How Times Have Changed
The Shiron that Lucia had come to know had always seemed oddly precocious.
It wasn't a figure of speech — she meant he carried himself with a maturity that simply didn't match his age. In those rare moments when seriousness settled over him, it became nearly impossible to think of him as a child at all. Call it force of will, or the sheer weight of his presence — whatever it was, the air around him changed.
It wasn't the kind of poise that came from reading too many books. Lucia had seen more than her fill of armchair theorists and ivory-tower scholars in her previous life; there was no chance she would fail to tell the difference.
What he gave off was something you could almost mistake for hard-won experience — the unhurried composure of a veteran who had weathered enough storms to know how to navigate the next one.
She hadn't known him long, yet the side of himself Shiron occasionally revealed made him look more seasoned than even her, a reincarnator who had lived through an age of legend.
He had shown that side of himself only two days ago. When he had taken her trembling hand and held it tight, there had been a light in him so fierce she could not have pulled away if she tried.
That memory refused to leave her. She could still summon it in perfect detail.
Shiron approaching her as she stood shaking, clutching her coat. Despite having stayed up through the night, his face had held not a trace of fatigue. He was still of an age that ought to have been under someone else's care — by any measure far weaker than she was — and yet he had tried to shore up the courage of a Lucia frozen stiff with fear.
The feel of his hand was still vivid against her palm, as if it had never left. Sometime after that night, she had stopped thinking of him as merely a child.
What did I just hear?
Which was precisely why she could not simply let Berta's remark slide.
Lucia's eyes took in Berta's bare white form. The symbol of motherhood resting atop that lean, well-trained body was striking even to another woman.
Come find him tonight?
Why?
She had tried to play dumb, but some part of her mind had already arrived at the answer.
Across both this life and the last, she had never so much as dated a man, let alone known one intimately — yet Lucia was not so dense as to miss the meaning of wash up and come to me tonight.
Besides.
The places where Kyle and her companions had spent most of their time had been battlefields where death could arrive at any moment. In extremes like that, moral boundaries tended to loosen. It was also where people showed their basest selves most clearly.
In every era, war had always drawn more men than women, and the culture that formed there was inevitably a macho one. Even the bookish types would brag about their first night as if recounting some heroic exploit. Blushing at the crude talk that spilled out over drinks was something even the nuns who had left the convent to volunteer never bothered with.
And yet.
A single fact kept her from brushing Berta's words aside.
Lucia lowered her head and counted Shiron's years again.
He's eleven… isn't he?
He was far too young to be demanding that kind of nighttime company. The realization set her pupils trembling. If she had the dates right, a conventional adolescence was still at least three years away.
She slowly lifted her gaze. However tangled her thoughts, the woman in front of her came into sharp, unmistakable focus.
Had their conversation dissolved the awkwardness between them? Berta held herself more easily than before. Lounging back against the wall with her spine arched in open confidence, she looked every bit the attractive woman she was.
As if on cue—
"Is there something you wanted to say? You've been staring for a while."
Berta turned her eyes toward her and scratched her cheek. There was nothing surprising about it. She was hardly so thick-skinned as to miss a heavy gaze fixed on her for that long.
Lucia decided the opening was convenient. What if she had simply jumped to the wrong conclusion? She bit down on her restless lips, then opened her mouth.
"Um… so."
"Yes? Go ahead."
"Why do you think Shiron called for you?"
She would not ask the question outright. Even framing it this way felt, to Lucia, like a breach of manners.
Was that too rude? What if she dodges the answer?
But contrary to her worries, Berta answered without hesitation.
"…Who can say? Perhaps the young master wants to make me one of his people."
"Shiron's… people?"
"Yes. I can't think of any other reason. I'm the sort who finds it easier to use my body than my head."
Berta finished with a bitter little smile.
Shiron could have killed her and hadn't. She had turned the question over through the night and arrived at nothing else. And this was a Prien, after all. Given his background, he could never have too many people he could freely command.
