Love Letters Bear Calamity
I am a spectator who has long and deeply watched Your Majesty’s story from the farthest distance.
Which decisions Your Majesty made, which cities were saved by them, which nobles held their breath, which subjects exhaled in relief.
In that process, how much resentment Your Majesty took upon Yourself from so many people, how many tears You wiped away in secret—I am certain I know at least a little of it.
The battlefield was victorious in Your Majesty’s name. The treasury endured in Your Majesty’s name. The children left behind were protected in Your Majesty’s name.
And yet—by whose name is Your Majesty Yourself protected?
The thought that rose when she reached that far was simple.
Whoever had written this, the sentences had not been crafted by someone who understood flavor.
A crude letter, overflowing with emotion that had gotten ahead of itself… no, not even a letter so much as a loose heap of type. It felt exactly like a man drowning in dawn sentiment, dumping the contents of his head onto the page without any attempt at order.
And yet, nestled inside that clumsiness, were several observations of unsettling precision.
Your Majesty has always made the right choice. Yet the right choice was never the lightest one, and at times it was the cruelest choice of all.
That is why so many fear Your Majesty. And why, at times, they hate You.
But I find myself thinking of how thoroughly Your Majesty’s own heart must have been torn to shreds in the act of choosing that cruelty.
Line by line, Serene’s eyes moved more and more slowly.
None of the predictable content that filled the reports of the imperial palace appeared here. It did not speak only of results and efficiency the way a bureaucrat’s document would. And yet, strangely, from a direction she—who had always lived with the Empire set before her—had never once considered, it was drawing out the private individual named Serene.
Your Majesty. I do not wish to say that I love Your Majesty’s greatness.
To claim love for greatness is, in the end, no different from declaring that one will be the first to turn away the moment that greatness vanishes.
What I dare to say I would like to love is the one person who, because of that greatness, could never allow herself to be weak before anyone.
I cannot presume to claim I fully understand the nights of someone who could not make mistakes, could not waver, could not lean on or cling to another soul—nor the loneliness of those nights.
But I thought that somewhere on this continent there ought at least to be one person who could tell You: “You do not have to be alone.”
“....”
Her heart gave another heavy thud, a little louder than before.
Yet Serene, still unable to identify the nature of the feeling, merely steadied her breath, lightly brushed her fingertips across her chest, and continued reading.
I will not write that I wish to stand at Your Majesty’s side. Your Majesty’s place beside the throne is already tangled with countless interests, countless blade-points, countless expectations and disappointments.
Only… should the day ever come when Your Majesty is truly exhausted, I will have prepared a chair that is a little narrow and uncomfortable, yet quiet around it—not the golden throne.
There, I would ask You to sit not as Your Majesty, but under the name Serene. And on that day I will not ask.
Whom You executed today, which nation You brought to its knees, which war You ended. All of that will already have been recorded, praised, and condemned by others.
I wish to ask only one thing. Today… how hard was it for you?
“…….”
The letter in her hand trembled, ever so slightly.
Only belatedly did Serene realize she had been clenching her fingers around it without knowing, and she slowly, carefully loosened her grip.
The inside of her chest burned with a heat so unfamiliar it startled her. The heartbeat that had remained almost perfectly steady for decades was beginning, little by little, to change its rhythm.
If this letter reaches Your Majesty’s chamber, that alone will be an undeserved miracle to me. I am nothing more than a single student at the Academy.
My name will never be known. I will never be written into history. The glory of throwing my entire body at Your Majesty’s feet is a possibility that barely exists for me.
And so I dare to make this request. Even if half the continent kneels before Your Majesty, let this one person alone not kneel. Instead, let me call Your name from the same eye level as You.
Serene.
The moment her own name entered her vision so clearly, she felt a faint scorching deep in her throat.
She lifted her head and looked up at the ceiling, thinking.
Had anyone ever called her name so openly, so often, in a letter?
No—how many personal letters had she even received in the first place? The memory itself was hazy.
