"WHAT?!"
The word bounced off the glass towers across the street and came back a second later, thinner and a little more hysterical. A few startled birds rose from the rooftops and scattered into the night. On the terrace, Bell sat very still with her hands pressed against her cheeks, as if she were afraid her face might fall off.
Max waved a hand in the air. He was calm. He was too calm, in the way of a man who had told this story in his own head thousands of times and had finally learned to say it without flinching.
"Relax. It wasn't as bad as it sounds," he said. "Well, it was. But the pyramid came later. First, Xerxian still refused to surrender. He even thought of a sneak attack on my legion. He sent a whole army out in the dark to hit us from behind."
"And?"
"And it failed. Completely. They never even reached our camp." Max shrugged. "So I added their corpses to the war banners."
Bell lowered her hands slowly. She stared at him for a very long moment. Then, like a person who has decided to ignore the largest thing in the room and focus on a smaller one, she asked, "Where the fuck did you get so much wood?"
"What?"
"For the banners! You had two hundred men, Max. You had a whole army's worth of corpses. You can't just hang them on a rope! You'd need poles, frames, scaffolds. Where did all that wood come from?"
Max blinked. Of all the questions he had expected, that had not been one of them. Then he started to laugh, a short, surprised bark, and he rubbed the back of his neck.
"Solania's camps had plenty of wood. They had lumber stacked everywhere, for their siege towers and their cooking fires. And Duke Claudius specialized in assembly magic. He could take a pile of planks and put it together into anything in a few minutes. Tents, bridges, wagons. Banner poles. All I had to do was point."
"Assembly magic," Bell repeated. "Like flat-pack furniture."
"What?"
"Nothing. It's just a very strange kind of magic."
"Strange, but useful," Max said, grinning. "That's why he was my most trusted man. He was the best I ever had, until his damn descendants left the nation, migrated to Amaria, and abandoned their roots. But I only learned that much later, of course. When I returned to that world as Sylan."
Bell nodded slowly, still trying to picture an army of corpses on neatly assembled poles. It was a horrible image. But it was also, in its own way, very efficient, and some small, cold part of her mind could not help but respect it.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her chin on them. Her face had gone quiet. Her next question came out in a flat, even tone, with no more feeling in it than if she were reading the temperature off a thermometer.
"What about the children and the commoners? Did you kill them, too? Did you cut off their heads?"
Max turned to her sharply.
"I know that might sound offensive," Bell said, before he could speak. "But I'm only asking out of curiosity. Genuinely. I'm not trying to judge you. Honestly, I couldn't care less about them. They're complete strangers to me."
She meant it. That was the strange part. It was not an act. As she said the words, Bell felt nothing at all, no pity and no horror and no disgust. Those people had lived in a world she had never seen, in a nation she had never walked through, and in her mind they were still little more than characters in a visual novel. She still could not truly accept that she had once lived there herself. If anything, she was holding on to that doubt like a railing.
She had never been a woman who wasted her compassion on strangers. After so many years of watching the people closest to her give her none, she had stopped giving it away to people who were further out.
Max studied her face. He did not seem shocked. If anything, a faint, tired smile crossed his lips, because he had met this Bell before. It was the same cool, calculating Laurentina who used to ask him, over a cup of tea, how many people he had killed that week, as casually as she might ask about the weather.
"No," he said. "I didn't do that to them."
"Oh."
"I told you I was going to punish them a hundred times worse for what they did to us. And that's true. But I wanted it to be fair. So I gave my men a clear order. If any commoner or child did not fight back, they were to be ignored. No one was to touch them. Walk past, and keep walking. We only targeted the people who fought us."
He raised a finger.
"The nobles. And the army of Solania. Those were the only ones. The commoners and the children stayed out of it. Most of them didn't want to side with the emperor anyway, or they didn't understand what was happening. They just hid in their houses, and we let them hide."
"That's more merciful than I expected," Bell said.
"I'm not a monster, Bell."
"You built a pyramid out of heads."
"I'm a selective monster."
Bell snorted. It was a small, involuntary sound, and she turned her face away to hide it.
Max chuckled and went on. "I destroyed their nation, though. I destroyed their capital. Completely. The damage was so bad that it took two hundred years for it to be restored."
"Two hundred years," Bell murmured. She tilted her head. Her mind had already jumped ahead, the way it always did. "Then there's a big chance they came back for revenge, isn't there? If you destroyed their whole nation, there must have been survivors who wanted to fight back."
