“Sieg, are these all the materials we have? I can still make more. I still have magical power left!”
“Mariela, don’t overwork yourself. Between the high-grade and high-grade specialized potions that you made yesterday, we’ve gotten over two hundred, right? If something happened to you, I…”
Gloomity-gloomity-gloom. Gloom-gloom-gloom.
Even though the magical ventilation tool in the atelier was chugging on at full throttle, the mood was damper than Slaken, the mucus-spitting synthetic slime made mostly of liquid. It really did look like mushrooms were going to sprout any second now.
“Whoa! A new kind of mushroom! Free materials!” Mariela might have shouted if she was feeling herself.
But the conversation now would be much different.
“Oh, materials…,” Mariela would likely say. “If I don’t make potions, I’ll…!”
Cue more mushrooms and Sieg crying her name: “Mariela!”
Mariela and Sieg spent the night they lost Lynx huddled together, but their relationship had hardly made any progress.
Sieg had thought of Lynx as his dearest friend, and his death was certainly painful. The grief from losing him squeezed at his heart even now. When they confronted the death lizards, his desire to help Lynx hadn’t been a lie. His own weakness and cowardice still overwhelmed him, making him feel as though his knees might buckle under him.
But at the same time, he had feared Lynx would rob him of his time with Mariela, take away the place where he belonged. It didn’t matter where the relationship between the three of them ended up: he was firmly committed to serving Mariela. But if Mariela had chosen Lynx, he wasn’t confident he could have given them his blessing from the bottom of his heart. There was a piece of him, deep inside, that was relieved he wouldn’t have to part with her…even though he was aware that this was extremely cowardly and underhanded.
On the night of Lynx’s passing, Sieg didn’t allow himself to experience that jumble of pain, relief, and anguish or to wallow in his own suffering. Thinking of himself was secondary. If he didn’t put the person who Lynx lost his life for first, he couldn’t even allow himself to remain at her side.
That was why Siegmund had chosen to hold Mariela close on that night on the rooftop of Sunlight’s Canopy, pushing his crushing shame into the corners of his heart.
“Don’t leave me all alone.”
Mariela had looked as though she could vanish at any second, and Siegmund listened to her express something that could be taken as a confession of love. But she was a lone girl torn up by the grief and slowly slipping away; it wasn’t as if she had actively chosen Siegmund as the one person she wanted to be with. He knew that, yet he’d felt a fire burning in his wounds, a painful sweetness that throbbed in time with his heart.
Before he fell into slavery, he’d done his share of messing around. As a sleazebag who’d prioritized himself over anyone else, he had experience sleeping with submissive women. The dark sweetness from these memories crossed his mind. The warmth of the girl in his arms made him think: What if?
After expressing her near confession, Mariela cried and cried and cried enough for a flood. Sieg had given her water, worried she would completely dry out, but it only seemed to make her cry more. In fact, she had wept so much that he thought she must be shedding a lifetime’s worth of tears. And finally, as if all that crying had exhausted her, she fell asleep in Sieg’s arms.
And it was a sound sleep.
He could hardly believe the combination of hysterical crying, nose blowing, and deep sleeping would be the clincher.
A woman rarely rubbed her eyes after a good cry to prevent her face from becoming puffy. Even if she cured it with a low-grade potion, she only showed her tear-stained face to the one she wanted to see it so that no one else would know she cried.
However, the eyes of the girl sleeping in Sieg’s arms had swelled up, and even her nose had become a deep crimson. She looked just a smidge like a needle ape, giving him a set of indescribable feelings.
…Anyway, I should put her to bed in her room…
Although she was wrapped in a blanket, the night was chilly. He couldn’t let her catch a cold. Sieg held Mariela in his left arm and stood to leave the roof.
He happened to look up and see the moon had appeared in a gap between the clouds.
He stretched his hand toward the hazy moonlit sky.
The thin crescent moon resembled a bow, a long way from becoming full, and its light was faint and unreliable.
Sieg faced the moon with his outstretched hand, but the only thing caught in his fingers was the wind whistling through them. They couldn’t hold on to anything.
Although many days had passed since that night, Siegmund and Mariela continued to lean on each other while holding on to the grief of losing Lynx. They were far from fully understanding it or processing their complex emotions.