Editor 140

Side Story 1. The Sage Who Became Light and Gold (1)

This is an old story, yet it is not the kind of narrative that calls for the song of a goddess.

Melchior Lioghnan was rather sick of the muses’ chorus. Nine times, no matter the content, is simply too much.

To begin with, this narration is not bound by the promise of the story.

The lines begin outside the story.

First, a question:

How is the world constructed before the existence of the protagonist?

Is it darkness where light and shadow have yet to divide? Does the manger wait in place for his birth?

Again, no.

In a narrative sense, before the protagonist appears, there is nothing in the background. It is an era when, lacking a great individual, the historian’s pen rests.

The repeated tragedies of life that accumulate to be later summarized in a single line are not the subject of this story.

Melchior Lioghnan knows this. Born as Philip’s first son, he knows it from eight direct experiences.

What he learned by shaking, tearing, and breaking the foundations of the world over several lifetimes is as follows.

This world, which can be reduced to letters and returned to blankness, is made of words themselves.

Nevertheless, for those who are not protagonists, tragedy is real.

The royal family tragedy that would mark the end of this millennium began with Philip Lioghnan.

From the ordinary man who grew up in the shadow of the genius eldest son Edward, with no complaints.

Originally, Philip was not the son destined to be king. That was why he could love. Through nine lifetimes, always the same partner.

The name of Philip’s first lover and first love was Elene Vitya. (For reference, her surname remained “Vitya” until her death.)

Elene was born the daughter of a flower farmer and became the king’s consort at age twenty. It was a status she had never imagined having.

Of course, in a very bad way.

The lover she loved was simply a gentle and naïve young man with light brown hair and turquoise eyes.

Kind and devout Elene fell in love after offering a loaf of bread and a cup of tea to a young man lost and hungry in the rain.

She was the cherished only daughter of the Vitya family, and her father, unable to refuse her plea, allowed her to bring home a son-in-law.

With light blonde hair and lovely blue eyes, Elene made new plans every day for how she would tend the cottage garden with her husband once married.

Philip Lioghnan had been thoroughly warned by the royal chamberlain about the consequences of a misalliance, but he did not care. Even if he were demoted to a commoner, he intended to marry Elene.

He could never allow the child, the fruit of their love, to become illegitimate.

That dream might have come true.

If King Edward had not gone utterly, indisputably mad.

If the bright young king’s reign had not been so short, Elene would have married Philip.

She could have made her garden at the village edge where the bells of the church that blessed her birth could be heard.

Truly.

Old bloodlines always bring trouble. The madness of the Lioghnan royal family was rare but unmistakably manifest.

All who remembered the origin of the madness were dead, and no record remained. Only one fact was passed down through the haze of time: at least once every five generations, some Lioghnan became an imbecile or a murderer.

This time, it was the latter. On the first night the madness manifested, Edward slaughtered three knights, eight attendants, and twelve soldiers.

In fact, the chaos Edward caused was not so great compared to the secret and brutal records left by previous kings.

Had it been an age when newspapers and publishing were censored, the crown might have shone longer on Edward’s head.

Had the belief not yet arisen that even a solar eclipse could someday be explained by science, had the people not yet learned that a king could be killed.

At the very least, Philip had the judgment to realize what a united populace could accomplish.

It was a time when every royal family on the Dernier continent feared the flames of revolution.

In Karolinger, Victoire Moreau detained the royal family; in Crater, terrorists assassinated a prince’s cousin in the palace.

Philip had only one option. The second prince had to persuade the Capital Guard Knights to carry out his plan.

So that the usurpation would appear to be a normal transfer of power. So that it would seem the old traditions continued unbroken.

Not every knight of the Capital Guard followed Philip’s word, but most chose the lesser evil to avoid the worst outcome.

Fratricide—the greatest accomplishment in the life of the second prince, who had loved a common woman, wanted to learn how to raise saplings from his father-in-law, and from time to time bothered the royal counsel to see if he could inherit a portion of his mother’s family wealth.

It was also his first and last accomplishment.

After ascending the throne, Philip did nothing worthy of being recorded in history. He was not a bad ruler, but he showed no exceptional merit either.

