TFM 245

Finally the jewelry box

He carefully wrapped his hands around the hand resting on his forehead and brought it to his lips.

The moment he did, her form scattered like grains of sand.

Watching the sight with a hollow expression, Varkas let out a suppressed groan.

Clutching the bedsheet hard enough to tear it, his body trembling violently, he soon sprang up as if in a fit.

He rushed out of the room on unsteady legs and ran down the stairs in a single breath. Beyond the wide-open door, wind and rain came raging in.

Varkas began running aimlessly along the muddy path.

The rain, sharp as blades, struck his cheeks without pause.

It felt as though the entire world had turned into a weapon, cutting him apart.

How long did he run and run through the pain that burned through every strand of nerve in his body?

In the dim darkness, he saw the figure of a small girl.

He stared blankly at the young girl standing in the mud, drenched in rain, then staggered toward her and reached out.

But this time too, she became cold rainwater and slipped silently between his fingers.

Varkas stood frozen, unable to move.

Then he resumed his perilous steps once more.

He no longer knew what he was wandering in search of.

Cold rainwater and hot tears mingled together, endlessly wetting his cheeks. His body, broken beyond repair, continued to pour out pain whose source he could no longer identify, and in his ears echoed screams that should not have been there.

He could not acknowledge that this was grief.

He did not want to acknowledge it.

Because if he accepted that fact, then the truth that he had lost her would become reality.

Varkas.

At that moment, a wet voice rang beside his ear.

Varkas stopped abruptly and looked around the dark forest where the wind was raging. Within the howling gusts, a desolate voice seeped through.

I hope you hurt, Varkas. Very, very much.

His eyes twisted.

The truth was, she had been hurting him for a very long time already. Her words, her gaze, all of it had been a pain that pierced him to the bone.

And this was the result of struggling while pretending not to know that truth.

He slowly closed his eyes, then opened them again.

When he raised his head, he saw the window of the room where she had stayed. Like a hallucination, the shadow of her looking down at him from there brushed across his vision.

Varkas.

Drawn by the auditory hallucination calling his name, he stepped toward the rear door of the main castle.

He climbed the dark stairs and reached the door of her bedroom.

There, the silence, still as a tomb, tightened around the pain in his chest.

For a long while, he stood rooted in place, trying to steady his rough breathing. Then he staggered toward the windowsill where she had often stayed.

Beyond the rain-spattered glass, he could see the main gate of Laedgo Castle and the hill stretching beyond it.

I am growing used to watching you leave.

Varkas gripped the window frame with brutal force.

Between his crushed fingernails, the skin split and blood seeped out. But the pain in his chest was so severe that every sensation carried through his body felt only like faint static.

With his forehead pressed to the glass, he stared blankly at the hill where the downpour was falling. Then, little by little, he crumpled to the floor.

His eyelids, heavy as lead, sank shut, unable to withstand the exhaustion of his body any longer.

He no longer wanted to care about anything.

Nothing anymore...

───※ ·❆· ※───

He did not know how long he had been unconscious.

When he lifted eyelids that felt stiff as untanned leather, the worried face of the high priest and Daren’s rigid expression entered his vision one after another.

The high priest spoke first.

“Your Grace, if you continue neglecting your body like this, you will reach a state even my recovery magic can no longer remedy.”

When Varkas gave no answer, the priest added in a subdued tone,

“The Grand Duke is still young. It may be difficult to endure right now, but… no wound can overcome the passage of time.”

At that moment, a rough laugh slipped from Varkas’s mouth.

He thought he could understand now why she had found comfort in the words that there were wounds which would not disappear, no matter how many long years passed.

The priest looked down at him with troubled eyes as he shook and chuckled like a madman. At last, with a heavy sigh, the priest left the room.

Only then did Daren, who had been standing quietly, open his mouth.

“They say Her Grace the Grand Duchess did everything she could to protect this territory until the very end.”

Varkas’s eerie laughter stopped dead.

Avoiding his gaze, the man continued heavily.

“...I do not believe Her Grace would wish for Your Grace to collapse like this.”

This was the same man who had remained negative toward her all along. Perhaps because his conscience stung him now for bringing her up as if offering comfort, the line of Daren’s jaw was pulled taut.

Varkas looked up at him with eyes gone cold, then moved his dry lips.

“I’m tired. Leave.”

His voice was so calm it sounded strange even to his own ears.

After hesitating for a moment, the man eventually left the room.

Varkas dismissed the servants loitering around him as well, then raised himself from the bed.

Perhaps the servants had removed the empty chests while he was unconscious, for the room had been arranged much more neatly.

He swept his hollow gaze around the room, then noticed a chest placed before the desk and staggered toward it.

It seemed they had gathered inside the remaining belongings of hers that had not yet been sorted.

He stared down at it blankly, then stopped when he noticed the pile of parchment stacked on one side of the desk.

For a moment, hope rose in him that the servants might have found something else she had left behind and set it there.

But the pages he snatched up contained line after line of reports on the various political upheavals that had occurred across the continent while he had been out of his mind.

He scanned the documents expressionlessly.

There was news that the engagement between the young lady of House Bleston and the crown prince had been successfully concluded, news that Marquis Oristein had successfully blocked the political offensive of the radicals centered around the empress, and reports that the postwar negotiations had entered their final stage.

What all those words pointed to was clear.

The empire’s political situation was finally finding stability.

Unless some other lord raised a rebellion again, Roem would remain firm for a long time.

The world without you will move toward dazzling prosperity, as though nothing ever happened.

Varkas stared down at the pages with distant eyes, then, unable to restrain the thing surging up inside him, tore the parchment to shreds.

Just then, through the fluttering fragments of documents, he saw the jewelry box sitting alone on one side of the desk.

He stared for a long while at the object she must have kept for years. Then he remembered the key he had found in the annex and staggered over to search the wall rack, where he found his coat, still not fully dry.

When he searched the pocket, the small key emerged.

He inserted it into the lock of the jewelry box, and with a click, the lid lifted slightly.

He pushed the latch up and carefully opened the box.

Inside, he found it filled with thoroughly dried flower petals.

Varkas blinked blankly, then picked up one thin petal that had faded white.

The delicate petal crumbled apart, scattering like ash.

He followed it with his eyes, then lowered his gaze back to the box.

With trembling hands, he carefully parted the flower petals. Inside, he found a neatly folded handkerchief, a small brooch, and a little stone that looked like an uncut gem.

The memory that flashed up in his mind stole his breath.

Hardly daring to believe it, he searched the bottom of the small box. And there, among the dried flower petals, he found a tiny button no larger than his thumbnail and froze.

He picked it up with bloodless fingers and held it up to the wavering firelight. The insignia of the Roem Knights emerged faintly upon it.

His trembling hand brushed over his mouth.

A memory he had buried for so long unfolded vividly before his eyes.

Thalia at fifteen, hurling laughable threats that she would not let him off if he damaged even a single strand of her hair.

And himself, enduring her childish fuss as he tried to untangle her hair from the button...

“Ah…”

A rough groan, like the growl of a beast, tore through his dry throat.