Love Letters Carry Disaster
A little earlier, in the heart of Silvareia.
Arsiena sat deep in thought, as she always did, within the deepest branch of the World Tree—the root that reached all the way down to the continent’s foundation.
“Another hollow day.”
For thousands of years she had watched the continent’s crust crack open and knit itself back together. She had watched the old gods fall and new divinities rise in their place. She had watched empires rise and crumble, and the borders drawn by human hands erased and redrawn more times than she could count.
Through all of it, she had never once left her seat.
Guardian of Silvareia. The queen who held the heart of forest and life in her hands. That was both her name and her shackle.
“Another one gone.”
She murmured it as she felt, somewhere on the continent, the final breath of a kingdom’s last king. Long ago one of that king’s ancestors had come to Silvareia’s woods and sworn an oath with his entire life as collateral—never to harm the forest, always to protect the elves’ land. His descendants had clung to their little kingdom ever since. Now even that bloodline had vanished.
“In the end, everything turns to dust.”
It was less a lament than a habit of confirming a fact she had already watched repeat itself countless times.
Love had been a kind of taboo to her from the moment she was born. To love a being that would die before her. Even without experiencing the emptiness and silence that followed, she knew it secondhand. So at some point Arsiena had deliberately chosen distance. Lives that bloomed like dust and vanished. Tiny flowers that opened for a moment and fell. She would protect them, but she would never step down among them and take their hands.
After enduring thousands of years that way, even her own heart had begun to feel almost stopped. It still beat, but without meaning—only the bare minimum of pulses needed to keep a body running.
That night should have been just another one of those nights. Sitting on the World Tree’s deepest branch, looking down on starlight and the flow of mana, drinking boredom and emptiness mixed into a single cup.
“…?”
Suddenly the air around her twisted, just a little. Arsiena’s brows rose by the barest fraction.
This sensation… magic?
At first she thought she must have imagined it. Common sense said that no one who was not a Transcendent could cast magic that reached the World Tree’s deepest roots. And even if something could, it would be closer to the authority of a god or an Outer God than to mere magic.
Yet the mana now crossing the World Tree’s roots was strangely quiet for anything of that order. Curious, Arsiena shifted her gaze toward the place where the mana was steadily growing stronger.
At the tip of a branch, between two enormous trunks, a tiny point of light condensed on the bark, then slowly took shape. What appeared was a single cream-colored envelope.
“…A letter?”
A neat, clean envelope. No protection, no curse, no tracking mark. The fact that the World Tree itself had not swallowed it, but had gently hung it between its bark, already meant the sender intended no harm to this forest…
“To know the exact coordinates of the space where the queen resides… what an insolent creature.”
Arsiena leaned from the branch and reached out. She picked up the envelope and looked at the front. A short line written in pale ink met her eyes.
To Her Majesty the Queen of Silvareia.
No florid praise of the sort used by servants or envoys. No drawn-out titles. Just one line that pointed precisely at her place. Intrigued, she lightly scraped the seal with a fingernail; the envelope opened smoothly. A single folded sheet of paper slid out.
Arsiena carefully caught it and unfolded it. The handwriting was a little uneven, yet it still carried the careful, earnest pressure of someone who had pressed each character down with desperate care.
To the woman who watches over lives that vanish like dust.
I am someone who has long admired Your Majesty’s forest from a very great distance. And I dare to know that your greatest terror is loving someone who will leave before you.
So I have grown bold enough to say this. I will vanish far sooner than you. But I will spend that brief time so brilliantly that you will feel lonely when it ends.
The days I remain at your side will, in the end, disappear like a single speck of dust. Even so, if that speck can remain even once as a warm trace within your eternity—
For that single time, I believe I could willingly burn my life. Someday, when you find yourself wanting to choose this moment instead of forever.
If you would remember me then, I would be honored.
— KJH, currently enrolled at the Academy
“....”
It was short. Nothing more than a few lines of love confession. Yet it was nothing like the letters she had received thousands of years ago when she still showed herself and moved about the world—letters stuffed with glittering modifiers from men who had fallen for her appearance alone, who wanted to win her favor or vent their filthy desires.
This was a letter that had pressed down only the words it truly wanted to say, and the feelings behind them. And so, for the first time, high on the World Tree’s deepest branch, the heart that had been still for so long began to beat again—very faintly.
Thump.
Without realizing it, Arsiena brought one hand to her chest. She felt it. The heart that had been beating without meaning for so long was slowly picking up speed, as if it had remembered a function it had long forgotten.
“Truly… bold of you, human.”
A smile that meant she found this interesting curved her lips. A human who knew he would vanish first, and still shoved that fact straight into her face as he confessed. Clearly foolish. And for that very reason, all the more striking.
Arsiena lifted her eyes from the letter and focused her attention elsewhere. Soon, high on the World Tree’s branches, she felt a single faint ripple of mana from a distant, tiny place.
The Academy. Argentina.
“I’ll be waiting. I intend to see for myself whether you can still be that insolent when you stand right in front of me.”
