Chapter 3

During the periods when he was absent from this world, or when he had not yet found me, I lived like the ocean. I simply existed, as if it were the natural order of things. Letting humans satisfied with the shore drift by, and quietly crushing into oblivion those who dared covet the abyss.

Clinging only to the name he had etched into the world for me—Adrian Nykbjär—like a sacred relic.

In 1894, having headed toward the Alps without conscious thought, I abruptly turned my steps and visited the place where his second incarnation was buried.

I had thought I was merely wandering, yet perhaps I had drifted back there because I missed him so deeply.

His second incarnation, who had sought me out once more despite suffering a tragic death because of me—Michael. Having been erected on a site chosen with painstaking care over a long time, his gravestone had not crumbled with the passage of time, maintaining its noble, solitary luster.

I sat before it and spent a long time. Was it a day, or two? Perhaps it had been a week.

Fiddling with the ring crafted to hold the handful of ash his third incarnation had left behind, beneath the rain pouring over my head and the wind on the high hill that ceaselessly whipped my clothes, I quietly reflected upon him.

Should I write of my very first meeting with him first, or should I write first of our second meeting, when he defied the mortal fate of man and sought me out again?

Pondering this kept me from opening the notebook for quite some time before I finally took up my pen.

Since my thoughts have drifted to the memory of visiting his grave, I think I shall begin by recording our first reunion—one in which it took me a rather long time to recognize who he was.

Michael Heider.

It was in 1817, at the tail end of summer when the late monsoon rains raged relentlessly, that I discovered him.

At the time, I held the position of Margrave on the eastern frontier of the Austrian Empire. It was a so-called “borrowed identity,” obtained through a peculiar transaction with Count Eisenhardt, whose lineage was on the verge of extinction.

The fortress of a house that had long proclaimed itself the empire’s shield was as cold and heavy as its name. Donning that heavy mantle, my role was to hold that barren border until the ailing, dying margrave’s grandson came of age. If one were to define it, it was a sort of regency permitted only because of that specific era and station.

Belsenburg Castle was a fortress that mirrored the empire’s neurotic vigilance in its purest form.

Built atop a sheer cliff overlooking the border, the fortress was stained dark by violent dust storms and relentless rains, and the servants within moved uniformly like suits of armor draped in human skin.

From the aged butler who had served the Eisenhardt family for generations down to the young scullery maids, they held their breath and hugged the walls as they walked, careful not to disturb a single hair of their master or even step upon his shadow.

Above all else, what defined Belsenburg best was the clinking of iron and the heavy tread of military boots.

Not driven by pride in defending the empire’s forefront, but taxidermied by the laws of Eisenhardt that tolerated neither failure nor retreat—the garrisoned troops. With expressionless faces stripped of emotion, they held their posts motionless, come rain or snow.

Befitting the reputation of the “House of Iron,” ingress and egress were rigorously controlled. To such an extent that even the imperial council’s edicts required the permission of Eisenhardt to cross those ramparts.

A place where human clamor became disloyalty, and disloyalty meant death. At the time, I rather liked that dreadful silence.

Or rather, to be precise, I thought I did.

Until a tiny, fragile life drifted into that iron fortress, once again shedding light upon me.

Michael was a boy sold for a single sack of grain from a village beyond the forest, the closest settlement to the castle. A boy who had been working somewhere within the fortress before anyone even took notice.

The first time I laid eyes on him was when I caught sight of pale blond hair, as though washed of its color, beyond the window. Unaware of his very existence, I had been unable to tear my gaze away from that hair which bore such an uncanny resemblance to his.

The first time I recognized him as a living being was when I met those eyes that seemed to hold the azure sky. When I looked face-to-face upon the boy who had been nothing more nor less than a glimpse of blond hair occasionally brushing the periphery of my vision from afar.

Right around the time the sound of rain rustling through the Black Forest was growing tedious. It was an afternoon when the downpour that had resumed around midday finally dragged thunder along in its wake.

Running along the cloistered corridor with a basket clutched to his chest, likely on someone’s errand, the boy failed to dodge me as I turned the corner abruptly, crashing into me with full force and tumbling flat onto his back.

With a sharp gasp—Hrk—mud-caked potatoes scattered in every direction. At the same moment a particularly round one rolled right up to my feet and stopped, thunder crashed over the open drill grounds.

Following the potatoes rolling past the pillars onto the wet earth with my eyes, I slowly looked down at the boy.

“M-M… My… My Lord.”

The boy choked on his breath in terror, and I, in an entirely different sense, caught my breath.