Her expression was already half resigned. It wasn't such a bad arrangement, if she was honest. In about ten years Shiron would almost certainly be named head of House Prien. Building a connection now would do her no harm. Deep thinking had never suited her, so Berta simply decided to accept it calmly.
The thought lightened something in her chest.
Lucia, on the other hand, found her confusion unraveling into something worse. No — it would be more accurate to say that suspicion had hardened into certainty.
What?
Easier to use her body?
Whose people?
Her lips moved soundlessly, unable to close.
Is that something you just say out loud in front of someone? And so casually?
Berta would become Shiron's woman tonight. The moment the fact settled in, blood rushed to Lucia's face.
Kids these days are… awfully advanced.
She dunked her head under the water, hoping to cool it.
It did nothing of the kind. She was sitting in a hot bath, after all.
Pwah—
Then, abruptly, it struck her that the age she had lived in and the present were not the same world.
To be fair, even back then people used to say the younger generation was growing up too fast.
For the first time, Lucia felt the true distance between eras. Five hundred long years had passed since she had fallen after striking down the Evil God.
Yura always said ten years was enough to change mountains and rivers. Five hundred years — that's fifty turns of the wheel.
Thinking about it that way, assuming the common sense of then and now would be identical was pure foolishness. Customs changed. Culture shifted. Of course they did.
And besides…
Through strands of dripping hair, Lucia looked at Berta. There was something almost light about the other woman's expression.
"……."
Shiron was the young master of House Prien — a family of staggering power. Even Lucia could see that the name of Kyle, the Sword God, still carried enormous weight. Five centuries on, and the house had still produced a powerhouse like Hugo; their prestige had clearly not withered. Becoming someone to a young master of a house like that would bring no small number of advantages. Smoothing a petty official's path would take little more than a glance.
Even in the old days, stories of people offering their bodies for advancement had not been rare.
Come to think of it… that kid used to toss filthy jokes at the cops without blinking, too.
Lucia's eyes went vacant as she slowly rose to her feet.
"Leaving already?"
"…Yeah."
She pulled herself from the tub on unsteady legs. Her head was spinning too hard to stay any longer.
*
Lucia trudged down the corridor. Even if she had lain down and tried to sleep, closing her eyes only brought Shiron to mind.
I've become a relic who can't keep up with the times…
It had been a day that shattered common sense. Her steps dragged, weak from a faint dizziness that had nothing to do with lingering too long in the bath and everything to do with the shock of how far the ages had drifted.
Kids these days. So open about everything. And look at me — how did I end up like this?
She mocked herself for sounding like a complete old fogey. Somewhere behind her eyelids, Shiron's sly face flickered into view, as if laughing at her and calling her a fossil.
The real problem is an antique like me trying to understand the modern world. What would people think if they saw this? A generation gap of… aigoo, five hundred years.
A dry, bitter laugh slipped out of her.
Unable to accept the weight of five centuries, she needed something to lean on.
I thought he was a comrade…
Even Shiron — the only real person in this manor — was not her ally. The only one who still understood her, the only friend she had left, was a book that held the past.
Right. I'll read. Empty my mind, cool my head — that should help a little.
She walked without direction until she found herself at the library. Lucia set her hand on the doorknob, eased the door open, and stepped inside.
She didn't need to wonder which book to choose. Her feet carried her forward as if drawn.
"…Huh?"
But the biography of Kyle that always sat in that spot was gone.
"Why isn't it here?"
No matter how thoroughly she searched, no matter how many times she circled back in case she had misremembered the shelf, the book was nowhere to be found. In this entire manor, the only people who would ever open a children's tale like that were Shiron and herself — and Shiron had dismissed Kyle's biography as shameless exaggeration, so she had already ruled him out.
Then, abruptly, her gaze snagged on a desk across the library.
"Found i—?"
The fairy-tale volume, its corners worn soft from countless rereadings, was held open in the hands of an unfamiliar little girl.