Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Prologue
“As knights, we must protect the weak.”
Those were the words my father always told me before he went off to war.
He said that was the sole reason for the existence of our family, a lineage of knights passed down for generations.
In that sense, I must have been a disappointing son to my father.
Though I was born the eldest son of a prestigious knightly family... I had never once thought about wanting to protect someone.
To begin with, I never even wanted to become a knight.
No matter how much the people around me praised them, knights always seemed foolish to me.
As much as I missed my grandfather, who died in battle, and worried for my father, who returned wounded from war, people who burned themselves away for the sake of others seemed like idiots.
What was so great about knights? What was so important about that trivial honor? What was so important about family?
Why even protect others?
The moment you have something to protect, you only become weaker. Isn’t that how people end up dying in someone else’s place?
So I thought that for the rest of my life, I would never sincerely protect anyone.
I did not want to live a life where I sacrificed myself for others.
But then, when I met you, who should have been my enemy.
When I saw you crying pitifully after losing everything to our family.
And despite that, when I watched you struggle desperately against me for years, fighting to survive.
...I heard the sound of my resolve beginning to waver.
“Don’t go.”
“...”
“...Please don’t go, Kylo.”