The eyes looking up at me from the ground were clearer than the sky pouring down rain, more transparent than the puddles gathered across the training yard.

Stiffening, I stared not at the dirt smudged across the hem of my coat, but at the distorted reflection of myself mirrored in those longed-for blue eyes.

For the first time since losing him, it was the moment I beheld a fragment of him.

“F-Forgive me! Forgive me, My Lord! I have committed a capital offense!”

Snapping out of his stupor, he scrambled onto his knees and bowed his head at my feet without a second’s hesitation. Pressing his forehead directly against the muddy floor of the corridor, he begged for mercy.

I said nothing. Rather, I could say nothing. My entire focus was arrested by his slender white neck, so thin the bones showed through, exposed above the tattered collar of his tunic.

Because no one in the castle had ever caused such a commotion before me, it was a moment where both he and I seemed frozen, knowing not how to react.

An unreal silence drifted through the corridor for a beat.

“P-Please, have mercy….”

What brought me back to my senses was noticing how the boy’s gaunt, clenched hands trembled so pitiably with fear.

I recall catching my breath. Breath was something I had no need to draw, yet whenever an emotion I could not explain stirred within me, I habitually inhaled or exhaled on purpose. It was a habit born after losing him.

“Raise your head.”

The voice that finally slipped from my lips sounded piercingly cold even to my own ears. The boy’s thin back flinched, and soon his head, shuddering so violently that his hair shook, lifted with great difficulty.

“What is your name?”

I asked while gazing at two red marks from which I strangely could not pull my eyes away.

“M-Michael Heider, sir.”

As I heard the reply, I watched his faintly quivering lips. Michael Heider. I resolved to commit that name to memory.

Fearing that if I remained any longer I would stare at him endlessly, I turned my steps away.

Behind my turned back, the sound of several shuddering exhalations broke out. Whether asking only his name and walking away in silence had terrified him further, or whether it was mere relief—I hope it was the latter, though given the circumstances at the time, it was likely the former.

Daily life in Belsenburg was simple. At the same time, it was rigid and dense with routine. Partly due to the post-war era, and partly due to the borderland environment.

The early morning garrison inspection and border report was one of the most vital duties there. In the parade ground draped in dense fog, some two hundred soldiers stood in formation awaiting review; as the thud of my boots echoed down the stone steps, a sharp, chilly command soon rang through the forest.

Attention. Salute. Following the sound of hundreds of uniforms shifting as one came salutes angled with geometric precision.

“Last night, on the Russian Empire border zone, an armed individual of unidentified origin was captured alive. A map was discovered on his person, and he is currently detained in the dungeons.”

While I strode between the lined-up soldiers inspecting uniforms and firearm conditions, the officer following a step behind recited his report in a low voice.

“Is he Russian?”

“The man remains silent, but the pistol in his possession was manufactured in Tula.”

“What other intel have you extracted?”

“Though we have swapped out the interrogation tools several times, he refuses to open his mouth, so we have obtained nothing further as of yet.”

Smugglers, deserters, stragglers, spies, vagrants…. A post-war frontier was a place of extreme isolation, yet plagued by endless friction.

“You must have shown him mercy.”

“…My apologies. I will intensify the interrogation.”

“No, I shall handle it personally. Once inspection concludes, withdraw the guards and prepare a sack.”

Thanks to this, it was a plentiful environment for me, enabling me to sate my hunger without fail, though for ordinary humans it was likely an agonizing one.

Spotting Michael usually occurred during the afternoon duties following luncheon. A time when I generally patrolled the border zone on horseback or read in the study, though I occasionally watched drills or inspected the estate grounds.

The first time I saw him again after the incident in the corridor was through the window of my office.

From the outer storehouse to the kitchen’s back door, he was shuttling back and forth multiple times with a coarse yellow sack as large as his own body hoisted on his shoulder. With narrowed eyes, I watched him until his trips ceased.

Having made the round trip well over ten times, the boy only leaned against the wall to catch his breath after a man with a bushy beard waved his hand. The motion of his hand massaging his scrawny arm was slow and sluggish.

From that day on, I looked out the window around the same hour each day, yet weeks passed without catching sight of him again.

Did I feel disappointed back then? I cannot say for certain. I believe I felt a far greater sense of pathetic foolishness than disappointment.

Projecting him onto a young boy who could hardly be twelve or thirteen. Even if I was no human, I knew such a thing was wrong, and so I deliberately severed my interest right then and there.

Having forgotten him for a while in that manner, the time I saw him again was in the dead of winter, just ahead of the severe cold spell. A night after returning from the manor where Josef von Eisenhardt, the true master of Belsenburg, was recuperating.