"Oh, they did."
"I thought so."
"But not many. Only a small group, and the man who led it was a bastard child of Xerxian." Max shook his head. "Isn't that ironic? The man who took the Solanian throne by force was an illegitimate child who usurped his own brother. And the son who raised a rebellion to reclaim it was an illegitimate child too. It was like watching the same joke tell itself twice. Fuck, I still want to laugh about it."
He did laugh, a short, dry sound, and then his expression turned colder.
"Eventually I killed him as well. But I let his children live. After that, Solania never declared war on Ravenia again, not until the timeline of the game. That's when the Aristocratic Faction won the civil war and took control of the empire. Naturally, they declared war on Ravenia once they had power. And naturally, they failed."
"In all your regressions?"
"In every single one." Max leaned back on his hands. "They were like cannon fodder, Bell. Puppets. They only thought they were running the show. Behind them, pulling every string, were the Black Robes. The men who call themselves the Hexagram."
Bell's head snapped up.
"Wait," she said. "Are those the people who killed the Pope? The ones who used his corpse to make that monster? The Pope of Qlippha?"
She still could not bring herself to call the Pope her grandfather. The word got stuck somewhere behind her teeth, as though her mind had put up a wall around it. Even now, thinking about it made her chest tighten.
Max nodded gravely. "Those are the ones. Though the game didn't reveal much about the Hexagram unless you met certain requirements. If you did, and you dug deep enough, you uncovered what they were doing in secret. Creating homunculi. Creating hybrids in their laboratories. And you learned that Emhyria turned into the Final Boss because the Hexagram deliberately triggered her trauma and let her run wild."
Bell's mouth fell open.
"And if you stopped them early enough," Max went on, "the fight with Emhyria became much easier. In fact, there was a high chance that you could save her. You had to spare her instead of using your execution move on her. Three times in a row."
"Three times," Bell said softly.
"Three times."
Bell sat in silence for a while. The wind lifted a strand of her blonde hair and laid it across her mouth. She did not brush it away.
"Well," she said at last, "at least the Hexagram is part of the game's plot. They exist, and they're written in. But I'm not going to lie to you, Max. When I heard that name, I wanted to kill them."
Her voice was quiet, and it was shaking with something very cold. Her fingers were curled tightly over her knees, and her knuckles had gone white. It was strange. She had never even heard of them an hour ago. But the hatred rose up in her chest so quickly and so completely that it felt like an old friend returning.
"Don't worry," Max said. His voice was equally quiet. "I still have a massive grudge against them, too. Even after all these lives."
For a moment, the two of them sat side by side in the golden light, united in a silent, shared hatred of men they could not even see.
Then Max sighed, and the tension eased.
"Anyway," he said. "That was the fate of Xerxian, and the fate of Solania, two hundred years before the game."
"After that, I ruled Ravenia for eleven years," Max said. "I became emperor at twenty-one. I died at thirty-two."
"Thirty-two," Bell said. She frowned, doing the math. "That's your age now."
"Funny, isn't it?" Max said, with a crooked smile. "Anyway, I died without a direct heir. In the end, I chose my sister's eldest son to inherit the throne. He was wise, at least. As wise as his mother."
"Wait." Bell sat up straighter. "You didn't have an heir? Why not, Max? I know it's a stupid question, but why?"
She knew the answer already. She could feel it, somewhere under the layers of her own thoughts. If she had been in his position, ruling a young nation at the edge of a long war, she would have done the same thing. She would have chosen the people over a marriage. She would have chosen a country over a crib.
But she wanted to hear him say it.
Max rubbed his chin. His gaze slid toward the moon, and it softened in a way that had nothing to do with the war.
"Well, the thing is... I had already met Emhyria in my first life. Back when I was still a child. We met in the woods."
"In the woods?"
"Yeah. I was hiding from my tutors, and I walked right into a thicket." He chuckled. "And there she was. About my age. A little girl with scratched knees and dirt on her face. And fuck, she was like an aggressive, cornered kitten. She hissed at me. She actually hissed."
Bell stared at him.
She had never seen him smile like that before. He was talking about a girl who had been dead for ages, and there was a gentleness in his face that she had only seen when he looked at her. A tiny, sharp pinch twisted in her chest, and she pushed it down.
"Wait," she said. "So your attachment to Emhyria came from meeting her in your first life?"
