she lay down to sleep—the sole pleasure of her days.
So in the year she turned thirteen, when a place was arranged for an engagement ceremony with Ferzen, Uriel went out clutching a heart fit to burst, made up as beautifully as she could manage. How those waiting seconds and minutes had choked her. When he appeared at the end of that long wait, she forgot even the etiquette she had been taught and stared blankly at his face.
The happy married life she had imagined whenever she went to bed. Until the engagement she had never seen that face, and so she had drawn him alone, as she pleased. Reality was far better than the imagining. At that, Uriel could hardly hide the pounding, the flutter. It would not be wrong to call it first love. No—it was first love.
Fortunately, across thirteen years she had been educated in everything for Ferzen alone, so keeping a conversation going was not difficult. Setting aside looks, sex, and house, everything she possessed was only what she held in common with him.
But the end was wretched. The engagement fell through, and splendidly.
Even now, at twenty-three, Uriel could not forget the voice in which Ferzen had cast those words at her, cold as frost.
After that, the yoke that had bound her reached its end. She was not glad. In truth there had been a paradoxically simpler choice—simply not to become his wife—yet through thirteen years Uriel had never once thought of it. No. She had refused to. Thirteen years was too dear to throw away.
And so, in the place he had left, she sat in a daze. Thirteen years, spent to become his wife. Counted in days, 4,745. Counted in hours, 113,880. All of it used for nothing but a one-sided monologue of some fifteen minutes. A truly miserable ending.
Hollow through the whole of her body, Uriel spent two years like a doll whose strings had been cut. Even her own house treated her coldly, as stock that had lost its use. She only barely managed to overcome it in the year she turned seventeen, when she became an Euclid-rank Elemental Magician.
And so today, meeting Ferzen again, she felt something restless and unsettled stir. She had heard he was married. A daughter of House Luerg, garbage of the hinterland. Set beside herself, the girl looked endlessly shabby. It would have been a lie to say she felt no indignation. The reason she bristled with irritation every time she looked at Ferzen was probably that contrary streak, born of having been made to waste thirteen years. And beneath it lay the wish that he would regret it. Regret having let her go.
Even in that fashion, Uriel wanted the time that had passed repaid to her.
"Ah..."
She opened her eyes. She looked around. A sickbed, and outside it seemed to be morning. And—
"You're awake."
Before her eyes stood Ferzen.