The Empty Bed Beneath the Tree
By the time Kadrian arrived at the Duke's residence, he saw Freya safely inside before heading to his office.
Yet even seated at his desk, the documents refused to hold his attention.
His mind kept circling back to the conversation he'd shared with the High Priest.
"I cannot say there is no trace of black magic."
"......."
"Faint—very faint—but I sensed black magic's energy clinging around a powerful aura."
The High Priest had felt black magic on Freya. The moment those words registered, Kadrian's aura had surged, wild and dangerous. The High Priest pressed on without pause.
"Duke. Please hear me out to the end. There is no question that the mighty aura is her true essence. The black magic I sensed merely brushed against the surface of that aura—nothing more than a smudge picked up in passing."
Brushed or smudged, it amounted to the same thing. That butler's soul carried the residue of black magic.
"So what you mean to say is that another soul may have been placed inside her by a black mage."
The High Priest exhaled at Kadrian's words.
"Certainly, I am not one who sees through all things. But of this I am certain: the soul dwelling in that butler's body has not been corrupted by black magic. Did you not sense it yourself, Duke? That is precisely why you are so troubled."
"......."
Then the High Priest had held out a small leather pouch toward him.
"It was two years ago, was it not? When she awoke."
Kadrian had examined the contents of the pouch.
"....This is—"
"I found it on the tip of a branch, back then. A handful, no more—something you could count on your fingers."
"......."
"Does this provide some measure of an answer?"
Replaying that exchange in his head, Kadrian rose from his chair before long. If he couldn't focus anyway, better to steal a little rest—he judged it the wiser course.
He walked at an unhurried pace, neither fast nor slow, and when the central staircase appeared along the corridor, he climbed it.
The stairs led from the third floor, where his office sat, to the fourth.
Reaching the fourth floor, Kadrian paused in the hallway for a moment and gazed down the corridor where Freya's room lay.
'Not a care in the world, that one.'
The image of her drifted up unbidden—dozing off in the carriage, a black cat cradled in her arms, her head nodding with every jolt of the wheels.
With a faint sigh, Kadrian turned and headed straight for the fifth floor.
At the top of the stairs, a black iron gate barred his way, heavy with an imposing presence.
But Kadrian reached out as though the gesture were an old habit, his palm covering the crest carved at the center of the iron door.
The ornate, mystical engraved crest vanished beneath his large hand in an instant. Then, with a low rumble, the iron gate ground open on both sides.
A gate that seemed like it would never yield had swung open with ease at the mere touch of Kadrian's hand.
With the iron gate gone, the dark corridor glimpsed through its bars vanished too, and an entirely different world unfolded before him.
The magic connecting to yet another space had activated.
Crunch. Kadrian took a single step, and grass bent softly beneath his foot.
He followed a stone path set at intervals through the grass, and before long a single enormous tree came into view.
A virtual space conjured by magic—and within it, a fabricated World Tree.
Perhaps because it was an illusion, this copy stood magnificent and brimming with grandeur, utterly unlike the real World Tree that had shed every last leaf and withered to skin and bone.
It had been recreated exactly as the World Tree appeared in the days when it was healthiest and most beautiful.
Its thick roots burrowing deep into the earth and its massive trunk seemed mysteriously connected to every living thing in the world. Along branches that reached out with such force they threatened to blanket the entire sky, vibrant leaves grew in lush profusion, shimmering gold.
Each time the wind brushed past, the rustle of those leaves drifted through the air, soft as a symphony played by nature itself.
And there—
In the shadow painted by those leaves, beneath the boughs of the World Tree, lay a bed adorned with its foliage and petals of every color.
Now and then the wind would sweep through, and golden sunlight would spill shattered through the gaps in the leaves, scattering across the bed.
Kadrian stood gazing at the scene for a while before walking back into the shade of the tree.
"......."
Walking right up beside the bed, he looked down at it in silence.
The bed was empty.
The pure white linens lay without a single wrinkle, and no trace remained that anyone had ever lain there.