Serene lowered her gaze once more and read the final lines.
If every word of this becomes a burden to Your Majesty, You may regard the letter as a mere mistake, a temporary madness. Even so, I do not believe I will regret having sent it.
If someday Your Majesty truly becomes happy—even if I am not standing beside You—and You smile under the name Serene rather than Your Majesty… simply recalling that will be enough for me to feel that my life has been saved.
Forgive the excessively rude confession I have offered, and I will close here.
Hoping that the day will come when we face each other not as Empress, but as one person named Serene.
— KJH, currently enrolled at the Academy.
The letter ended.
Yet even after reading every word, Serene still held the paper in her hand and only blinked blankly, over and over.
Like the exaggerated romantic lines of an actor overplaying a scene—excessive, honest, embarrassing, even arrogant. No: before any of that, simply writing a love letter to the Empress of the Empire was arrogance of the highest order.
If someone had spoken these words to her face, Serene would probably have gauged the surrounding eyes and ended it with a single cold remark: “An arrogant one.”
But in this moment, no one was watching her expression. No one could hear her breathing. No one could hear the sound of her heart.
Was that why? Somewhere in her chest, a sensation she had long forgotten was quietly stirring back to life.
Thump.
Once.
Thump… thump.
Twice, three times.
The rhythm lost its order, and an unnameable emotion began to whirl inside eyes that had known only boredom and emptiness for so long.
Serene looked down at the letter and murmured, so quietly it was almost inaudible:
“…To shake this Empress’s heart so thoroughly. I find myself desperately curious as to who you are.”
And that day, for the first time in its thousand-year history, the Roelina Empire woke to the worst possible morning: the disappearance of its Emperor.
“No one has died.”
An obvious outcome.
She had never drawn the bowstring of her divine weapon, the Heavenly Bow, with the intent to harm anyone. She had simply wanted to reach Agentina—where the Academy stood—as quickly as possible, and so she had climbed atop one of its arrows and ridden it. A notion only a Transcendent could have conceived.
Still, while no one had died, the entire area where the Heavenly Bow’s arrow had struck was utterly devastated.
Serene cast a brief glance over the chaos that had engulfed the heart of the Academy, then lightly stepped onto the fletching of the enormous golden arrow. Amplifying her voice with mana, she spoke.
“—This Empress seeks one student.”
Her mana-laden voice rolled across the entire Academy. One by one, students and professors who had been lying unconscious among the ruined training grounds, the cracked earth, and the shattered buildings began to push themselves upright.
And the moment they looked up at the figure standing high above them on the vast golden fletching, instinct told them the truth.
Ah. That is not the same kind of human.
That woman is a Transcendent—the master of half the Rahelon Continent, the ruler of the Roelina Empire.
Empress Serene Roelina.
“Well then…”
Serene glanced down once more at the letter in her hand.
The final line, the signature written crooked yet carefully:
— KJH, currently enrolled at the Academy.
He hid his name and left only the initials.
She could understand it. If word spread that an ordinary Academy student had sent a love letter to the Empress of the Empire, the writer must have sensed, at least vaguely, how thoroughly his life would be turned inside out afterward.
So he had omitted his name and written only the initials.
But to Serene, the full name was not what mattered.
There was only one thing she wanted to know right now.
“The one who sent a love letter to this Empress, bearing the initials ‘K.J.H.’ Does anyone know who that student is?”
In the dining hall, on the training grounds, in front of the library, on the dormitory stairs—students who had been staggering to their feet everywhere across the Academy turned to stare at one another.
“K… J… what?”
“K…J…H, she said?”
“Someone who would send a love letter to a Transcendent… do we even have a lunatic like that in our year…?”
The murmur swelled, then died the instant everyone remembered the Empress was watching. Most of the students simply looked at each other with faces drained by fear.
Serene found the reaction only natural.
Yes. This is not the sort of thing one would shout about openly.
