The Emperor furrowed his brow and began to slowly distance himself. In an instant, he moved toward the window.
Ack, I let my guard down!
“Your Majesty, why are you avoiding me?!”
I widened my eyes and dashed forward. Practically throwing myself at him, I grabbed onto the hem of the Emperor’s robe. He looked at me with an expressionless face and feigned ignorance.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You ran away from me in the garden earlier. You’re doing it again now!”
“I’m just opening the window because it’s warm.”
“It’s autumn right now.”
A cool autumn breeze swept between us, carrying my words straight to him.
The Emperor fell silent, momentarily at a loss for words. Taking advantage of the opportunity, I grunted and managed to maneuver him to sit on the sofa.
“You’ve had dinner, right? Come on, have a drink with me.”
I offered him the wine I had prepared. He took it reflexively, then immediately looked regretful.
“What’s wrong? You drank just fine yesterday. I even got so drunk from our drinking game that I blacked out!”
As I muttered my complaint, his golden eyes narrowed.
“How much don’t you remember?”
“Um, let’s see… bits and pieces? But I do remember you saying you’d reconsider the ball.”
“You only remember what suits you.”
The Emperor muttered with an incredulous look.
Still, he finally took a sip of the wine, and I beamed with satisfaction.
“Your Majesty, so have you thought about it? You’ll host the ball, right?”
Pestering him like a ball-obsessed fanatic, I watched his eyebrow twitch as he looked at me.
“…You remember the ball, but why can’t you remember my name?”
“What name?”
I blinked at him, my gaze saying, Is this supposed to be famous or something? The Emperor set his wine glass down with a sharp sound.
“…Didn’t I ask you to call me by my name? You said you preferred ‘Xian’ to ‘you.’”
“Oh, right! I remember now! Then call me by my name too, Your Majesty.”
When I urged him with sparkling eyes, he countered with an arrogant look of defense.
“You first.”
“Me? How can I just call Your Majesty by your name?”
“You had no problem doing it yesterday, and now you can’t?”
Ugh. That was because I was drunk!
Clearly feeling awkward, he was making me go first. Embarrassed, I scratched my cheek, then decided to just go for it and smiled brightly.
“Alright then, Xian. Why don’t you want to host the ball?”
He hadn’t expected me to jump straight to it like that. Sian downed his wine in one gulp and poured himself another glass.
“Hey, using alcohol as an excuse is cheating!”
I quickly grabbed the glass from him and gulped it down myself.
“You… why…?”
“It’s Leah. Xian, you need to tell me why you don’t want the ball. Otherwise, I can’t be convinced. I really, really want to host it.”
Gently coaxing him, I saw Sian—no, I should start thinking of him as Sian to get used to it—make up his mind to try and get rid of me.
Finally, he opened his mouth.
“I have no good memories of it. From childhood until now.”
His typically stoic golden eyes darkened slightly.
I was surprised and tried to recall. Come to think of it, the last ball had been during his coronation.
Hmm, but I can’t really remember much about it.
What could have happened at that ball to make him dislike them so much? My curiosity surged, and I felt an urgent need to solve this mystery.
Only then could I host the ball and collect hair strands from the men! At this rate, when would I ever gather all 10,000 of them?
“Can’t you tell me what happened? Maybe I can help.”
“You must’ve seen it during the coronation.”
His voice was calm, almost reassuring, as if urging me to remember. But Sian looked at me with suspicion, and I guiltily sipped the wine, laughing sheepishly.
“I’ve been so drowned in alcohol I think I have partial memory loss.”
“You should take care of your health. Not me.”
He cut himself off mid-sentence. I was smiling at him with a gaze so earnest, so full of longing, that it threw him off guard.
For about thirty seconds, we stared each other down. Finally, Xian averted his gaze with a sigh.
“…It’s you who should take care of your health, Leah.”
Hearing my name spoken in his smooth voice felt unexpectedly pleasant.
Ah, come to think of it, this was the first time since becoming Lea that I’d heard someone say my name.
“Yes, Sian. I’ll even eat broccoli from now on.”
Feeling oddly cheerful, I responded like someone placating a child.
Xian’s eyebrow twitched as if he sensed something was off. But I ignored it and pressed on.
“So, why do you dislike balls so much?”
Resting my chin on the armrest of the single-seater sofa, I asked. Xian looked out the window into the distance, silent.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Pouring myself more wine, I decided to wait patiently.
Sian turned his head to look at me with thoughtful eyes. After I emptied two more glasses, he finally spoke.
“I was raised not to feel emotions.”
Joy, sorrow—everything.
His voice was so calm it lent credibility to his statement.
“‘An Emperor with emotions will destroy the Empire’s fate.’ My father believed the prophecy made when I was born and raised me accordingly.”
Looking down at his hands, Xian murmured.
“…For a beast like me, war and hunting are more fitting than human activities like balls.”
