“He wants a word with you in private,” Zack continued.
His tone and manner were casual as he gestured to Alec. Bla wobbled at his feet.
“Hm? Oh, sure,” replied Alec. “I’ll be right over.”
He replied with an easy grace, and even smiled. And while the expression was forced, anybody watching the back-and-forth would have assumed immediately that the margrave simply wanted to praise the new dragon slayer in person.
“What do you want to do, Shiori?” Alec asked.
Though she was with Rurii and their fellow adventurers, he was nonetheless worried that a knight might get pushy with her.
“I think I’ll take a bit of a break and spend some time with Nadia and Clemens,” Shiori replied.
Violid, too, sensed something between Zack and Alec, and wagged its tail: “You’ll only draw more eyes with me around, so I’m staying put.”
Alec thus withdrew from the rowdy group with Shiori and Rurii, who parted with him to visit the medic tents while he headed towards the far side of the camp. There, he arrived at a tent kept strictly private and watched over by armed guards. Inside the tent, the ground was layered canvas flooring, save for a hole in the floor—a soundproof jail built from earth magic, which was currently being used as an interrogation room. Inside was the man who had masterminded the ice dragon’s resurrection and had attempted to kill Alec. His shoulder had been cleaned and bandaged since Linus had stopped him, and though he looked gaunt, he still had the energy to struggle and resist.
“You!” he screamed the moment he saw Alec. “You backstabbing son of a bitch!”
“Backstabber? What are you talking about?”
Alec shrugged. He showed not an iota of guilt. This infuriated the Imperial captive.
“How dare you?! In your veins runs the blood of the Empire!”
He lurched forward but was held down by the knights at his side.
“Enough. Show some manners before the king’s elder brother.”
The margrave’s voice held a quiet authority, and the Imperial—who until that moment had been struggling in vain against the knights who restrained him—froze.
“The king’s...elder brother...?” he uttered.
It was as if he needed to speak the words himself to put meaning to them. And as that meaning dawned upon him, his expression turned to one of shock.
“No, you mean to say...the one who vanished from the face of the...”
News of the third prince, and his disappearance in the midst of a power struggle for the Storydian throne, had naturally been so shocking it had even crossed the borders into neighboring states. This was no surprise, however—illegitimate or not, it was still a member of the Storydian royal family disappearing into thin air.
“I see that even an ignorant noble like yourself kept up-to-date with scandals from across the border.”
Alec looked down at the man with a sarcastic grin. The Imperial’s glare bored holes into Alec’s skull, and in that moment he put it all together—the disappearance of the king’s elder brother, and then that same brother pretending to be the younger half brother of Elector Ulanov...
“The...royal family...was behind it all...?” he spat.
“Indeed it was. All three of the royal families among the nations that surround the Empire were involved, all to remove a poison that ate away at our very continent. Elector Ulanov was a great help.”
Ulanov had begun by throwing his own personal resources at solving the problem. With hoe in hand, he had attempted to save his people. In the end, however, they had been left with nothing but the last of their seed potatoes, and with all other options exhausted, Ulanov had risked his life to crawl across the border and beg Kristoffer for help.
When Ulanov had appeared before the margrave, he was gaunt, his rough hands and sunburned skin a far cry from a typical noble’s appearance. The hardships the man had suffered were written into his very body. At the same time, this was the chance that the three nations surrounding the Empire had been waiting for—a chance to read the nation its last rites.
The uprising within the Empire had not started naturally—it had been an elaborately planned scheme, put into place by the Empire’s neighbors. When the Imperial realized that it had practically amounted to an invasion, he was outraged.
“You can’t possibly think you’ll get away with this! None among the international community will let this stand!”
“Your nation was utterly merciless in its attempts to invade the countries around it. Would you wake up and listen to yourself? The Empire was originally nothing more than a far northern city-state, one that intimidated, stole, crushed, and absorbed its neighbors to rule over the continent. And you—a noble who built your wealth on the backs of countless deaths—you would dare talk of what the international community will allow? Don’t make me laugh. We have done nothing more than return things to their original state.”