He simply kept the throne as a tool to continue the traditions and rules, like the crown and the scepter.

He did not even inherit the Lion’s Sword.

Unlike King Edward, who was a master swordsman, Philip had no ether sensitivity at all, so it was only natural.

At the moment Edward’s head was severed by Pierce Klagen, the Lion’s Sword fell from the king and returned to the Conqueror King’s sarcophagus, never to appear again.

Without the Lion’s Sword, inheriting the covenant was also impossible.

Nevertheless, Philip became the king of Albion. After all, the eclipse occurred.

On the day of the coronation in December 1863, with the cold wind blowing.

This is the summary of what happened in the ten months after Melchior Lioghnan was born.

Exactly ten months before the coronation, Elene Vitya gave birth to the prince’s illegitimate child.

Now that Philip was king, she was granted a separate palace as the king’s first consort. It was only possible in Albion, which was tolerant of unions outside the church.

Of course, it was not what she wanted.

She collapsed, unable to support herself, gazing at her son who had never cried since birth, who neither fussed nor moved, who could not open his eyes by himself, his face as cold as stone.

Thus, she did not attend the coronation of the child’s father, and did not care about that fact.

---

It was on the leap day the following year that Melchior first opened his eyes by his own power, without the care of the adults tending him.

That extra moment, the day added to adjust the calendar, a day that comes after eternity.

The event of the child’s golden eyelashes trembling and revealing iris and pupil was proof that he was alive.

Eyes with a strange opal-like light were endlessly cold. But in that moment, Elene simply surrendered herself to a whirlwind of joy.

“Ah, my child. My child opened his eyes. Goddess. My child was born. He was alive.”

With her hair undone, Elene wept and laughed for two days. And she never returned to the Elene she once was.

Elene Vitya believed until her death that her eldest son was born on February 29, 1864.

Philip did not refute Elene’s claim, and always threw a grand birthday party for the first child every four years.

But all Melchior had done was open his eyes; he did not respond to any external stimulus.

Even at one year old, he could not roll over or hold up his head.

Everyone but the pitiful Elene, who thought her child had just been born, knew Melchior had a problem.

There was no law in Albion’s royal family that stripped children of succession rights for not being born of the official wife.

But a child who could not even swallow a sip of milk without someone forcing it down his throat could not be an heir to the royal family.

The royal advisory council, courtiers, and Duke Cruel all pressured Philip to take a queen for their own reasons.

One of those pale-skinned maidens with blameless bloodlines, twisted by generations of inbreeding, and long, complicated names.

After a ball full of sharp maneuvering, a pile of portraits that did not resemble their subjects, and a war without weapons, the victor was determined.

It was the very young Duke Joseph Cruel.

Just as when he killed Edward, Philip had no choice.

If Philip and Edward’s mother, Queen Carmela, had been alive, she would have scolded him. She was the one who had fought a great war with the former emperor of Brunnen.

During Carmela’s reign, for the first time in history, the petty states beyond the mountains united into a single empire.

In the unified Brunnen monarchy, the hawks of the Duchy of Laetica, which produced the emperor, took the lead.

In Emperor Ferdinand’s court, as a source of martial spirit, there was a movement to reclaim the territories lost to Albion in the time of Absalom II.

As a result, several battles across the Clotho River ended anticlimactically with Emperor Ferdinand’s sudden death. Both sides only suffered losses, with nothing gained.

Juleika Charlotte Castilien was both the cousin of Brunnen’s young Emperor Joachim and the fifth cousin of Joseph Cruel. Joseph’s mother and Juleika’s mother were cousins.

A marriage alliance unimaginable a generation before, the union of the continent’s oldest royal family and its youngest imperial house, was the result of political calculation.

To the south of Brunnen and the southeast of Albion, the Karolinger kingdom was seeing the revolutionary government gain momentum.

It was an outcome explainable only by the fear of class conflict outweighing that of national rivalry.

Thus Philip gained a queen who could not speak Albionese.

As with all political marriages, their relationship was politely cold, but within a year, a legitimate second prince was born from the queen.

His name was Aslan Lioghnan, and in that moment, the prince with the most noble blood on the Dernier continent was born.