“You call that life a curse, yet right now, nothing seems more enviable to me.”

Thanks to gorging myself, my physical vigor was high, yet for that very same reason, my mood was foul that night.

“…Immortal. Have you truly no intention of sharing that life with me?”

The primal, instinctive desire of a dying man persistently rang in my ears.

“You must have been lonely for a very long time. No matter how much affection or devotion you offered, in the end, everyone must have left you, and no one would have remembered you. So… what say you? If you had someone to walk that path alongside you, someone you could seek out even once every several decades to inquire after their well-being, would that not alleviate at least a fraction of that terrible solitude?”

All the way from stepping off the carriage to heading toward the study, a grotesque sensation that was neither disgust nor pity trailed behind me like a shadow.

Was the issue that I had failed to snort in immediate mockery? Was it because it was a thought I, too, had harbored once upon a time? I could not tell whether it was displeasure at someone trying to peer into my abyss, or discomfort at having the very sore spot of my displeasure struck.

Just as I reached the study and went to turn the doorknob, an alien sound brushed past my ear.

Pausing by instinct, I turned my head. Having dismissed the servant following with a lamp to walk alone, the corridor was deafeningly silent. No presence could be felt. Since everyone was asleep save for the guards manning the posts, such stillness was only natural.

Yet the moment I focused my hearing, the sound filtered through once more.

The sound of someone forcibly choking down breath bursting from wet lungs. A far duller whimper trailing after it, as if muffled in the folds of clothing.

It was someone sobbing.

Releasing the doorknob, I slowly turned my steps. Concealing my presence, I moved toward the direction from which the sound had come.

The sound was leaking from beneath a secluded staircase at the western end of the lower floor, inside a small storeroom filled with God-knew-what. Concealing myself within the shadows, I quietly watched the storeroom door.

The door, which failed to close properly as if its hinges were broken, stood ajar by a hairline gap; that narrow slit, barely wide enough for a single finger, was more than enough space for my vision to peer through.

Having crept inside without so much as a single candle, the small, gaunt figure hugging his knees with his face buried was steeped in darkness far too dense for human eyes to discern.

“Mother….”

Of all people, it was that boy again.

The child with eyes so uncanny in their resemblance to the only human I had ever loved in all my life—the one bearing a name meaning an angel from the wasteland.

I stood still for a long while, simply watching him.

The child wept for a long time. His small, hunched shoulders heaved weakly. At the end of his faint, desperate sobs, the faint calls of “Mother… Father…” followed now and then.

I do not know how long I stood there. Only after moonlight spilled into the pitch-black corridor, when I could no longer remain hidden in the shadows, did I lift my feet and approach the storeroom.

When I pushed the crookedly shut door, the broken hinge groaned in a faint creak—Creeeak. The boy, weeping with his face buried in his knees, startled violently as though struck by lightning and jerked his head up.

His sky-blue eyes, already blurred and distorted with tears, collapsed into total panic the moment they reflected my figure.

The boy looked up at me with an ashen face as though he had forgotten how to draw breath, then turned a sickening leaden hue in an instant and bowed his head frantically.

“M-M—hic—My Lord… sniff…”

Unable to articulate a proper word in the choking aftermath of his weeping, he obstinately tried to beg for forgiveness. Looking down at the curled, hunched back of the child who pressed his head so close he might have kissed my boots, I narrowed my eyes.

I wanted to ask him. Do you not know you were sold? Do you not know that those parents you miss so desperately traded you away for a single sack of grain?

Yet knowing that my pure curiosity was often perceived by humans as the most venomous mockery, I did not actually ask.

“It is past midnight.”

I spoke indifferently, pretending not to see the boy’s despair.

“Were you not taught that servants are forbidden from wandering the castle grounds after ten o’clock?”

Michael, the boy who had been he, could not even muster an answer, occupied solely with gulping down his hiccuping sobs. Pressing his forehead tight against the ice-cold stone floor, his frail back heaving with difficulty as he struggled to swallow his terror.

“F-Forgive… me. Forgive….”

“Return to your room.”

At that brief dismissal, the boy flinched and lifted his head. From eyes so severely rubbed and swollen red that they were painful to behold, tears were still dripping down even then.

“I shall send the butler in the morning, so submit to your punishment.”

With a faint gasp, his gaze plummeted to the floor. Without looking at him any longer, I turned away.

Intentionally letting my footsteps echo to avoid listening to the sounds of the boy left behind in that pitch-black storeroom, on the way back to the study, Josef’s words rang in my ears once more.

