Editor 141

Side Story 1. The Sage Who Became Light and Gold (2)

Hileida Seydr, who was of good birth and had a neat appearance, was considered a likely candidate for the next head maid.

She had an excellent talent for guiding those she served so that, even without going against their wishes, they did not cross the line.

Born to a noble family, Hileida was even fluent in Karolinger, making her an indispensable asset for Philip, whose household was full of troubles.

Eight years had passed since the grand royal wedding.

The proud Queen Juleika had painstakingly learned Albionese to a high level.

However, when speaking with her emotionless spouse, she still used Karolinger like the old nobles. Before the revolution, Karolinger had been the diplomatic lingua franca of the Dernier continent.

Given Philip’s poor command of Karolinger, it was clear why she insisted on this behavior.

Born as a lady of the vast Meinrat estate and the niece of the late emperor, Juleika was practically the emperor’s sister.

She could neither accept nor forgive the fact that a noblewoman like herself had to reside in the palace alongside that common woman.

Therefore, they did not make an [Oath] of fidelity as husband and wife.

It was not a big problem.

Having borne a legitimate heir, Juleika had fulfilled her duty as queen, and Philip did not demand more devotion than necessary from a spouse who had done her duty.

That was not the way of those with blue blood.

Knowing all about the cold situation between the royal couple, Hileida kept her mouth tightly shut and gained the trust of both.

The king and queen, who rarely agreed on anything, readily agreed to entrust their child to Hileida.

As a result, she found herself gathering her skirts and crossing the now-wooded cottage garden.

Chasing after her young prince.

Prince Aslan had dashed upstairs to the cottage’s second-floor bedroom like a puppy.

Having barely caught up, she was confronted with the child’s questions before she could even catch her breath.

In perfect Karolinger, Aslan asked,

“[Hileida, Hileida! Why does that kid only lie down? Can’t he talk?]”

Hileida Seydr failed to curb Prince Aslan’s curiosity. Even for the seasoned maid, this honest and lively prince was not easy to handle.

Expected to be crown prince within a few years, the royal heir was a curious and healthy child.

He never stayed still for a moment and roamed the palace, seeming to treat the shadowy cottage as a special place for adventure.

If Juleika knew her precious only son was visiting here, her fury would be terrifying.

‘At least Lady Elene is away praying right now, thank goodness.’

Lady Elene, whose mind was increasingly disturbed, now spent most of her days kneeling before the palace’s small goddess statue in prayer. Only a priestess dispatched to the palace looked after Elene’s well-being.

Still, since they could be discovered by other maids at any moment, Hileida hurried to coax Aslan.

“[Lord Melchior is very ill.]”

“[So he can’t speak or hear, can’t eat by himself, can’t even walk in the garden? An im-be-cile?]”

“[Your Highness, you must not say such things.]”

Aslan knew quite a bit about the “imbecile.” Adults would talk about all sorts of things while keeping watch over a sleeping child’s bedside.

They must have thought that whispering in Brunnenese would prevent him from understanding, but Aslan understood his mother’s language quite well.

The maids who had come with his mother from Brunnen, all noble-born, said the same thing.

That it was senseless to keep a child of unknown origin and bad omen in the palace. That it was an insult to his mother.

“[Why?]”

“[Because it’s a bad word. It doesn’t suit someone of your high status. Now, let Lord Melchior rest.]”

She naturally wrapped her arm around Aslan and led him out of the bedroom. Even as he left, holding the hand of his favorite maid, the seven-year-old prince kept glancing back.

“[He’s always lying down, but you’re letting him rest again? All day, every day? What does he do lying down?]”

“[Nothing.]”

“[But it’s his birthday today! And he still can’t get up?]”

Aslan was a smart boy, fluent in both Karolinger and Albionese. To him, what was being brought to this remote palace annex today was clearly the fireworks and lanterns for a birthday celebration.

“[You know, I learned today. It’s the day that comes only once every four years on the calendar. It feels like a day you get as a present, but he’s just lying there. Wouldn’t he be bored?]”

“[Perhaps not, Prince Aslan.]”

How could that be? Does he hear the birds? But how old is he? How can he look like a doll made of gold and ivory? Can’t I bring my puppy Luan and play with him? No, Mother said not to let Luan’s muddy paws touch the carpet.

Children’s words are without context, fragmentary, and burst out explosively. Shiny and overwhelming. A voice that was strange but not disturbing.

Melchior opened his eyes.

