Chapter 21
“Your Majesty, you’re with me now.”
Lari was everything to Thierry.
A girl who had given him so many firsts when he had nothing, it was only natural that she would become the center of his world.
Thierry had been separated from his mother when he was a newborn, but he remembered those last moments clearly.
Thierry’s birth mother was an elf.
A lost Emperor and a curious elf met by chance, fell in love, and had a baby. But reality was no fairy tale.
The elves were a closed race, and to them, intermarriage with other races was a sin they could never accept. They decided to erase this tragedy by imprisoning their fallen comrade, and to get rid of the disgraced half-elf, they pressured Thierry’s birth mother under the guise of persuasion.
“This necklace will be your prayer. Never take it away from you.”
These were her last words.
Thierry didn’t understand, but he obeyed her last words. When an elf handed him over to his father, and when his father locked him in the cottage, he kept the necklace hidden.
Since then, many humans have passed through Thierry, but none of them have stayed long. Bad things kept happening to the people who worked at the lodge, either injuring them or disappearing, and soon no one wanted to come.
Thierry had become a dry lake, waiting to be filled, and when he met Lari, he wanted to fill it with water, and eventually with the ocean.
“Did… hit you?”
“No, I was just rushing by myself and fell!”
Disheveled hair and red, swollen cheeks. Every time she went to the main palace to get supplies, Lari returned in such a sorry state.
“You’re lying.”
“I’m fine, really! I’m just a little dirty, but I’ll be fine once I’ve washed up, and voila-! I’ve got something for you today.”
“That’s not okay, it hurts.”
“Oh my… It’s just you, after all. You’re worried about me, aren’t you? Well, if you’d just ho-, it wouldn’t hurt at all… Can’t you? Hehe.”
Thierry’s heart swelled as he looked at the girl’s giggling face. But when he saw her hurting herself over and over again, it felt like his ballooned chest was being popped by the needle of greed.
“If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be hurting so much.”
Lari’s smile faded at the sound of the tasteless, feminine voice.
“You’re… I don’t mind being alone.”
Thierry spun around, shaking off Lari’s grip on his hand. But her hand came right back out, forcing his blue eyes to meet hers again.
“I can’t.”
The touch had dulled the needle. It was no use poking her with a needle that was now completely blunt.
“Don’t you remember, I told you I only have you now, and now, without you, I might cry every day by myself… because I miss you so much.”
If Lari hadn’t disappeared one night, young Thierry might have been a smooth sailing sea.
Thierry’s world fell apart in an instant.
Where did she go? Did she get tired of me and move away?
Just as Thierry’s eyes were dying in the creeping darkness, a silver-haired head appeared and spoke unintelligible words.
“I sense a twisted magical energy. What the hell are you doing, kid, you can’t do anything…”
“What are you?”
“Hu-!”
“What did you do to Lari?”
“… Wait, Kwak. What is this power? You… Oh, okay, I’ll tell you. What do you think I did to her that caused her to appear in front of you?”
“Give it to me. Give me Lari back.”
“Ha, you’re not listening. Wake up, it was an elf, and an elf has been watching you all this time!”
Thierry’s rationality was beginning to be overwhelmed by the boiling power.
“Find your girl, soul or no soul!”
“… Soul?”
“Huh… Phew, I thought my guts were going to turn inside out, look. I smell death, and something’s wrong, this must have done something to the soul.”
“Shut up. Lari’s alive.”
“Don’t act like you don’t know! You can feel it, these deformed auras.”
I lost Lari.
In the end, my greed had put her in danger. Staring blankly down at Lari’s empty bed, Thierry let his helpless tears fall to the floor.
When he awoke, he had awakened his fire powers. All of his emotions had been volatilized since the day she disappeared, and his dull, blood-red eyes had lost their light.
All that remained was his obsession with Lari. It became madness, and nothing was too much for his goal.
Fortunately, the silver-haired man introduced himself as a half-elf like Thierry, and said he was also looking for the elf. “My goal is to find the elf and drag him out of the mud,” he said, and offered Thierry his hand.
“No one can find where the elves live, and how am I supposed to find what I haven’t found in nearly a hundred years? This is not a job for an individual, so I need the power and strength of your blood.”
Thierry did not reject the hand. Force was not the answer, even if he had awakened his powers, so he decided to take the top job, with the silver-haired man as his aide.
The elves had disappeared from the village so long ago that even after he became Emperor, it was difficult to trace their whereabouts. Wherever there was even the slightest trace of contact with them, he raided for evidence, but to no avail.
Day after day, there was nothing but ruins around.
“They say there’s a special spell that separates the soul from the body, and I wonder if that explains the aura I felt that day.”
As time passed, the questions deepened.
Why did they kill her, why were they toying with her soul, why was it her?
Whenever anything untoward mentioned her, Thierry never swallowed his anger. He ran his Empire to make sure there was no room for doubt, and that day, like any other, he scoured the lands that seemed to have some connection to the elves.
“It can’t be, she’s a good girl.”
And then he met her.
Alicia Ashtad, with platinum hair sprinkled with stars and a sparkling smile.
Normally, he would have dismissed her on sight. But that day was different. Different enough to change all plans.
The only thing she had in common with Lari were her oceanic emerald eyes, and I kept leaving room for more.
But the choice kept coming back to haunt Thierry. He’d given her a momentary reprieve in a fit of nostalgia, but Alicia was quickly taking him down.
Suspicions piled up.
No mention of melanin pigment, Rudd following no one, Alicia seeking her out first, Alicia playing with Rudd in a weird slingshot fashion.
And she casually throws out the name of a wolf no one knows.
It was ridiculous. I could see Lari in Alicia.
I wondered if my crazy longing had finally gotten the best of me.
“Report anything unusual, even the smallest thing.”
“She’s afraid of stairs. She has to hold on to something when she goes down.”
In a way, it was a trait that anyone could have, but I couldn’t let it go unnoticed.
It had been years since I’d searched for the elven stronghold, holding out hope that Lari wasn’t dead. If something had been done to her soul, I assumed they would be forcibly holding her, but it felt like someone was testing her.
“You said you felt a faint aura of twisted magic, but it wasn’t as strong as it was the first day I met you, so it was vague, but just to be sure, I checked and it turns out that was the day Princess Alicia opened her eyes again.”
Bakken’s meaningful words.
“She can’t eat anything that smells like cucumber, actually.”
Just a normal eating behavior, but he’s reading meaning into the details.
“Get Chef Sue.”
It was all doubt, but he needed to be sure. If she wasn’t who he thought she was, he would crumble and never get back up.
But the look of surprise on Alicia’s face when she saw Chef Sue shook the very core of denial that enveloped Thierry.
It faded quickly, but what had just flashed through her eyes was the look of recognition.
Thierry felt an intense sensation of anticipation sweep through his body, and greed began to fill him as he felt the mismatched pieces fall into place.
“The hunt is in a week. Princess will participate.”
One last time.
If he can pick up Lari’s tracks this time, he will never let her go.
***
“Damn it!”
Thierry was growing increasingly impatient in case something went wrong with Alicia.
He just wanted to get her into the Maze Forest so he could watch from a distance.
If Lari was right, she couldn’t be in danger in the maze, and he’d be watching her anyway, so he figured there would be no problem.
But it wasn’t.
My heart sank at the sight of her back, clinging desperately to her injured horse, and my breath caught in my throat as she disappeared into the Maze Forest and I could no longer see her.
This wasn’t right. It wasn’t right. It was his own misjudgment, his own arrogance.
“Alicia!”
Thierry dismounted and looked around. The horse’s trail led deep into the maze forest, but even that trail ended in the horse’s carcass.
