I Love You.
What words would even be... needed.
How should I begin.
Truthfully, Cariel had nothing to say. Nothing he needed to ask about Elhermina, nothing he was curious about. Even now he lay in the Wilderness, pale and bleached of all color, inside a space that had lost even its hues — and there, he was still chasing after something.
And yet. It was different now than it had been before. Because if he gave up everything... the contract he had sealed with the Demon King would take effect.
One. Cariel shall strike down Rueld — the Hero, and his own father — and accept the verdict of their duel, victory or defeat.
Should he break this resolve, or lose it, he shall bear the most wretched, most agonizing despair the world has to offer.
That despair will endure beyond death, extending in perpetuity to him and to every soul he holds dear.
It will continue until the day his bloodline is erased from the world.
(Excluded from this: his father Rueld, his mother Ermina, and any sibling born hereafter.)
It had nothing to do with parents or siblings. The Demon King had presumably reasoned that if he bound such people to Cariel's fate, Cariel might take his revenge in return — by choosing to end his own life. That, he supposed, was why parents and siblings had been left out as exceptions.
In fact, Cariel himself had briefly considered just such a retaliation. More often than he would care to admit.
If you find me so displeasing... what if I simply die in front of you?
And yet. It was an absurdly laughable supposition — but even if he severed his breath in a single instant... Mother would more than capable of bringing him back to life. Thinking of that, even suicide ended up excepted.
Then he would die in some wretched place instead? And once he was dead? He would never get to see how the two of them reacted, would he?
It was a petty obsession, something closer to lingering attachment than resolve. But because of that alone — even the act of choosing his own death was something he could never settle on to his own satisfaction.
And now... he had begun to fear contact with anyone. Because if he failed, it would not end as his own private unhappiness, his own private despair.
Someone might put it this way: You'd harden your resolve over a maid? Over some working commoner girl? Are you in your right mind?
It doesn't matter.
Even that maid — small a light as she was — I never forgot her warmth.
It had nothing to do with love. Simply as one human being to another, he could not bear the sight of someone being made wretched because of him.
"I love you."
"……."
...?
…………??
"What?"
"It seems you are recovering some of your senses."
Did that woman just make a joke? Her expression hadn't changed in the slightest — he wondered if he'd merely hallucinated it.
"What I said just now was my honest heart. You did not mishear, so there is no need to play at having heard nothing."
"...Wait. Wait just a moment."
Where did this come from, out of nowhere?
"That is why I am all the more sorry."
Sorry?
"Sorry... you say?"
"I—"
For some reason, she stopped there. Eyes squeezed shut, lips firmly sealed, she let out a short hum — then snapped her eyes wide open again.
"I have no gift for words, Cariel. You know that well enough."
"……."
With her archaic diction gone, she did look distinctly... lacking.
The peculiar pressure that wrapped around her remained undiminished. The dignity of a sovereign, perhaps — something of that sort.
"This is my greatest miscalculation. I overestimated you, quite on my own authority."
"Over...estimated?"
"Indeed. I committed a foolish miscalculation — blindly convinced that even without my protection, you would willingly cast off your place and rise to your feet."
"……."
"Nor was it I alone. His Majesty believed it, and my mother thought the same. Sir Bariel never once doubted it, nor did Uncle Rueld. Ermina... Aunt Ermina, perhaps, was a little different."
"……."
"But in the end, I cannot deny that driving matters to this point is our doing — ours to answer for."
"You... have no part in it, surely."
Cariel answered in a level tone. Even if she brought up that day five years ago, she hadn't even existed there at the time. By the time she returned to the Imperial Capital, everything had already been settled, each thread tied off on its own.
"Even so, I admit it plainly: I cannot free myself from the original sin of having stood by and watched."
"...You said yourself that you didn't stop Alesius to preserve your own dignity, didn't you? You just confessed it with your own mouth — where does 'original sin' come from?"
"And so, did you not end up unhappy as the result?"
"……."
Was she really someone who spoke this bluntly?
Clumsy though her expressions were, her sincerity came through unmistakably. The exterior she always wore felt utterly devoid of emotion — indifference itself, down to its core. Even in the most grueling physical training, she would sweat, but not once did her composure so much as crack. Within the Academy, the instructors could only learn from her — they were hardly in any position to lecture or advise her. She had long since become a figure beyond reach at that stage. In magic, perhaps, their footing differed slightly. But even that had left the realm of mere genius far behind.
"I know that you and Eras once shared the same dream."
"……."
"And those are words you once spoke to me as well, after you returned to your homeland."
That, he had not expected.
"Me? With you?"
"...It seems your memory has grown faint, after all."
The corners of her mouth trembled, as if beyond regret and into something faintly sorrowful.
"Did you not once tell me that you wished to set out on an adventure?"
That the world, once you stepped out into it, was so very wide... that there were so many places to go. That you wanted to see so much.
"Even the uncharted frontiers no map recorded — the Scorching Earth. The Ceiling of the Mountain Range. The ends of the sea. To the very hem of the sky."
The Scorching Earth that seared everything as if to kill it outright. The land of death shrouded in the unknown. Perhaps, you said, we only shunned such places because we were ignorant and afraid.