A life where everyone leaves me, and no one remembers me. Throughout that entire night, I turned those words over in my mind.

When Josef sought me out to propose the bargain, he was already aware of my true existence. It was because of the recent war.

Because I, who had never involved myself in the conflicts of human society, had been unable to master the turbulent emotions swirling within me and had intervened in that war.

On that battlefield, he had seen me. He remembered my face, witnessed my death, and even saw me defy it.

That was why the bargain was offered. Having smelled the scent of blood his entire life as the empire’s spear and shield, he was a man who, in some respects, transcended humanity; he saw through my true nature in a single glance.

“Immortal. What is required to sustain that life of yours?”

That was the first question he posed upon finding me.

“I shall provide it in your stead, so could you hold the fortress in my place?”

And that was the proposal thrown at me before I could even utter an answer.

He was in a precarious predicament. His son, his sole heir, had died; he himself was sick; and his only remaining blood kin, his grandson, was still distantly young and helpless.

In the wake of the war, though the outer shell projected peace and solidarity, within lurked thorns sharper than those before the fighting began. No matter how deeply rooted the family had been like an ancient stake driven into the earth, Belsenburg occupied too sensitive a vantage point for the empire to entrust to a sick, frail lord.

Hence, his choosing me was both a personal request and a decision resting upon the imperial interests at large.

“How do you trust me? Have you never considered that the moment you place me in the regent’s seat, I might slaughter you and your grandson and claim everything for myself?”

“You are no human. You are far removed from the petty greed humans harbor. Even if you seized the house, what would you do with it in a body that neither ages nor dies? You would inevitably have to leave someday, to hide. To you, power is a mere fleeting second. A nuisance, perhaps, but never sweet.”

In that moment, I thought to myself: He is indeed the head of the House of Iron.

“Therefore, I believed that if I understood you properly and proposed a bargain that was not a loss, you might accept based on reason, however reluctant you might feel. Am I mistaken?”

I accepted the bargain not because the proposal pleased me, but because the man himself intrigued me. Though his physical flesh was diseased and dying, the gleam in his eyes and his commanding aura were razor-sharp, as though freshly bloomed. I found a flicker of amusement in that stark contradiction.

Thus did Adrian von Eisenhardt come to occupy a corner of my existence. And the choice made out of that minor curiosity brought me face-to-face with him once more.

“Among the scullery hands, there should be a young boy named Michael Heider. Summon that child and assign him to clean the study and my office.”

On the morning I conveyed those instructions to the butler, I regretted my choice throughout the entire border briefing. If I keep him close, I will only look for him in the boy all the more; I might end up harboring feelings for a human once again…

Even after thinking that, unable to suppress a thought that suddenly struck me during morning duties, I summoned the butler again.

“From this day forth, forbid all servants from entering while I dine.”

“Do you mean we should set out the entire meal beforehand, My Lord?”

“Yes.”

“Pardon the impertinence, but do you intend to give the food to that child?”

“It was unnecessary sustenance to begin with. It is better than throwing it out.”

“…I see. Understood.”

Since his true master knew what I was, the butler assigned to attend me naturally had to know as well; it was a moment where not having to act out the guise of an Eisenhardt before the white-haired butler proved quite convenient.

Whether he thought the “punishment” I mentioned meant being cast out or executed, when Michael was summoned, his face was pale with terror and his hands trembled violently; yet upon being ordered to clean, he reportedly wore an utterly bewildered expression.

“Me? You mean me, sir?”—he reportedly asked some five or six times, and only after being reprimanded did he hastily grab a rag. That was a story I heard much later from Hans the butler.

After forcibly altering his sphere of activity, the first time I confronted him was during luncheon that very same day.

In front of the dining hall, Michael, who had already been informed by Hans and came downstairs, was waiting with both hands tightly clasped together.

As I stepped before the door, he opened it with movements clumsy in the extreme. Without even needing to look down, I could plainly picture his trembling hands and his terrified, stiffened face, so I deliberately tossed my words out as I brushed past him:

“Follow me.”

Having stood outside as though intending only to open and shut the door, he took a quick, sharp breath and scurried immediately after me.

“Sit.”

“…Pardon?”

“I told you to sit.”

Before a dining table where all the dishes—normally served course by course in rhythm with a diner’s pace—were set out all at once, he hesitated for a long while, caught in total indecision. Sweating cold and walking on eggshells, only when I knitted my brows after growing impatient did he gingerly move toward a chair in an empty corner where no food sat.

“What do you think you are doing?”

“Pardon?”

“Surely you are not asking me to carry the dishes over to you as well.”