Alec’s voice was cold, but his heart ached with each word he spoke. A bloodless coup would have been ideal, but things had not gone that way. The uprising had its victims. And while the vast majority had been among the military under direct rule of the emperor and the military men of Imperial noble descent, not all were in cahoots with the Empire. The rebel army had also suffered casualties. And even if those losses were far lower than the typical uprising of such scale, lives had nonetheless been lost, and Alec felt the weight of them. It was, after all, the duty of the royal family to bear the strain of such losses.
“The nation of the fallen hero, Dolgast, is gone,” said Alec. “The Imperial lineage ended more than twenty years ago. You know this. The Empire is dead. It has been for decades.”
And everything you’ve done since then has been meaningless, Alec thought.
“But as members of the Imperial nobility, it is our duty to see the nation restored to glory!” shouted the man. “We must save the emperor, so that the Imperial family might live on in perpetuity, their legend spoken of into eternity!”
“You would pledge allegiance to a man like that? And then what?” asked Alec, his face taking on, for the first time, a touch of pity. “The man who impersonated your emperor indulged in pleasures that his nation paid for with blood. And when everything was crumbling around him, he scraped together what money he could and tried to flee across the border, together with the chancellor who masterminded the whole thing.”
The emperor and the chancellor had known that the Empire was on its last legs, and so they had sought to save themselves. They had thought nothing of the nation’s citizens, they had abandoned their families, and they had taken fake names as they looked to live out the rest of their days in an affluent, temperate nation.
“They were not leaders worth staking your lives on,” Alec continued. “And deep inside, you’ve always known that, haven’t you?”
The Imperial’s head sank between his shoulders.
It was true—he had always known.
No noble could have watched the lands dying before their eyes and felt nothing. And yet, they had abandoned any idea of doing the good and proper thing centuries ago, and so they were left helpless. They’d looked the other way, pushed their responsibilities on their retainers, and fled to the Imperial capital, where they could do little more than simply cling to past glory.
“Do you know why the Empire’s downfall suddenly accelerated, two centuries ago?” muttered the man, his question purely rhetorical. “The emperor at the time wanted to place himself among our hallowed ancestors by rebuilding our fallen nation. He tried to play the hero, and that meant making a dragon. Yes—I speak of the ice dragon of legend.”
Countless lives had been lost in efforts to steal an egg from a dragon’s nest, and more still in attempts to tame the dragon born of that egg. Surgery had been conducted to make the magical beast more like that of the dragon of legend, and in taming it, the emperor had striven to recreate the second coming of an almighty hero. The dragon, however, which longed for freedom, could not be reined in, and after countless more losses, the beast had to be locked away at the bottom of the Dima Frozen Lake.
“The dragon, however, was far stronger than anyone expected for a fire dragon,” continued the Imperial. “It could not be killed, and so the only option was to force the beast into eternal hibernation. Can you guess what happened next? Magic ice crystals were gathered from all across the nation and beyond, and these were used to plunge the frozen lake into even colder temperatures. It was a project of such magnitude that it literally transformed the weather, and so naturally it required an equally exorbitant amount of coin to achieve. So much money, in fact, that it sent the Empire on a downward spiral.”
The man knew this because records of it still remained in his family, written by the lord—his own ancestor—at the time the events occurred. The Imperial now laughed at the thought of it all.
“It is ridiculous, is it not? Think; all that time in the past—two hundred years ago!—our Empire was already broken beyond repair, and by its own emperor, no less.”
It was not something the Imperial ever wanted to admit. Accepting the fact was, in and of itself, near impossible. This was why the man had instead gathered together patriots in an effort to restore the former government. His refusal to accept the truth had led them all down a path of great violence.
“Many suffered, and many died, just to accompany you on your journey of ignorance. They believed you, and they followed you, and their fate was to be killed by the dragon.”
Those who had survived were now in custody. They had escaped the death penalty, but none would ever see the light of the sun again.
“Kill me. I have nothing left,” muttered the Imperial.
“What would you do, Your Highness?” asked Kristoffer.
The man had told them everything they needed to know. He, too, had seemingly accepted his fate, and confessed to it all. And so, in Kristoffer’s gaze there was a message: “You are free now to take revenge for your friend.”
“That is not my decision to make,” replied Alec. “He will see a just sentencing for his crimes, and he will meet with his deserved punishment.”
All knew the crimes the Imperial had committed. It was Alec’s wish that he be judged through official channels. Kristoffer and Zack lowered their heads.
“Understood.”
And with that, Alec left without a second glance.