"Yes. But it wasn't romantic," Max said quickly. "Not then. I always put my nation before my own feelings. We were best friends, Bell. That was all. She was half High Elf and half Dark Elf. Which meant she was going to live for a very long time."
His smile faded.
"And I knew that. I knew I wouldn't live past forty. I was sickly my whole life. I'd made a promise to her that I would reform Aen Elle, the empire of the High Elves. I wanted to change them. And I..." He closed his eyes. "I couldn't give her what she wanted. She wanted to live a long life alongside me, and I couldn't grant that wish. I kept my promise about Aen Elle, but I didn't keep the one that mattered more."
"Max..."
"I was a fool," Max said quietly. "I made a promise I couldn't keep, and I didn't even live past forty."
He opened his eyes and looked at the sky.
"No wonder she tried to kill me the first time we met in my second life. She realized right away that I was Aurelius all along. Not that I didn't already know that was coming..."
He trailed off into a mutter, and then stopped.
"What?" Bell asked.
"Hm?"
"You said something. About killing you."
"Ahh, nothing." Max waved his hand. "Just thinking out loud. Anyway."
Bell narrowed her eyes. She had caught every word, and she was fairly sure that he knew it. But she let it drop. She had already pushed him over enough edges tonight.
"The real reason I never married a noblewoman, and the real reason I never wanted an heir," Max said, "was my own stubbornness. I believed that if I formed an attachment to anyone, I would start wanting to live. I'd want to live longer, and I'd want it so badly that I might do something vile just to cure myself. Something selfish. I didn't want to become that kind of man. I didn't want to be that selfish toward my own people."
He opened his hands.
"So I chose duty. I chose fear, if I'm honest. I was afraid of attachment, so I chose my role as ruler instead. That's why I never had an heir."
Bell looked at him. She said nothing for a few heartbeats.
Then, in a very dry voice, she said, "Duty over your role as ruler. Wow. What a great ruler you are, Max."
Max burst out laughing. It was the first real laugh he had managed in a long time, and he threw back his head and let it roll out over the rooftops. "Yeah," he said, wiping his eye. "I was a great ruler. Fuck. Haha."
She smiled, a small, tired, genuine smile, and the weight in the air seemed to lighten for a moment.
But her curiosity was not finished with him yet.
"Then how did you find your sister?" she asked. "Did you really go looking for her?"
Max's laughter died away.
He shook his head. "No. She was the one who came to me."
"She came back?"
"She read it in a newspaper. About our parents. About their deaths." His voice went flat. "But the newspaper was already four years old. Her husband had hidden it from her. That foolish liar. He knew she would leave him if she found out, so he kept the news from her, year after year after year. Four years, Bell. And when she finally learned the truth, she came back to Ravenia. She found me at our parents' graves."
Max's eyes had gone distant. His voice dropped to something lower and heavier.
"And when I saw her, all I felt was anger. I walked up to her, and I slapped her. Across the face."
Bell's mouth opened.
"Twice," Max said. "One on each cheek."
"Two times?! On both sides?!"
Max nodded slowly.
The cemetery lay on a hill above the capital, and the wind there was always cold.
Two tall marble tombs stood side by side under a gray sky. One was carved with a black sun, and the other with a crimson moon. Fresh white flowers lay at the base of each one. They were replaced every morning by the Emperor himself, with his own hands, before dawn.
He was standing in front of the crimson moon when he heard the footsteps.
He did not turn at once. He knew them. He would have known them anywhere, after all these years, in any crowd. It was the gait he had grown up beside. Lighter than his, a little quicker, with a hitch in the left foot from a fall they had taken as children.
When he finally looked around, a woman was standing at the top of the path, with a traveling cloak hanging from her shoulders and dust on her boots. She was holding a crumpled newspaper in one trembling hand.
Her hair was dark violet, like their father's. Her eyes were crimson red, like their mother's, lastly she has a mole under both of her deep-crimson red eye.
Aurelius crossed the grass in six long strides.
-SLAP!
The sound cracked across the hilltop like a branch snapping. Renalith's head jerked to the left. Her cloak slipped. The newspaper fluttered out of her fingers and rolled away across the grass.
Before she could turn her face back, he struck her again.
-SLAP!
This time, her head swung to the right.
"How dare you," Aurelius said. His voice was low and shaking. "How dare you come back here after abandoning us for four years!"
Renalith pressed both of her hands against her red cheeks. Tears were already running between her fingers. She did not fight back, and she did not raise her voice. Her answer came out small and meek, like a child's.