“N-No, sir, th-that is not….”

“Come over here and sit. Sit, and eat. If you trouble me even once more, I shall truly throw you out of the castle, so bear that in mind.”

Wearing a look that suggested he could not fathom the situation in the slightest, Michael hastily sat where I gestured.

Even then, unable to eat right away, he hunched his shoulders and warily gauged my mood; only after I pushed aside the cutlery before me and flipped open a book did he finally pick up his spoon and begin scooping up the soup.

I pretended to have no interest at all, silently reading my book. In truth, my entire attention was caught by the rumblings as soup filled his long-starved stomach, and the ceaseless clinking of silverware shattering the silence through the clumsy fumbling of a lowborn child who knew nothing of etiquette.

Having emptied the bowl of soup, Michael set down his spoon and repeatedly stole glances at me. Yet when I, quietly turning pages while waiting, pushed the platter of meat toward him as if yielding to his silence, he eagerly took up his fork with audible gulps, as if he had been yearning for it in his heart.

“How old are you this year?”

I spoke up when he had cleaned off even the meat and was scraping at the remaining potatoes.

“F-Fourteen, sir.”

As luck would have it, having just swallowed a piece of potato, he spoke too hastily, coughed—cough, cough—and answered with a slightly flushed face.

“Too small for fourteen. A build like that is of no use anywhere in this castle. Even the youngest maid here possesses more strength than you.”

Turning a page, I spoke casually as if letting the words drift past:

“From now on, report downstairs promptly at luncheon and dinner.”

From start to finish, it was nothing more than an excuse, but Michael seemed to interpret it precisely as intended: There is no use for someone as weak as you in this castle, so build up your strength.

He grew crestfallen for a moment, then, belatedly realizing it meant he would receive proper meals every single day, his eyes lit up in an instant. Twitching his lips that glistened with meat grease, he answered three times in a slightly excited voice.

In truth, children were more difficult for me to deal with than old men who knew too much. Yet managing a starving boy was simple. After all, if you feed them anything at all, their vigilance diminishes.

Indeed, after that single meal, Michael no longer trembled unnecessarily in my presence.

The boy, once worn down and parched by loneliness and starvation, regained his vigor day by day.

His gaunt nape, where vertebrae had protruded starkly whenever he merely lowered his head, filled out smoothly, and his chapped cheeks and hands regained their natural softness. His brittle hair acquired a gradual sheen, and his lips, once chapped and jagged like the cliffside at the edge of the Black Forest, healed without a blemish.

That winter, having summoned an ignorant boy to my side merely chasing the shadow of him, even amidst a tempest of self-reproach, I could not stop watching over and caring for the boy.

The year 1818 was a quiet one. A time when neither Belsenburg nor the empire witnessed any major event worthy of particular record.

Though I could not say it was the sole reason, during that period when I was growing weary of the static surroundings, what occupied my mind the most was Michael’s “growth.”

The blue-eyed boy who used to carry a three-step stool about like an extension of his own body, wiping bookshelves on tiptoe even while standing on its top tier, no longer lifted his heels by the time the year turned and summer came round again, and by autumn he had stepped down a rung.

The growth phase of humans possessed a grotesque quality. Sprouting a finger’s joint taller overnight, or waking up to a voice so transformed it sounded like an entirely different person.

For someone like me, who had grown slowly across immense spans of time before freezing in form the instant I reached the pinnacle of physical vigor, the year Michael turned fifteen could be summed up as a year of discovering something altered each morning and being taken aback.

“You have returned. The roads were slick with rain, so I worried; I am glad you returned safely.”

“Why are you still here at this hour?”

“The candlesticks have all been snuffed since the hour is late, so I thought you might require light on your way back to your chamber…”

I had bestowed nothing upon him beyond meals, nor displayed any outward sign of interest. Yet from that single shred of care alone, he grew more radiant day by day, going beyond merely opening his heart to attempting to offer it up to me entirely.

“My lord, pardon me for an instant.”

He would drop to one knee before me as I returned from an inspection, scrubbing away the mud splattered upon my boots;

“Watching you handle a horse, my lord, is something I can scarcely believe no matter how often I see it.”

He would come out to greet me on my return from border patrol, his eyes sparkling, unable to pull his gaze away until the instant I dismounted;

“Um… It weighs on my mind that I am always the only one eating like this… When do you take your meals, my lord?”

Or he would cast glances of presumptuous concern toward me as I turned the pages of a newspaper before the banquet table.

Under ordinary rules, Michael displayed conduct that should never have been tolerated in Belsenburg. From daring to meet his master’s eyes, to uttering words that could be construed as evaluations, to prying into private affairs.

