“What can you tell me about Chris?”
Mathias gasped for breath. He felt like he’d just been punched in the gut.
“I don’t know anythin’ about…about that.”
His answer came by reflex, but Henrik seemed unimpressed.
“In that case, perhaps I should just ask Felix instead.”
Mathias sucked on his teeth with annoyance. This guy was a true devil. He wouldn’t put it past him. He was clearly the type to do anything, no matter how underhanded, to achieve his aims. He was dangerous.
“Chris was his—our childhood friend…”
Mathias cast his mind back to when he first met Felix.
Mathias and Chris were both brought along to befriend the young prince, as ordered by their families. Each boy came from a respectable family and was considered suitable friend material.
Usually, friends are people you choose yourself, rather than having your parents choose for you. But politics colored every aspect of Felix’s young life. Despite his tender years, he seemed to understand that all too well.
After the onset of his panic attacks, Felix’s face had grown pale and thin.
He was like an anxious, skittish stray cat, and Mathias had no idea how to approach him. But Chris…Chris just shot Felix a carefree smile and asked, “Hey, wanna go play outside?”
Chris was that kind of guy. He didn’t care for gauging the atmosphere of a given situation, he just wanted to do what he wanted to do at the time. Felix was used to people always peering nervously at him, trying to read his feelings. Chris didn’t do that. And Felix found that immensely refreshing.
Felix was a completely normal boy when he wasn’t having one of his attacks. Perhaps normal isn’t the right word, though. He was unusually gifted but as prone to japes, tomfoolery, goofing off and causing trouble as any other boy his age. In other words, he was pretty much just a healthy kid. He and Chris soon became great friends.
Mathias, meanwhile, with his painful shyness, simply watched from the sidelines as Chris and Felix became the best of buddies. Mathias always saw himself as tertiary to the group, simply a backup for Chris.
But for whatever reason, the two of them saw Mathias as a part of their group. They seemed to understand that Mathias needed time to warm up to people, and they made allowances for his turtle-slow social pace.
It wasn’t too long until the three of them had formed an unbreakable friendship.
But their relationship was destined to be short-lived. Mathias was blocked from taking a place at the Royal Academy. Born with red eyes, he was shunted along into a future as a mage.
Everyone told him it was his duty. The more he heard that, the more resentful he became.
It felt like everyone was telling him that the only thing of worth he had was his magical powers.
In rebellion, he trained his body up and aimed to go into the army as a regular soldier, abandoning the path of a mage. He planned to excel in the combative arts, to become Felix’s right-hand man. In that way, he’d be able to prove that he had more to offer than just his innate magical power.
Chris, however, knew even better than Mathias what it meant to accept one’s lot in life. He used to scold him about it. Tell him he wasn’t living up to his potential.
“You’re just being needlessly stubborn, Mathias. You can protect Felix just as easily by becoming a mage. Why would you waste your gift this way?!”
“…”
Lost for words, cowed by Chris’s attack, Mathias could say nothing in his own defense. Felix burst out laughing, however.
“It’s Mathias’s life. Let him live it how he sees fit.”
But Chris was inflamed and wouldn’t back down.
“So who’s going to protect you then, Felix? All right then. In that case, I’ll become a mage myself!”
“Don’t be a fool. You haven’t any magical power.”
“I’ll just have to go out and get some then, won’t I?!”
Both Mathias and Felix laughed dismissively at Chris’s bravado.
But maybe at that time, Chris already knew a way to become a mage. That’s what Mathias had been thinking recently.
Since they’d lost him, though, the truth was lost to darkness. No one, not even his parents, knew the details of how Chris had become a mage.
It was all Mathias’s fault. Chris becoming a mage, contracting Angel Tears, all of it. Whenever he thought of Chris, he felt guilty, like he was the lowest of the low. But Felix was suffering so much more than him. Compared to Felix, he was just breezing through life.
Whenever he watched Felix suffering through one of his attacks, Mathias always felt like he was the most cold-hearted person alive. He hated himself.
He wanted to do whatever he could to at least prevent things from getting any worse. That’s why he stuck so loyally to Felix’s side. He would protect Felix in Chris’s place. It was the only way he knew how to make it up to Chris’s memory.
“I’m telling the truth. I really don’t know much about…about what happened to Chris. Nobody knows it. He just suddenly announced one day that he planned to become a mage to protect Felix. An’ then…he did it. Became a mage, I mean. If we’d known the method he was going to use, we woulda stopped him…”
Every time he revisited that day in his mind, the pain came back to him as if it was still fresh. He felt like his psyche had been forever damaged by what had happened.
As Mathias trailed off, Henrik seemed to silently back down. It was as if he was realizing for the first time that Mathias had experienced trauma, just as Felix had.
“I understand.”
“Sorry.”
“We’ll just have to think of something else.”
“…Like what?”
Mathias found himself questioning Henrik.
“You said no one knows the truth, right? But that’s impossible. Someone has to know. Someone must have done it, right? Made Chris a mage? And we know the army has the means to do that to people. So there’s a high probability there’s some link there, between Chris and someone in the army.”
Henrik had a good point there.
“Someone must have brought Chris into the army.”
Mathias looked at Henrik, his eyes growing wide, the possibilities opening up before him. Henrik smiled.
“I understand why it might be hard for you to see that situation clearly.”
“So, you’re saying it could be possible?”
“Anything’s possible.”
Henrik shot Mathias an enigmatic smile. It made him think of bright little flowers budding up from the snow. But for all Henrik’s magnetism, Mathias’s heart still felt heavy and dark with foreboding.