It was at the end of winter, 1865.

---

Speech was sound and thought was letter.

So it was from the start of this life. For Melchior, all people’s words and thoughts were emitted simultaneously.

In this case, innate literacy was a curse.

From the moment he was pushed out of his mother’s womb, Melchior had to see and hear both the midwife’s muttered congratulations and her thought that it had been a dreadful labor.

Everything poured in excessively.

Before he could understand their meaning, the gap between word and thought, the malicious intentions of those who smiled kindly, seemed to batter his brain.

The court was not a suitable place for a child with a stigmata that could read others’ thoughts.

Would things have been different had Melchior been born in a quiet cottage on the Angelium estate, his mother’s hometown, where warm sea winds blew?

For Melchior, time began suddenly, without before or after, above or below, tangled in the disorder of unedited text that did not garner attention worthy of record.

The author fills the pen with ink, gathers the papers neatly, and files them. He drafts and revises, and ponders the time and place suitable for the protagonist’s appearance.

Into the chaotic space of “before,” where mangers, straw, and myrrh are heaped carelessly, Melchior was thrown.

With no kindly guide, torn apart by the violent storm of too much knowing.

Melchior was half-blind, unable to open his eyes. He was a crown prince burdened with the sins of blood. He was one who would challenge the gods. He was my beloved little child.

At times he was the darling of the media, or a dictator with secret police, or a perpetrator of massacres.

Alien and unknown knowledge wedged between repeated deaths and revivals, entangling with the past and overwhelming him.

Melchior could not muster the strength to respond to external stimuli.

Life continued, inhabiting an immature body that contained countless latent times.

He endured time in the body of a child, limbs so withered from not eating or sleeping properly they seemed about to break.

Years.

In this life, Melchior, after regaining life and nine years passing, finally understood that people cannot read the minds of others.

He learned that humans are not a species who parade the malice behind polite faces and the pettiness behind lips professing loyalty in golden letters.

Those golden letters, the ugly texts dissecting the depths of human minds, appeared only in Melchior’s vision.

Understanding brought intellect. Only then did Melchior establish a “self.” It was a long and arduous process.

Just recalling which lifetime his failed suicide attempt, the breath that would not cease even with a torn carotid, and the exhausting fratricide belonged to wore down his spirit rapidly.

Repetition makes all things familiar, but also makes the distinctions between each round strange.

Because he remembers everything, paradoxically he cannot remember each event completely. Some names are unfamiliar because their roles changed; some are always trite.

Thus, realization came late.

In previous lives, the ability of “discernment” was only a faint whisper.

But this power, reaching the ninth repetition, manifested in a completely new way: as vivid golden letters.

It was certainly an aspect never seen before.

Of course, that might be why Elene went mad faster this time. Because the stigmata, which had not been visible before, now shone brightly.

Melchior’s right hand, where the stigmata’s brilliant light pooled, was always wrapped in bandages.

Because when Elene saw her child’s bare hand shining in the dark, she would have fits, scream, and sometimes even harm him.

Whether hidden or covered, the stigmata functioned powerfully.

At first, he could only know what the maids and servants were thinking in the moment.

As he grew, the day came when he knew their pasts, what they had known, seen, and heard.

Melchior did not want to open his eyes.

The stigmata forced him to see too much.

The crimson of his irises widened with the growth of his skill.

Every night, Elene prayed to the goddess to return her child, who should have had light turquoise eyes like Philip.

Of course, those prayers were never answered.

At first, the “stigmata” was so overwhelming that he mistook it for having no usage limit or penalty for overuse.

Because of that, Melchior, unable to manage his unique skill, hovered between life and death many times from overload.

The first time the “stigmata” hit a restriction was when he was six.

The awareness of just how immense this stigmata’s power was came painfully clear in the suffering caused by the backlash of its limit.

It was a grueling torment that wore down his emotions.

There was nothing he could do in his underdeveloped child’s body. He could only wait helplessly for the skill to reload, enduring the punishment that was the price of the stigmata.

So many conditions had changed, but one premise remained constant.

As always, the historical turning point that triggered the stigmata’s reload was never of his own will.