Talia stared at him intently, her eyes shimmering with expectation.
“What do you think?”
“…It’s passable.”
At his indifferent reply, a faint shadow of disappointment flickered across her face.
“Is that all?”
Varkas furrowed his brow. He could not begin to guess what she wanted from him. Was he supposed to offer lavish praise for the taste of the wine? A strange suspicion stirred at her uncharacteristic eagerness, but he did not wish to sour the mood of the woman who had prepared all this for him.
He parted his lips to add something more. At that very moment, a searing burn flared in his throat. Varkas instinctively gripped the edge of the table. The liquid coursing down his esophagus felt like a blade scraping through his entrails.
“…What did you put in this?”
“I didn’t put anything in it.”
She denied it, her voice trembling. Looking at her through dazed eyes, Varkas slowly pushed himself upright. He felt that if he did not lie down at once, he would collapse onto the floor.
He stumbled to the bed and slumped onto the sheets. As blood rushed back into his head, his swimming vision gradually steadied. Yet the helplessness creeping through his limbs only deepened.
Had she given him some absurdly potent spirit? He struggled to clench and uncurl his fingers, which were growing numb as though paralyzed, when Talia approached the bedside and peered down into his face.
“How do you feel?”
He narrowed his eyes, unable to grasp what lay behind the question. What did she want to hear? Even so, he felt compelled to answer.
He opened his mouth to describe the sensation. Then, a hot surge tore up from his churning stomach. Varkas twisted his torso to the side by pure instinct. A metallic flood welled in his throat and spilled across the sheets. It took him several seconds more to realize that it was his own blood.
As his vision went black, he gasped for air. From far away came the sound of someone screaming his name. He tried to answer the call, but his frozen tongue would not budge an inch.
His failing body was sinking. Sinking toward that river of blood he had beheld thousands of times in his nightmares. And into that thick tide of death, he let go of whatever he had been desperately clutching.
Soon, absolute silence fell.
It was a realm of pure void, where nothing could be felt.
The boy is dreaming.
In the dream, he seats a girl with hair the color of deep honey upon his lap and kisses her rosy lips.
The playful peck, like birds nuzzling beaks, gradually deepens into something carnal. Though he knows she is not yet old enough for such things, the boy does not care.
Before long, his body burns like a furnace. Even while gripped by that agonizing heat, an intense happiness floods a corner of his heart.
The girl who has cast him into this fever babbles without end. Looking down at the innocent face that has not the faintest inkling of his longing, the boy feels a sweet, sharp ache.
Losing all restraint, he kisses her with fiercer passion. As if in answer, her fingers bury themselves deep in his hair.
Desperately fighting the urge to slip his hand beneath her dress, he tears his head away in torment, only to see her wearing a shy smile upon her flushed cheeks.
In that instant, the ecstatic joy that held him vanishes like smoke.
Waking with a desolate, hollow heart, he is swiftly consumed by self-loathing.
The boy cannot fathom why this dream keeps returning.
In truth, the girl is nothing more than an impurity muddying his life. The image of himself smiling happily while holding her feels utterly foreign.
He soon dismisses the illusion woven by his mind as an unavoidable aberration of physical maturity.
Perhaps it is only natural for the body to react to the closest female in his presence.
Having reached a rational conclusion, the boy rises from his bed.
Beyond the window, the dawn light blazes with a sharp, cold ferocity.
The sun, sweeping in like a tide, shatters and washes away whatever trace of the dream lingered upon his eyes.
Before long, his world regains its composure.
A pristine, orderly world. That is the life he is meant to live.
The boy reminds himself.
This unwelcome disturbance will pass soon enough. He will maintain his steadfast existence within the bounds set for him since birth, and the girl will remain nothing more than an ill-fated, fleeting crossing of paths.
Having scrubbed away every trace of needless emotion, the boy steps outside his sanctuary.
Yet in the next breath, his world is swallowed by blood and dark.
The young man is crushing something underfoot in a filthy alley that reeks of rot.
His eyes, which had been fixed on the crescent moon gleaming faintly through the clouds, slowly drift downward.
The face of a man, turned gray after vomiting up every drop of blood in his veins, fills his sight. The man’s eyes are rolled back to reveal burst capillaries, and bloodied gums gape where every single tooth was ripped away. Inside the jaw wrenched unnaturally wide sits nothing but a dark clotted heap where his tongue once lay.
He remembers then that what he is crushing underfoot is the man’s tongue. His gaze shifts toward the empty wrists.
Cleanly severed, the hands lie buried among a heap of scrap fish discarded by the river men. Staring at the fingers poking through the rotting scales and offal, he asks himself.
What am I doing here?
He recalls the steel gaze of the priest peering through a crack in the door. His father’s eyes, staring at him as though looking upon a repulsive creature, also flash across his mind.
Had they foreseen this within him all along?
After gazing down at the corpse’s face, which looks as though it had witnessed hell itself, the young man turns to leave the alley.
Just then, the moonlight pierces the clouds to shine starkly across his blood-drenched form.
No one would ever take him for an imperial knight now. He likely does not even look human.
Brooding numbly over the thought, he walks slowly through the shadows. Amid the heavy silence, the wind off the river blows without pause. Yet the stench of blood clinging to him shows no sign of lifting.
A sudden doubt grips him.
This was not the first life he had taken. Nor would it be the last. Why, then, was he feeling this way?
Across the surging currents of the Silviska River, the girl’s scream echoes.
The sudden realization that her voice was what drove him here sends a chill down his spine.
Danger.
The single word pierces his skull like a needle.
Only then does he realize he is standing before a threshold he must never cross.
What becomes of me if I cross this line?
A scene from the dream that had haunted him for months flickers before his eyes.
A dream that left him fevered and yearning for things he did not desire.
Yet that vision is soon eclipsed by the hollow form of Bernadette, and the face of an Emperor who, despite holding the world in his palms, chose to be the slave of a single woman. He remembers, too, the girl who had screamed while pinned beneath a man who was now rotting meat.
He senses that his undoing awaits within those eyes mangled by tears, terror, and despair.
Yet it is not too late.
If he has strayed onto the wrong path, he need only turn back.
As he has always done, he will ruthlessly sever every impurity that threatens his unyielding world.
With that, his world sinks once more into a deathly calm.
Down in those deep, pitch-black waters, he does not come up for air for a long time.
When he came to, the room was steeped in the fierce red glow of dusk.
Varkas barely managed to lift his eyelids, which felt as stiff as dried hide, and stared blankly around the crimson-stained chamber with unfocused eyes.
For a while, he could not even comprehend where he was. Only after several minutes dragged by did the frozen gears of his mind begin to grind back to life.
‘…How long have I been out?’
END