Doing anything to a Transcendent was an act so reckless it could, if mishandled, shake the order of the entire continent. There was no friend who would casually speak the name of the person who had sent such a letter in front of a crowd.
So Serene chose another approach.
“Very well. Then I will change the terms.”
Standing upon the golden fletching, she slowly raised one hand and continued.
“Anyone who knows the person with the initials K.J.H., or who knows which class he belongs to—”
That was the moment.
The air itself changed.
Over the flow of mana still twisted from the earlier golden bombardment, an entirely different current of power began to sink in.
Blue light and green light. The scent of flowers and sap.
Serene’s eyes, the first to sense the anomaly, snapped upward toward the sky.
“…That is.”
The heavens split open once more, and a colossal shadow began to fall across the Academy grounds.
Students screamed again and dropped low.
“What… is that…?”
In the blink of an eye the entire area went dark.
And what descended, cleaving the sky, was—literally—a gigantic greatsword made of flowers and trees.
The blade had been fashioned by taking the trunk of a great tree that must have grown for centuries, splitting it lengthwise, and binding it tight. Silver sap ran down its surface like veins, and between those streams every kind of wildflower and vine bloomed in full glory.
At a glance it might have looked like nothing more than a weapon carved from wood. Yet even though its edge was pure living timber—neither alloy nor magic-steel—it radiated a pressure that felt capable of cleaving an entire city in a single stroke.
“…….”
And at the very top of that greatsword, upon a hilt woven of flowers and leaves, stood a woman.
Long, straight hair of golden-green in which lemon and pale lime blended in perfect harmony. Eyes the soft emerald of a forest at dawn. A dress that seemed to have captured the colors and light of the woods themselves. A delicate radiance that looked as if a single flower petal might fall if one so much as touched her.
Yet those eyes alone resembled the eyes of a predator who had lived for thousands of years.
“Oh my.”
The woman surveyed her surroundings once, spotted Serene, and smiled.
But the meaning of that smile was closer to a predator’s interest upon discovering prey than to any simple greeting.
“To think the master of the continent would personally set foot in such a remote academy. Has the sun risen in the west today, Emperor of Roelina?”
The trees that still remained on the Academy grounds shivered their leaves.
The High Elf Queen of the Silvairia Elf Kingdom. The one who held the heart of forest and life, the Lord of the White Wood.
As if answering the voice of Arsiena Silvairia—
Serene looked down at her from atop the golden fletching and allowed the corner of her mouth to lift, just slightly.
“For the forest of Silvairia to sink its roots so deeply into ground that is not the land of the World Tree… it would seem the Queen of the Forest has found herself with a great deal of free time.”
She observed the minimum of courtesy.
Even among Transcendents, the years the other had lived and the accumulated weight of her presence itself stood higher.
“Not free time. Something rather interesting has arisen, you see.”
Arsiena glanced once at the enormous greatsword planted beneath her feet, then noticed the letter envelope in Serene’s hand—identical to the one she herself had received—and murmured with clear intrigue.
“I did wonder for a moment whether this little academy in Agentina was truly charming enough to draw down two Transcendents at once…”
She deliberately stressed the word two.
“It appears someone here has received the same ‘something’ as I. How very fascinating.”
“…The same something.”
Serene slowly raised the letter she held. The paper fluttered lightly in the wind.
“This Empress, too, was just thinking the same thought.”
The Emperor’s golden eyes and the Forest Queen’s emerald eyes met across the empty air.
“The man who hid his name and sent a love letter to this Empress…”
Serene tilted her head the slightest degree.
“To think he was enough to drag even the Queen of the Elven Kingdom all the way across the forests of the continent. His identity grows ever more interesting.”
“Indeed. I, too, can only pray that the human who dared send love letters to Transcendents proves to be something worth looking at.”
The auras of the two Transcendents began to clash in earnest above the ash-covered Academy.
And under that pressure, several of the students who had only just managed to regain consciousness convulsed as if seized by a fit and blacked out once more.