Though he lay in the same position the maid had placed him that morning and did not even turn his head, he immediately knew who the child running into his bedroom was.

‘Again.’

From Aslan Lioghnan, only his voice came, with no inner thoughts leaking out, just as before. His “siblings” were not affected by his skill.

A healthy, lively child with a clear and clever voice, on the second February 29th since Melchior had inhabited this body.

Time and year, tangled by pain, finally settled clearly in Melchior’s mind. All the information he had seen and heard so far fell into the correct index.

Order arose among the memories, piled to bursting with no blessing of oblivion. Now, he could remember everything in the right order.

It was now 1872.

Never before had he failed to establish his self for so many years.

While Melchior had been lost in a long chaos, the beginning of the end had quietly approached.

Soon Philip would meet the priestess Theophila Ygrain. The priestess destined to bear a king.

Cast off by both his mad lover and his cold queen, Philip was not the sort of spouse to keep marital chastity.

Philip’s occasional nights of pleasure were an open joke among the nobility. Reaching out to a courtesan at the palace during a birthday festival was not encouraged, but it was not considered a serious indiscretion either.

But the single night between the priestess and the king was a device of myth, not a result of lust or love.

Aslan’s innocence would soon reach its end.

Now, the manger, the stable, the persecuted one from the holy mother, the king of our world would arrive.

Melchior would have to helplessly listen to the song of the hero favored by the goddess.

Total obedience and complete resistance always ended the same way, so why was he given thought and will?

But this beginning felt like it had conditions different from any beginning Melchior had known before.

What could that cruel and harsh god be preparing this time?

In any case, history awaited with fervent anticipation the birth of the new millennium’s protagonist.

In the midst of it, the pain of Melchior Lioghnan, a secondary element of the narrative, did not earn a single line. This narrative did not exist to explain him.

How could a narrative that was never created serve an explanatory purpose?

This world would be created in 1873.

Now Melchior would have to fulfill his role after creation. The will and arrangement of the god were punishment and shackle to him.

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“Hileida, close the inner window before you go. The afternoon sun is dazzling.”

Hileida heard the first command Melchior had ever given in this life.

She had sharp ears. It was one of the qualities that had brought her so high.

The young maid turned toward the one who had issued the command, whose voice was gentle and kind but carried an irresistible force. She did so with the fear that she might turn into a pillar of salt or a statue.

Even wrapped in a body that looked little more than skin stretched over bone, the prince sitting up on the bed had an almost sacred majesty.

If a great archangel were to descend to drive away darkness, it would look just like that.

Forgetting she still held Aslan’s hand, Hileida thought so.

Collateral damage:

The clever Aslan would never forget this moment. It would be his first experience of being pushed out from the center of another’s attention and the world.

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“Oh, w-well, Prince, look, after the flowers wither, you have to dig up the bulbs… dry them and store them.”

Thomas Soler, the gardener of the palace cottage garden, demonstrated how to dig up anemone bulbs.

Crouched beside him, Melchior, peering at the bulb in Thomas’s rough hands, nodded slightly.

Under the jaw of the boy, beautiful almost inhumanly so, platinum hair fell softly like a girl’s. It was long past the time it should have been cut.

Though his manners were refined and his demeanor mature, his clothes were worn and un-princely due to lack of adult care, and the tutors who came in the mornings were never much good.

Thomas had known the child for three years, but as always, he could not bring himself to look directly at him, and simply explained how to tend the anemones.

“If, if you don’t dig them up, they’ll freeze. All of them. If you want to see flowers again next year, you have to soak and plant the dried bulbs at the right time.”

“Yes.”

Though Thomas was not eloquent and spoke slowly, the prince listened patiently to his explanation.

Having lived his whole life attuned to others, Thomas was, despite his large and sturdy build, sensitive to people’s moods.

The reason Thomas, who had never left the border town of Carmain on the western coast, came to the palace was because the daughter of the house where he worked became the king’s lady.

Mr. Vitya, who had only expected his daughter to bring home a son-in-law, soon passed away upon hearing she had become the king’s consort.

Rumors continued to circulate in Carmain. That Miss Elene’s child was an idiot, that Miss Elene herself had gone mad.

‘What nonsense.’

Miss Elene, said to be mad, was as lovely as ever even after ten years, just with whiter hair, and the so-called idiot was so dignified and bright—why did everyone in the palace treat the first prince like a plague?

As an orphan who grew up in the slums, Thomas could not understand lineage and tradition.