"I'm sorry, Lius. I'm so sorry. But please, let me explain."
"Explain?"
The word came out of him like a laugh, and it was the ugliest laugh she had ever heard.
"Explain what to me, Renni?! You abandoned us! You vanished into thin air, and the gods only know why! Do you have any idea how much I suffered when I found Mother and Father dead? Do you know how much I suffered cleaning up your mess?! Huh?!"
"Lius..."
"If you had just told me before you left! If you had just told me why you wanted to leave the throne, why you wanted to go, I could have understood! Fuck, I would even have helped you escape! Because you're my sister! Because you are the other half of me! And yet..."
His voice cracked.
"And yet you left us, without any reason at all!"
Tears were pouring down his cheeks now. He did not wipe them away. He was crying because his parents had died, because they had sacrificed everything to protect their nation, and because his twin sister, whom he had always thought of as his other self, had abandoned them all for god-knew-what.
Renalith lifted her eyes to his face, and she saw him properly for the first time.
He had changed. His amber hair had grown long and was tied carelessly at the back of his neck. A black eyepatch covered his left eye, and the skin peeking out below it was scarred with an ugly burn mark. His face, which had once been so full of color and laughter, was gray and drawn. There were deep, dark shadows under his remaining eye, the shadows of a man who had not slept in years.
Author's Note: He got that burnt scar during his fight with Emperor Xerxia.
Her hands flew to her mouth.
She dropped to her knees in the grass, and the sobs tore out of her all at once. "Forgive me," she wept. "Forgive me, brother. I was a fool. I was such a foolish girl. I fell for a man who was a liar! A liar who hid what happened to our parents for four years, because he was afraid I would leave him and go back to our family!"
Aurelius stood over her, trembling.
"You..." he said. His teeth were clenched so hard that his jaw ached. "You abandoned us... for one man?! Because of one man?!"
He raised his right hand to strike her a third time. His whole arm shook with rage.
But his left hand moved first. It closed around his own wrist and held it in the air, trembling, like two halves of himself fighting each other.
Slowly, Aurelius lowered his arm.
"Leave," he said hoarsely. "Get out of my sight."
"B-brother, please. Please, let me explain..."
"LEAVE NOW!" The shout cracked across the whole hillside. "OR I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY OWN HANDS!"
The wind howled over the graves. The white flowers shivered.
Renalith did not speak again. She stayed on her knees in the grass for a long, long moment. Then she got to her feet, picked up her torn cloak, and walked away down the hill, with her shoulders shaking at every step.
The terrace was quiet.
Bell had her hand pressed against her lips. Her eyes were wet again, though she had not noticed it. She was looking at Max, who was staring at his own hand, the one that had stopped itself.
"I see now," she said quietly.
"Hm?"
"I see why you never wanted any loving attachment. Or an heir." She turned toward him. "You were afraid of becoming like her. Your sister. You were afraid that if you let yourself love someone that much, you would abandon everything for it, too."
Max did not answer for a few seconds. Then he let out a long, slow breath, and his shoulders dropped.
"Spot on," he said. "That's the whole reason. And since I had no direct descendants, I chose my sister's eldest son. He had the same appearance as her, so it felt right. He had her hair, and her eyes. A little piece of Renni, wearing the crown."
Bell nodded slowly. Something clicked in her head, and her eyes widened a little.
"That's why Emperor Auranium Van Valraven the Great has dark violet hair and crimson red eyes," she said. "He inherited it all from his great-grandmother."
Max nodded.
"The bloodline came straight down from her. All of it."
For a while neither of them said anything. The moonlight poured over the terrace, and the golden bulbs swayed gently on their wires. In the city below, the lights of the cars moved like slow rivers.
At last, Max straightened his back. He wiped his face with his sleeve and drew a deep breath, the way a swimmer does before going under.
"All right," he said. "Now that I've given you the brief summary of my life as Aurelius, it's time to tell you about my life as Sylan. Or, as he was also called, Aurelius the Second."
Bell turned to face him fully. The silver-gray of her eyes caught the moon, and for a moment she looked very small, and very brave.
She nodded.
"I'm ready, Max," she said softly. "I'm ready to listen."
She reached out and laid her hand over his, and her fingers were cold and trembling, but her grip was firm. She was not going anywhere, whatever came next.
Above them, the moon hung silent in the black sky, and the night waited for the next story.