"You told me that, once."
And in doing so, you planted in me another dream. Another hope.
"...I don't remember."
Cariel could only answer haltingly, oddly ill at ease. She paid it no mind.
"It is fine. You were grievously ill at the time, after all."
At those words, he had some inkling of which moment she meant.
"What actually happened, I cannot say — Sir Rueld kept his silence on the whole affair. But because of it, the elves grew singularly wary of us. That they took to offering concessions of their own accord."
And back then —
"That Sir Rueld had very nearly hacked the World Tree to pieces — that it was no mere jest — I heard it directly from His Majesty."
"……."
He knew nothing of any of this.
Still, one thing was certain: the journey that had dragged him about as a hostage had come to its end with the elves' nation. And at some moment after that, he awoke — to find himself abruptly back in the Empire.
That aside... the World Tree?
— So that's it.
So that thing was the culprit.
— I had wondered, but...
Suddenly — from a vantage that looked clear down upon the densely wooded ground below, the Demon King lifted his gaze to the night sky, a layer higher still, and asked:
— Did the old sages already know?
…….
……….
— Ha. That is hardly the question worth asking.
What could one possibly expect from mere revenants?
Yet within the heart of the Empire, inside the Imperial Capital itself, the symptoms had apparently been comparatively mild. The Demon King looked back up at the empty air and let out a small, dry laugh.
Spirits? Those things... spirits?
Their bodies had rotted away ages ago, and still the very sight of it churned his stomach toward vomiting.
— So in the end, all they accomplished was a palliative, hm?
Could there be such a coincidence? Or no — was even this a necessity disguised as chance? A preestablished harmony? Rather than anyone deliberately setting it in motion, perhaps it was simply a fortunate site?
And on top of that —
— So even the sages, quietly, desperately, were fighting for their lives, were they?
…….
……….
— Khek!
In a sense, the Demon King himself was little more than a revenant. What set him apart from them was the difference in the weight of their existence. There was a fundamental gap in disposition as well. Between the pitiful creatures bound by the laws of matter, forced to take form as substance merely to keep hold of their identities — and beings like us, who grew up without an identity at all until, for one reason or another, one was forced upon us — there was, unmistakably...
— a gap that could never be crossed.
That aside, the situation was turning delightfully amusing. To think that imperial princess would brazenly slam a confession down right in front of him.
— What a fine moment.
And yet. Truly regrettable, but... you are far too late.
Even if Cariel were to accept that confession, he was now in a position where he could only roll the wheel steadily onward, never again able to stop.
If anything, your confession was precisely the thing that fanned the embers of his complacency and emptiness with a desperate, burning pair of bellows.
Before long, the ember would catch alight. Even without you, there had been the child who handed him that spark before. 'Because he learned fear.'
Had he never known, might he not have been happier, for a little while at least? For ignorance is, at times, sweeter than the juice of the sweetest fruit.
But now he knows. And once a man knows, Cariel can no longer give up.
The ones who had genuinely wished him well — if he idly imagined all of them cast down, not into some mild purgatory but into an abyss that poured out nothing but screaming, then even surrendering quietly to despair would become impossible.
Given the boy's nature, his temperament as it is.
'He would simply choose to forget, that is all.'
Still, there was nothing here he could not understand. To that degree, they had believed he held no particular attachment to the world. They had believed he possessed no concrete, precious bond with anyone.
But that much is unknowable, is it not? Perhaps you simply do not remember.
And if, because of that, your despair ends by becoming theirs — an indiscriminate one — will you still be able to laugh merrily when that day comes?
Or. Will you be able to weep?
He didn't know why, but past the cold sweat, a greasy sweat of agony now ran down him in streams. He felt he had forgotten something — yet the mere thought of trying to recall it sent shudders through him. Fear climbed from the soles of his feet up through his whole body and pressed down on his shoulders. His tongue went stiff, and his jaw began to shake on its own.
"Cariel?"
"……."
It was paltry pride, nothing more. But at that call, he recovered a measure of his senses.
What he had to do here was obvious. He had not forgotten. A deep breath. Just a deep breath. Straighten his back. Drive the air in deep. Yes — the way he always had. When the mind frays, the breath is the first thing to collapse. So — the breath...
"……?"
Who was it I learned this from?
"Don't panic. Start with the breath, calmly. Slooowly. There's no need to think about anything."
"Keep at it, and once the breath is refined, the troubled heart will settle on its own."
And so —
"……."
Something was strange. He had only just set out beyond the Imperial Capital, and yet his mood was profoundly, inexplicably odd.
Had Elhermina's unexpected confession loosened his tension without his even realizing it? What on earth...
"That is why — let us return now."
But at those words, his scattered mind snapped wide awake in an instant.
"...That will not do."
Miraculously, a perfectly sound answer forced its way out past his lips.
His wavering gaze steadied itself, and the blurred world before his eyes grew sharper, clearer.
This was how it was meant to be seen. There, in the forest where darkness had settled, the damp, earthy scent the woods exhaled quickly roused a mind that had all but congealed, dull and inert.
"That, I cannot allow."
I declared it, flat and firm.