In truth, the soldiers who accompanied me on patrol would watch my countenance with stunned expressions whenever Michael approached to speak without reservation upon my return. Had the same men accompanied me every time, they might have grown accustomed to it, but because the private soldiers rotated weekly, the same scene repeated itself whenever Michael appeared.

“Your Excellency, forgive me, but… recently, uncomfortable remarks have been circulating among the soldiers regarding that young servant’s conduct.”

“Is that something that requires my concern?”

“Ah… No. I will caution them.”

“Do the men follow you so poorly that you cannot even settle a minor stir like that? If you need my voice, I shall address them myself.”

“…No, Your Excellency. I will see it corrected.”

The aide-de-camp, unable to watch in silence any longer, had once attempted to intervene gently, but I had no intention of restraining the boy. Tedious days, the dreary Black Forest, the irritable metallic screech of maintaining firearms and blades, and the thud of combat boots echoing through the castle from dawn to dusk. Michael was the sole existence breathing vibrant color into that ashen environment.

And so, in the end, I once again began dismantling, stone by stone, the high wall I had built and guarded all by myself.

That winter, I had Michael moved to a different room. Only then had I learned that he had been using a cramped, secluded storage closet rather than a proper servant’s quarters, and that he had been sleeping curled up in a child-sized bed all this time.

Since the dimensions of the room did not match the size of the person occupying it, this was not a special favor but a matter of simple necessity; yet Michael was so overwhelmed, as though he had been awarded some grand medal, offering his gratitude again and again.

Human hearts are truly unfathomable, I had thought to myself back then, merely trying to brush aside the inward feeling of pride that arose within me.

Human children possessed a period called adolescence. Michael’s adolescence arrived when he was sixteen.

During that phase, Michael exhibited a demeanor that seemed bewildered over whether his feelings toward me were loyalty or romantic affection. The young boy whose lips had twitched into smiles and whose eyes had sparkled whenever he looked at me grew increasingly suspicious and ashamed of such conduct as he approached young manhood. At the same time, he grew acutely sensitive to the gazes and rumors around him, and he ceased coming out to meet me on my return from patrolling the borders or the forest.

The soldiers, who had barely grown used to his greetings over the course of a year, ended up walking on eggshells around me even more because of it.

“Tsk, that’s boys for you.”

“The moment hair sprouts between their legs, they think they’re fully grown. When they reeked of sour milk, they’d cling to their fathers all day long, then overnight they treat them like total strangers.”

“Since he’s a lad, if they’d rolled him across the drill grounds early on, we’d have knocked some proper discipline into him. His Excellency let him off far too easy just because he was young.”

“Quiet, you! Watch your tongues. Where do you think you are, daring to compare His Excellency to the parents of some mere servant boy?”

Knowing that while they only rolled their eyes in my presence, such banter passed freely when my back was turned—words I could hear effortlessly from my desk in the office—left me with a thoroughly unpleasant taste.

At the time, I believed this irritation arose from being judged by mortals according to mortal standards; yet looking back, what had truly displeased me was Michael’s change itself.

His sudden distance, just as the soldiers whispered—treating me like a stranger overnight and refusing to speak without explicit reason—was deeply bitter to stomach.

Yet back then, unaware that Michael was truly him, I had no justification to call him out on it. That a boy should change as he matured was natural; that I should project him onto that young boy to satisfy my own longing was anything but.

Believing that to live masquerading as a human in human society one must abide by human conventions, I suppressed the reflex of irritation that flared whenever I saw Michael keeping his distance as if shy before a stranger.

A period when he and I consciously strove not to be conscious of each other. That span was not brief. It was a time whose very memories have blurred because I spent so much energy looking away and severing my attention.

What could truly be deemed an incident erupted around the time Michael, who had never quite shed his boyish air no matter how tall he grew, began to show the unmistakable stature of a man.

“What is this commotion?”

“Ah! M-My lord. That is…”

Was it near the close of sixteen, or the onset of seventeen? There was a day when an uproar loud enough to reach my ears broke out inside the fortress where no disturbance was permitted.

By that time, I had eliminated unnecessary movement altogether by having meals served in the library rather than the dining hall and remaining inside my office, leaving me completely unaware of what unfolded outside between the morning duties, luncheon, and the afternoon patrol.

The “incident” of that day occurred at precisely that hour, when I was ignorant of anything taking place beyond the office doors.

“There was a slight friction between the servants… Forgive me. I am deeply mortified to sully your ears with such a lowly affair.”

