“Hey, look over there.”
“Over where?” Raising her head, she followed Shuuichi’s gaze toward a woman on her way back from the restroom, a very remarkable woman. “Wow. She’s so—”
“Pretty,” Shuuichi sighed, gawking at the waves of her silky black hair.
She carried herself with grace and elegance all the way to the seat behind them, but not before Shuuichi made sure he got enough of an eyeful to last the rest of the trip. The sight turned his face into melted ice cream.
The woman was about their age, not that they could know that. Nor her name—Mizunami Ritsuko.
“Wow, she sure is beautiful,” said the grinning pile of pudding. “Whichever guy she decides to date has gotta be the luckiest man in the world.”
Reia’s amusement had run dry. “I think I know why you never have any luck with the ladies.”
“You do?! What is it? Tell me!”
“The fact that you need me to tell you means you’re already beyond help. Get used to being single.”
“No! I refuse! Please, Reia-chan! What am I lacking? Tell me and I promise I’ll change!”
“Ask someone who cares.”
“Don’t do this to me!”
Schroden awoke with a start. He lay on the balcony, his head throbbing. Fending off the vertigo, he gradually rose to his feet, fingers pressed against his temples.
“What happened? I…”
Unfamiliar thoughts littered his mind, thoughts that blended with his own, changing him in ways he could not yet perceive.
“Sheesh, my head hurts. Did I hit it on something? I need a mirror.”
He returned to his room, picked up the flickering candle from the table, and tried to inspect himself, head pounding all the while.
When he arrived at the mirror, what greeted him in the candlelit reflection was…
“What? But that’s not—”
A flash of intense pain. Schroden doubled over as his thoughts turned violent and innumerable. Memories that were not his flooded his mind. Knowledge he had no way of knowing. Words from the lips of a woman he did not recognize, speaking of characters and “plots” and “backstories.” Certain doom.
They were his. His memories from another time. Another life. Another name. These were Hirosaki Shuuichi’s memories.
Schroden groaned. “Was that…my future?” The thoughts blurred like a fading dream. “Who was that woman? She was awfully pretty.”
Her name eluded him, but the implications did not. She had spoken of him and his fate. Numerous paths. Successes and failures. It all followed from his enrollment at Royal Academy. In one future, his plan came to fruition and he was imprisoned. In another, his love for his homeland became love for another, driving him to betray his own family and sending him to an early grave. In yet another, he enacted his plan at the cost of that love. Another early grave, this time at his own hands.
A voice. “Most of Schroden van Rordpier’s bad ends are him dying one way or another.”
“He has tons of endings. His plan working is just one of them, but he still winds up dead.”
“So yeah, there’s pretty much no way to have his plot work out and keep him alive.”
Schroden heaved. The woman’s voice echoed painfully in his skull. His heart raced. His lungs defied him. He could not accept what the woman was telling him, and yet he knew her every word to be true. How? Why? On what grounds? Schroden did not know. It was a certainty he could not describe, but a certainty all the same.
He studied his face in the mirror again. His skin was like porcelain, his hair bright blond, his features handsome. One look into his eyes and the dread threatened to surge up anew.
Schroden van Rordpier was on the road to ruin.
The little speck he’d thought was snow wasn’t snow at all. It was a vestige of Melody’s spell, Fa in Bel Sogno, carried far to the north upon the wind at impossible speeds, where it met with the reincarnation of one Hirosaki Shuuichi.
In truth, coincidences often flowed from a series of events, a logical chain whose outcome defied understanding. This, however, stretched the definition of coincidence, but without a scholar on hand, one could do little but attribute that all-encompassing conclusion to that which beggared belief: a coincidence.
Schroden’s contact with that trace of mana had given him a brief glimpse into his past life, including a short conversation concerning the plot of an otome game by the name of The Silver Saint and the Five Oaths that he’d had with a woman on a doomed flight. The vignette, however, wasn’t long enough to convince the prince that these memories were his own, that he and Shuuichi were one and the same. Dreams were fragile, and as with most dreams, a great deal of it escaped his recollection upon waking. All he knew was that the face the woman had pointed to and the face he saw in the mirror were one and the same, so the doom she spoke of could only be his.
A happy coincidence.
“I-I’m going to die. I’m going to die!” And yet, though he remained without his memories, other pieces of his previous life manifested. “Not good, not good, not good! If I go to that academy, I’m as good as dead! I’ve got to find a way out. Something. Anything.”
Schroden van Rordpier, in all aspects except memory, had become Hirosaki Shuuichi. Ah, coincidences.
Schroden-slash-Shuuichi paced in a panic. “What was I thinking, putting myself in that kind of danger? All to conquer Theolas? What for? Wait, right. To become emperor. Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Shuuichi was winning the war for dominance, and the absurdity of his past behavior appalled him.
“Maybe I can persuade Father to… Nope, that ship has sailed. It’d be like moving a mountain. What am I going to do, tell him ‘Whoops, changed my mind!’? Maybe Sharlemein? Agh, yeah right! Did you forget he wants your heart for dinner? Mother’s entirely detached from politics, so she won’t be any help either. Oh! What about Ciestine?! She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She could throw me a bone—not! She hates me too! After all the grief I gave her, there’s no way she’s coming to my rescue. Gah, what was I thinking snubbing a cute little sister like her?! Was I insane?!”
Past actions notwithstanding, he was certainly going some manner of insane now. He continued to pace, chattering and murmuring and agonizing—until he froze in place.