“What nonsense. Xian, you’re human too.”
Setting down my fourth empty glass, I spoke softly. His golden eyes stared at me, as if trying to figure me out.
“What’s so special about a ball? You hold hands, dance, chat with familiar faces. It’s just about having a good time.”
Could it be that he didn’t know how to dance? I grinned, teasing him, and his perfectly shaped lips twitched faintly.
“Oh, you smiled!”
“I didn’t smile.”
The handsome, dark-haired man denied it with a serious face. I rested my chin on my hand, grinning.
“If there’s something you don’t know, you can learn. When you’re with people, do you feel nothing? Like you don’t understand them?”
“…Mostly.”
Perhaps realizing how much he’d confessed, Xian seemed awkward now.
He hesitated, closing his eyes. Instinctively, I knew he was recalling the coronation ball.
Quietly sipping my fifth glass, I waited.
“…..”
*****
Beneath his closed eyelids, memories resurfaced.
After his father passed away, following the Empress to the grave, Xian ascended to the throne.
From his childhood as a young prince to his adulthood as the crown prince, balls had been nothing more to him than occasions to greet his father alongside nobles and foreign envoys.
But once he became the ruler of the empire, everything changed.
Xian, who had grown accustomed to the screams and groans of the battlefield, found himself plagued by constant headaches within the serene palace.
He’d had headaches even during the war, but within the peaceful and quiet imperial city, the intensity became far worse.
He chalked it up to the change in environment and endured it silently.
But the fact that his suffering was piling up, pushing him to his limits, went unnoticed by everyone. That was the beginning of his misfortune.
“Your Majesty, I humbly offer my greetings.”
“It is an honor to be in your presence, Your Majesty!”
The coronation ball was Xian’s first as the Emperor.
From the orchestra playing celebratory music to the voices of far more nobles and envoys than usual, Xian’s nerves were stretched to their breaking point.
Even so, as a crown prince raised with perfect discipline, the newly crowned Emperor barely managed to maintain his composure and propriety.
“Your Majesty, may I present my daughter, Clarence Sescall.”
Near the end of the ball, as Xian was nursing his headache with alcohol, a high-ranking noble approached him with his daughter.
“Y-Your Majesty, it’s an honor to meet you for the first time!”
“A pleasure to meet you, Lady Sescall.”
The girl’s soft, high-pitched voice made his temples throb.
The young woman, barely having reached adulthood, was both nervous and smitten with the handsome young Emperor. She babbled on and on, her words tumbling over one another.
As her chatter grew, Xian’s patience frayed, and the sharp pain in his head worsened.
He decided it was time to leave and rest. Maintaining a blank expression, he responded politely and prepared to withdraw.
“Please enjoy yourself.”
At least, that was his intention.
Overwhelmed by her one-sided crush, the girl unconsciously grabbed hold of the Emperor’s robe and shouted.
“Your Majesty, please don’t go!”
Her high soprano voice pierced his mind, and a searing pain exploded in his head.
“I still have so much to say to you!”
Overwhelmed by the sudden agony, Xian lost control. He roughly pried the girl’s hand from his robe and pushed her away.
Unfortunately, at that very moment, a servant was passing by with a tray of champagne glasses.
Crash—!
Clatter, shatter!
“Ahhhh!”
“Clarence!”
The girl was drenched in champagne and slipped on the broken glass. In an instant, blood spattered across the floor, filling the air with the metallic scent of iron.
“Aaaaah!”
Her dress torn, her limbs bleeding, the girl screamed before fainting. Her father, trembling in shock, lifted her in his arms.
“How could you try to harm this young girl?! All she did was hold onto you!”
The familiar smell of blood made Xian’s breathing rough, his veins tightening.
Amid the chaos in his mind, he glanced down at the girl bleeding at his feet, a strange sensation washing over him.
It was confusion—disorientation. But Xian, who had been trained to suppress emotions he didn’t understand, said nothing.
Everyone in the ballroom witnessed the scene.
“I heard he spent his childhood on the battlefield!”
“Be careful—if you cross him, you might lose your life. He doesn’t discriminate, not even against women!”
The Emperor, face grim, left the ballroom without a word. Fearful whispers spread like wildfire.
The wailing father, the unconscious girl, the bloody mess left behind, and the stoic Emperor walking away without an apology.
“He’s a tyrant, a monster!”
“How horrifying. He’s definitely bloodthirsty!”
The aftermath was a deluge of rumors.
People said he had lived on the battlefield for so long that he couldn’t survive without spilling blood. That his constant blank expression was because he was suppressing a murderous urge.
Though speculative, the image of a young girl lying in a pool of blood in a dazzling ballroom was too shocking. The rumors spread far and wide.
As Xian remained silent, the whispers solidified into “truth.”
Before long, a title clung to the young Emperor’s name.
“The Tyrant.”