The servant I had caught attempted to smooth it over, shifting his eyes in panic, but to me, having already opened my ears and caught the tail end of the violent clamor, it was an entirely unsatisfactory answer.

“Lead the way.”

“Pardon? Ah, Mr. Baumann is currently resolving the matter, so you need not trouble yourself…”

“I ordered you to lead the way.”

“Ah, er… Y-Yes, my lord.”

Normally, the moment I heard Hans had gone to deal with it, I would have dismissed the matter entirely. But when my hearing caught the sound brushing past the office, the name that happened to reach me was “Michael,” making it impossible to let go that day.

Whether the silence of the past few years—which had felt like enduring with an astringent fruit clutched between my teeth—had driven me on impulse, or whether the harsh sounds of violence following right behind the name “Michael” had struck a protective instinct I could barely control…

Even as the footsteps of the servant hurrying before me made my head throb, I kept my ears stubbornly attuned, directing sharp strides toward the panting gasps echoing from below.

On my way down to the basement where the servants’ quarters lay, I ran into Hans ascending the stairs.

“What brings you to make your way down to such a lowly place, my lord?”

“I came knowing what occurred, so give your report.”

He cast a brief glare at the servant before me as though flogging him with his eyes, then straightened his posture, lowered his gaze, and spoke:

“It appears there was a brawl between the young servants. I have already reprimanded and punished them, so I believe you need not trouble yourself to walk all this way…”

Hans silently expressed his objection by standing directly in the center of the stairway as if blocking the path. I looked down at him quietly, drawing a slow breath. Through my wide-open hearing, the ragged gasps of Michael struggling to swallow his fury were still plainly audible.

“If they stirred up a disturbance loud enough to reach my ears, it is from me that they must receive their punishment.”

I knew it was bizarre for me to meddle in a scuffle between lower-tier servants, who were numerous enough to kick around with the slightest exaggeration. I knew better than anyone that servants without any notable rank should be handled by senior staff, or at most settled at Hans’s level.

“Bring them to my office.”

Even knowing that, I simply could not let it rest. What had enraged Michael, who had said what to him, how badly he was hurt—I had to know.

To the extent that I failed to realize I had zero reason to know any of it, at that moment, even I could not hold myself back.

Not long after I returned to the office, a knock sounded. Hans entered first with his characteristically detached expression, followed by two boys hunching their shoulders tight.

“Pay your respects with proper decorum, and recount the details of the disturbance without omitting a thing. If even a single lie is mixed in, you will face no light punishment under the laws of this castle.”

Hans, having sought my approval with a glance, delivered that low warning and left the room. Leaning back in my chair, I silently regarded the two heads bowed low, concealing bruised and split faces.

“Karl was trying to spread false rumors, so I tried to stop him, but then he uttered insulting words and I lost my temper…”

As Michael spoke first, sounding suffocated by the heavy silence, the red-haired boy standing before me for the first time inhaled a frightened gasp and frantically objected:

“That is not true, my lord! I d-did not insult him! I only asked if the floating talk was true, but Michael suddenly—”

“…He insulted not only me, but my lord as well.”

“Hey, you…! N-No, my lord! It’s not true!”

While the boy named Karl frantically waved his hands and poured out excuses, I looked at the blood-stained hem of Michael’s clothes. I saw his split lip and the purplish, swollen brow above his eye. I saw the red fingernail scratches gouged into his pale neck and his thoroughly disheveled hair.

“Never, it was never something I said, my lord. I truly only asked about what I had heard… Please believe me.”

At that point, I pulled my gaze away and examined Karl’s condition as well. His jaw was swollen red, and dried scabs of blood clung to his eyebrow. A large bruise spread from his cheekbone across his eye. Having assumed Michael had only taken blows, it turned out he had not backed down in the slightest; the other boy’s face was battered to an equal ruin.

Thanks to that, my mood, which had threatened to sour without end, improved a fraction.

“What sort of rumor did you ask about, and in what manner, that it is said I was insulted?”

It was something I knew without having to hear. The rumor that had drifted through the castle for a long time, and which I had ignored for just as long. Yet I asked with feigned ignorance to secure a solid pretext for banishing the boy from my sight.

“Th-That is… well…”

“You speak.”

Made to speak in his stead, Michael gritted his teeth until his jaw bulged, glared at Karl, and then opened his mouth with agonizing difficulty, wearing an expression torn between the humiliation of speaking the words aloud and the terror of uttering them in my presence.

“That I… warm my lord’s… bed until morning…”

Without a word, I shifted my gaze back to Karl.