She folded the paper and slipped it into her robes. The World Tree’s branches slowly parted beneath her feet, opening a path. The crown of the great tree split, and a colossal greatsword of flower and wood revealed itself.
The guardian who had held her post for thousands of years. The moment that queen first began to move for her own sake.
Arsiena lightly sprang from the deepest root and landed atop the greatsword. At the same instant the entire forest shuddered once. Then the sword of the great tree, carrying her, shot toward the Academy at a speed close to light.
A golden arrow and a greatsword of living wood. The symbolic weapons of two Transcendents floated facing each other in the sky above the ruined Academy.
“So then.”
After a long standoff, Seraine spoke first.
“Your Majesty of Silvareia said you received something similar to what I did. Might I hear from the queen’s own lips exactly what that was?”
“Hmm?”
Arsiena did not answer at once. She tilted her head slightly, swept her emerald eyes over the emperor, then smiled a peculiar smile and spoke.
“The forest stirred. All because of a single letter sent by some insolent man.”
“Insolent, you say…”
Seraine murmured the word as if tasting it, glancing down at the letter in her hand.
“I was thinking of a similar expression myself. Anyone bold enough to fire a love letter straight into the middle of my bedchamber is insolent enough, wouldn’t you say?”
“So you admit it was a love letter? The Emperor of the Empire herself?”
“The contents make it rather hard to deny.”
Seraine answered evenly.
“I take it the insolent letter that reached the Queen of Silvareia was… of a similar sort?”
“Well.”
Arsiena drew from her robes an envelope identical to the emperor’s and gave it a light shake.
“When a heart that hasn’t beaten for thousands of years starts hammering so loudly… it was hardly an ordinary letter.”
They kept their true feelings hidden and only softened the ends of their sentences—conversation that tried to sound ordinary. To the students’ ears, however, it all sounded like this:
— I rather liked that letter.
— Did you? I liked mine even more.
Seraine shrugged at the queen’s manner and continued.
“In any case, does that mean you came here to meet the sender in person?”
“If I had no intention of meeting him, I wouldn’t have come this far.”
Arsiena briefly shifted her gaze downward, toward the half-collapsed dining hall and training grounds. Students were staggering to their feet among the rubble.
“A human attending the Academy. Judging by the density of his mana, a young man between nineteen and twenty-one. Initials: KJH.”
“Even to the Queen of the Forest he only wrote his initials. Whether he’s timid or simply quick at calculation…”
“Both, I imagine.”
Arsiena gave a short laugh.
“That’s why I like him even more. The fact that a timid, calculating human still wrote a letter like this, knowing all of that.”
Down below, several professors tried to raise mana barriers again to protect the students, then froze with trembling hands. They had realized that inserting themselves between two Transcendents openly sparring was close to suicide.
Seraine pulled her gaze from the students and fixed it fully on Arsiena once more.
“Then the conclusion is one.”
“What conclusion?”
“The insolent human we’re looking for is one person—and—”
The corner of Seraine’s mouth lifted, ever so slightly.
“—the being who can take the hand of the man who sent love letters to two Transcendents is also only one.”
Arsiena answered at once.
“Whose hand he takes isn’t particularly important.”
She flicked her fingers lightly. A few tree roots among the rubble twitched as if answering the gesture.
“What matters is beside whom that child shines most beautifully.”
Her tone and word choice were gentle, but the meaning was this:
— Wouldn’t he look more beautiful standing next to me than next to you?
“Hah. Your Majesty has more wit than I expected.”
“You’re too kind. Among all the masters of Roelina I’ve seen so far, you are by far the most entertaining.”
The air grew stiff. The two Transcendents still stood proudly atop their divine weapons, exchanging only glances. Yet the faint power leaking from them made the Academy caught between them continue to scream amid rubble and dust.
And then—
“…? What is this now?”
Arsiena flinched first and turned her head. From somewhere far to the east she suddenly felt a presence sharp enough to sting even a Transcendent’s cheek. Neither the forest’s aura, nor the golden sun, nor human mana.
Seraine’s brow furrowed at the same moment as she looked eastward.
“So Your Majesty felt it as well?”
Before the words had finished, a portion of the blue sky was suddenly overtaken by deep darkness. Not clouds. Not the sun being blocked. A stretch of sky a little off from where Roelina’s golden arrow and Silvareia’s wooden greatsword faced each other above the Academy. There, a darkness denser than pitch black settled, and the area began to condense into a single “point.”
“…….”
One of the students muttered in a trembling voice.
“A… star?”
But it was far too dark to call a star. Instead of giving light, it seemed to swallow every light and color around it—a black sphere. And that sphere was growing. The point became the size of a coin, the coin the size of a fist, the fist the size of a cartwheel. Even from a distance one could feel the flow of mana being dragged in a single direction.
“What the hell is that….”
And then a black star, denser than pitch, slowly began to spread its overwhelming presence outward—and fall toward the Academy.