“Then will the flowers bloom again next year?”

“Of course.”

“Every year?”

“Yes, yes.”

“That’s good. I want to learn more about gardening.”

The simple gardener brought a breath of fresh air to Melchior.

Choosing something he had never chosen before, under these new conditions, was an impulsive act.

Perhaps the author might allow Melchior to learn, or perhaps a bolt of lightning would strike tomorrow and remove the gardener from the story.

He would never know without trying.

“That’s a good idea, Prince.”

Thomas grinned.

It pleased him that the prince, who spoke many foreign languages without being taught, read thick books, and learned even from poor teachers, was interested in soil and flowers.

If even a little joy could be planted in this noble being with desolate, empty eyes despite being only about ten years old, how wonderful it would be. So that the flowers blooming each year could comfort the prince.

The garden, which had grown wild and ruinous for ten years, was transformed by Thomas’s country-bred hands into a tidy and vibrant space.

Planted with different wildflowers and blooms for each season, the garden was comfortable and cozy.

In spring, primroses of pink, purple, and white grew in different heights by the clear pond, and moss on the adjoining rock garden gave off a mysterious atmosphere.

The soul of one who could create such beauty was clear and simple.

Thomas, whose name Melchior learned only in this life, was the most genuine person the eleven-year-old Melchior had ever known. There was no gap between what he said and what he thought.

Melchior gazed at Thomas for a long time.

At this innocent person full of love.

A premonition arose in Melchior’s heart. It was a sentence whose source he could not know. A line that had slipped through the twisted margins of a world the god could not fully control.

‘Love is weak, prone to failure, and has no guarantees.’

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Soon, that premonition proved true.

Elene Vitya committed suicide with her gardener when Melchior was thirteen.

As an event that occurred for the first time, with no repetition, it left a deep impression on Melchior.

In a court where the affairs of married ladies were nothing new, the precise rumor that a stammering common gardener and the king’s consort had run off together was a completely different matter from the amusements of society.

Elene’s actions were a struggle not to be marked by disgrace, but also the resistance of a pitiful woman who had no strength left to endure life.

That suicide brought no laughter to anyone.

Juleika felt bitter humiliation. It was not enough that she had to accept the king’s consort; now the label of a vulgar crime committed by lowborns was attached to her name.

Philip, who ordered the servants to keep silent and secretly arrange the bodies, began to waste away after the funeral of his first love, who had died in an affair.

Once the father who had protected him with feeble strength became completely powerless, threats of murder began to loom over our protagonist and the priestess who bore him.

Each time Arthur hovered at death’s door, the world crumbled a little more. As Melchior suffered, the uncertainty of the world also deepened.

The abyss revealed by the collapse of the world felt like an omen.

Astonishing knowledge never given in eight lives, a past before memory seeped out through the cracks of the world.

In a strange ecstasy, Melchior thought of the anxiety the god must be feeling.

This is what you have done.

In the process, Melchior’s own journey became all the more arduous.

While he spent his childhood like the dead due to the aftereffects of the stigmata, Aslan and Juleika’s power grew uncontrollably.

Philip, the only piece he could use, slipped into a nearly comatose state.

The stigmata could not be used only on princes who would oppose him; Philip was not an exception.

But even the advanced functions of the highly developed “stigmata” could not be applied to an unconscious person.

It was not easy to stay by the side of the dying Philip when he occasionally regained consciousness. But patient Melchior managed it.

First, he gained a nominal organization called the Internal Security Bureau, and finally, he got Philip to sign the crown prince nomination papers.

Even looking at Duke Joseph Cruel’s furious face before the perfect documents, Melchior felt nothing.

It was hard to tell if that murderous intent was any different from previous lives.

Unable to nullify the documents, Cruel blocked the public announcement of the nomination. In the end, Melchior became crown prince without a formal ceremony.

That was enough.

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After all those affairs and people had passed, only the garden remained for Melchior.

The limbs of a twenty-year-old youth were elegantly long, but strangely clumsy at gardening. He planted soaked bulbs in the cold ground, crookedly. The joy of learning gardening for the first time had not faded.

The failures of previous lives left him not only with regret but also with accumulated knowledge.

After seven repetitions, he finally succeeded in withdrawing the god’s favor from the world; perhaps someday he could even break the god’s pen.

The steady gardener spends each year soaking, planting, and digging up the same bulbs.

Waiting for the day when the movement of the stars is halted and a rupture is made in the rules of the world.