The boy, who had been anxiously biting his lip in distress, dropped to his knees on the floor and knocked his head against the boards the instant our eyes met.

“I-I have committed a crime worthy of death! I truly only asked out of curiosity about something I overheard! It was never, never because I believed that rumor!”

“Sophistry. If you did not believe it, what need was there to verify it?”

“I-It was merely curiosity, my lord! Truly!”

“Which means your vulgar curiosity dared to reach beneath my bed.”

“N-No, that is…”

The pretext was firmly established. Staring indifferently into the brown eyes trembling with terror, I rang the desk bell. Hans, waiting outside the door, entered immediately.

The moment he saw Michael standing with his head bowed and Karl prostrated flat, trembling, Hans seemed to grasp the situation, stopping beside Karl.

“Remove him.”

Even at that blunt command, Hans merely gave a short answer of “Yes, my lord,” and escorted Karl out the door.

In the office where only the two of us remained, Michael could not raise his head, and I gazed only at the crown of that deeply lowered head. It was I who broke the lingering silence.

“Take this and apply it.”

Drawing an ointment from the drawer, I slid it across the desk and gestured toward the scratches on his neck. Michael flinched, his shoulders jerking as he looked up; upon seeing the ointment, his lips trembled with an indescribable expression.

“It is because it is unsightly to look upon.”

“Ah…”

“Did you win?”

“…Pardon?”

At the casual question tossed out while watching his hesitant fingertips reach out and take the medicine, Michael froze in place mid-motion. It was not for long. Carefully curling the medicine into his palm, he answered softly in a tone laced with faint pride:

“I… struck him twice more.”

My mood, which had improved slightly upon seeing Karl’s battered face, ascended almost completely to its usual level at that moment.

Around the time snow piled up once again in the Black Forest, which held an air too sharp for peace and too slack for vigilance. If my memory serves, it was likely the winter Michael was eighteen.

Michael, who had begun approaching me little by little again after the brawl, had by then reached a position where he handled not only the cleaning of the library and office, but personal errands as well.

“My lord. May I now entrust the care of the bedchamber to the boy?”

Only on the day Hans, who had been watching in silence, posed that quiet inquiry did I realize how I had come to regard him.

Only the butler and the personal valet may enter the master’s bedchamber. Therefore, those words were an inquiry as to whether Michael could be treated as a valet.

Though I had been completely oblivious, it seemed that watching him grow closer to his likeness day by day had led me to keep him close unconsciously. So that he could not leave my sight, so that he could not perform other tasks elsewhere.

Without even recognizing it, I had kept burdening him with duties, pushing him into a position where he had to remain by my side without my ever noticing.

I sank into self-loathing once more, but Michael’s reaction was entirely different.

To Hans, he had pretended to be nonchalant, claiming, “I’m only continuing what I was already doing, yet my wages are changing—it feels as though I’ve been shortchanged all this time,” but in truth he was thrilled, practicing his introduction whenever he was alone in the library, “I am the valet to Count Eisenhardt.”

Sitting in the office with my hearing tuned to him, I felt my self-contempt chipped away in large chunks whenever I heard such murmurings, only to despise myself anew for feeling that way.

Having reveled in it to his heart’s content when no one was around, Michael took care not to reveal even an ounce of his joy at becoming a valet before me. Of course, on the first day his attire changed, he did steal glances at me for quite a while, as if begging me to notice his neat new livery.

“Pardon me for a moment. …You did not ride today, so where did you get this mud on you?”

Just because he had become a valet did not mean he acted like one. Rather, as if knowing his place was now secure, he exuded a bold presence, brimming with confidence that seemed to spring from who knew where.

“The tea has gone cold. Shall I brew fresh water, or clear it away?”

In the evening, when all duties were finished and I sat quietly turning pages in the library, he would often deliberately break my concentration with such words.

Then, without lifting my eyes from the book I was reading, I would drain the cold tea and slowly trace the rim of the empty teacup with my fingertips.

It was merely a small habit slipping out—one that in some past life had meant Pour more tea—yet the first day he saw it, he froze stiff as if he had seen something forbidden, his eyes tracking those fingertips for the longest time.

“Why don’t you a-answer me?”

Then, snapping back to his senses, he would poke vigorously at the innocent poker in the fireplace, muttering in petty complaint:

“You never order me when I’m free, only when I’m busy…”

Only after similar situations repeated several times did I notice that he was reacting to my gesture. Only after discovering the tips of his ears flushed too crimson to be blamed on the heat of the hearth.

A blunt tone of voice and ears dyed red. It was a season in which that unbalanced harmony repeatedly blinded me.