And yet the eyes that stared at that empty bed were fixed on someone who had once slept in it.
"Fredika. Come down from the tree at once. What will you do if you hurt yourself?"
"I hate that name! It sounds like a man's name—I hate it!"
The girl had complained that her name was far too long and sounded like a boy's.
"It is a precious name, granted to you by the divine."
"I know. That's why I don't say anything in front of other people."
"......."
"But I won't have you calling me by that name too, Kadrian!"
She had the gentle face of a flower raised in a pampered garden, yet carried the wildness and ferocity of a mustang raised tearing at grass in the open fields.
Unbefitting a Flanker, one might say.
The House of Flanker had, for generations, been chosen by the divine—a family that resonated with the World Tree and protected and guarded it.
Perhaps, Kadrian thought, assuming a child chosen by the divine would be meek and docile had simply been his own prejudice.
"Come down, first."
"Give me a nickname."
"....A nickname? You want me to?"
"Mmhm. Promise you'll give me one and I'll come down."
"......."
"I won't ask you to call me that in front of other people. Just a nickname that only you and I know. Okay? Kadrian."
The sparkle in her eyes as she coaxed him so endearingly remained vivid still.
The moment he promised to give her a nickname, the girl leapt down from the tree in a single bound.
"How about this?"
"You thought of one already? It's not something weird, is it?"
"I once read of it in an old text. There lies an ancient city now sunk deep beneath the sea, a city the divine loved so dearly that He sent down His own child. And that divine child became the queen of the city—"
"There you go with the long explanations again. Never mind. Just tell me the nickname. What is it? What's it like?"
"......."
Kadrian, who had been smoothing his hand across the empty bed, called the name softly in place of the self who lived inside that memory.
"Freya."
The nickname Kadrian had chosen, the one only Kadrian ever called her.
He had once asked Freya—who claimed she remembered it as her own name—a question.
"Do you understand what it means, that you know that name?"
Naturally, she had remembered nothing.
It felt as though the small, fragile hope he had let himself carry was collapsing beneath him.
He had believed that the moment she awoke, everything would fall back into its proper place. But that single word—amnesia—had thrown all of it into doubt.
Doubt had reached so far that he could no longer be certain the soul within her truly was Freya's.
Kadrian's time, stopped twelve years ago, remained stopped still.
The Cadea Empire and the Tenasis Empire had once been a single land.
The World Tree had held that land fast in its roots, and all who lived there had passed their days in abundance beneath its divine protection.
But there is no such thing as eternal peace.
The World Tree stood at the far southwestern edge of the map, and as the years passed, the economic gulf between the regions near it and the regions far from it only widened. Resentment over the right to govern those inexhaustible resources began to breed—between noble and noble, between subject and subject.
In the end, that festering resentment erupted into a great war, and the nation that had been one split into two independent realms.
The Cadea Empire and the Tenasis Empire—one blessed by the World Tree, the other denied that blessing.
And the family that had guarded the World Tree through the generations, that it might endure forever, was the Marquisate of Flanker.
House Flanker was known as the family that both protected the World Tree and received its blessing in return. Its descendants had never been bound by the title of marquis. They stood more exalted than any noble house in the land—more revered than the High Priest of the Temple, more revered than the imperial princes themselves.
Yet twelve years ago, when its sole heir sank into a deep slumber, that storied House of Flanker was erased from history.
That was when the World Tree began to wither, as well.
Fredika Flanker.
The owner of this now-empty bed.
In those days, Kadrian had been Freya's fiancé.
True, it was a promise forced upon them by their elders—but Kadrian had not minded the engagement at all.
Because from the very first day he laid eyes on her, his heart had already been given away.
Kadrian leaned against the bed and drew a pocket watch from his inner pocket.
Click—
On one side of the golden watch's lid, in lettering fine as grains of sand, he saw the engraved initials of Freya and Kadrian.
And between them, a little heart.
Looking at that heart, Kadrian found himself smiling without meaning to.