That incident was something I had only ever told Papa about.

Even then, I had never told him the full truth.

I told him about Charles.

I told him that he had taken me outside the city, along with who he really was and my relation to his parents and that he had pushed me off the cliff.

I told him about waking up in the forest at the bottom, about the pain, about dragging myself through the woods until I found the road again, and about eventually being found by the merchant who brought me back to the capital.

But I never told him about the wolves.

I never told him about the pack that had cornered me on the road, or about the first wolf I had killed with that broken branch, or about the darkness that had erupted from the ground and turned two of them into those black creatures with glowing purple runes carved into their bodies.

I never told him about the way those things had slaughtered the rest of the pack and then simply obeyed me when I told them to go away.

I never told him any of it.

And after that day, the whole incident simply... disappeared.

No one in the manor ever spoke to me about Charles.

Papa never brought it up again after hearing my story, and I never asked him what he had done with the information or whether he had investigated anything about the boy or his family.

It was as if that entire day had been swallowed by silence and buried beneath the weight of everything else in my life.

Even stranger was the darkness itself.

I never saw it again.

Not once.

Years passed, and no matter how angry I became, no matter how hurt or lonely or unstable I felt, that black void from the road never returned.

I began to wonder if maybe I had imagined it in my delirium.

If perhaps the pain and blood loss had made me hallucinate the whole thing.

But there was one thing that always stopped me from fully convincing myself of that.

I still felt it.

That same sensation.

That same strange, dark pulse that had flowed into me the moment I killed the wolf.

I felt it every single time I killed something.

I felt it when I killed those two B-rank mages beside Adrian.

I felt it during my trip into the Magneto Kingdom whenever someone unfortunate enough crossed my path.

I even used to feel it during my walks through the capital at night, back when I would deliberately wander alone through the filthiest parts of the city and bait drunken thugs and scum into trying something with me just so I could vent my frustration by tearing them apart.

That had always been one of the easiest ways to calm myself.

I would let them approach, with then thinking they had found some vulnerable noble girl wandering where she shouldn’t be, and then I would kill them one by one and feel that strange sensation settle into me afterward like some invisible reward.

Though... I had stopped doing that for a while now.

Because Leon wouldn’t like it.

I paused.

Leon...?

The name drifted through my thoughts so suddenly that for a second everything else stopped.

Leon.

Who was that again?

The moment the question formed, something in my chest twisted.

Then the world lurched.

My eyes snapped open, and suddenly I wasn’t in the old forest anymore.

I wasn’t on that blood-soaked road.

I wasn’t even in my room in the royal capital.

I was somewhere else entirely.

I sat there for a second in confusion, looking around at unfamiliar walls and shelves and the soft light pouring into a room that felt warm and peaceful in a way the forest never had.

Then a voice spoke from in front of me.

"Do you want to play catch?"

I looked up.

There, standing only a short distance away, was a little boy around my own age.

He had brown hair and golden eyes, and in his hands he held a ball raised slightly above his head as though he had just been about to toss it to me.

He was small.

Tiny.

Just like me.

For one brief moment I simply stared at him, unable to understand why he felt so familiar, why just looking at him made my chest tighten so painfully.

Then all at once the memories came rushing back.

Leo.

It was Leo.

The person who was...

Mine.

The very one I had wished for that night in the forest when I had stood beneath the stars and begged for someone, anyone, to one day belong to me and stay by my side forever.

The moment I remembered, I moved before I could think.

I threw myself forward so fast that I crashed straight into him, and the two of us tumbled to the floor in a heap with the ball bouncing away somewhere across the room.

"What the hell?!" he yelped in shock.

He landed beneath me and stared up with wide golden eyes, clearly having no idea what was happening, while I clung to him so tightly it probably hurt.

I couldn’t stop myself.

The second I touched him, all the grief and fear and relief that had been building up inside me came crashing out at once.

Tears burst from my eyes.

My whole body shook.

And before I knew it I had buried my face into his tiny chest and started crying into him as if he were the only safe thing in the world.

"Leo..." I sobbed.

"Leo... Leo... Leo..."

I just kept saying his name over and over like if I stopped he might disappear.

The little idiot beneath me looked completely stunned.

He awkwardly tried to lift his head enough to look down at me, then hesitated as if he wasn’t sure whether he was supposed to push me off or ask for help.

"Uh..." he said uncertainly.

"Are you alright?"

I sniffled hard and looked up at him with tears running down my face.

His expression was so confused it almost would have been funny if I hadn’t felt like my heart was being ripped open. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

"Tell me you’ll always stay by my side,"

I said immediately, clutching the front of his shirt tighter.

He blinked.

"What?"

"Tell me you’ll always stay with me," I repeated desperately.

"Tell me we’ll always be together. Tell me you’ll never leave me no matter what happens. Tell me you’ll always come back to me even if we get separated. Tell me you won’t ever disappear and make me wait all alone. Tell me you’ll stay with me forever and ever."

He just stared at me.

I could practically see the panic building in his tiny little face as he tried to understand what sort of insane child, which he had just met for the first time, would tackle him and immediately start demanding lifelong vows.

But I wasn’t finished.

I grabbed at him harder, my tears soaking through the front of his shirt as I kept talking in a rush.

"And promise you won’t look at other girls. Promise you won’t let anyone take you away from me. Promise you’ll only smile like this for me. Promise you’ll let me keep you. Promise you’ll belong to me forever. Promise you’ll always choose me over everyone else. Promise you’ll never think about running away and leaving me behind."

His mouth opened slightly.

He looked so deeply, hopelessly confused that if I hadn’t been in the middle of a breakdown I might have laughed.

Instead I just cried harder and shoved my face back into his chest.

"Please..." I whispered.

"Please, Leo..."

For a moment he didn’t do anything.

I could feel how stiff he had gone beneath me, probably because he had no idea how to react to a crying girl who had pinned him to the floor and was talking like a lunatic.

Then, very hesitantly, I felt a small hand touch the top of my head.

I looked up again.

Leo was patting me.

Very awkwardly.

His little hand moved over my hair in slow, clumsy motions while he looked down at me with a mix of concern and utter bewilderment.

"I don’t know what’s happening,"

He admitted carefully.

"but I hope everything’s alright."

That only made me cry more.

I pressed my face back into his chest and kept repeating his name between little broken sobs while his hand continued to pat my head.

"Leo..."

"Leo..."

"I love you..."

The moment those words left my mouth, I felt him flinch beneath me.

His whole tiny body tensed, and I could practically imagine the horrified confusion racing through his head at hearing a girl his age sob into his chest and confess her love out of nowhere.

But even then he didn’t push me away.

He just went very, very still.

I kept crying into him anyway.

I cried until my chest hurt.

I cried until my breathing turned shaky and uneven.

I cried while clutching him like a lifeline and whispering his name and telling him I loved him and begging him not to leave me even though he clearly had no idea who I was or why I was acting like this.

Eventually, the world shifted again.

It happened so suddenly that at first I thought I had blinked.

But when I opened my eyes, Leo was gone.

The room was gone too.

I was somewhere else now.

This room, at least, was familiar.

The walls.

The furniture.

The heavy curtains.

The quiet elegance of the place.

It was the NightBane manor in the royal capital.

My room.

No, not my room.

A guest room, or one of the recovery rooms.

Something like that.

I lifted my hands in front of me and stared at them.

They were grown again.

No longer small and childish, but my own proper hands, pale and elegant and very much adult.

My breathing caught for a second as I realized what that meant.

I was awake.

The dream was over.

No.

Not just a dream.

A memory.

Or several memories stitched together and forced to the surface all at once.

My hand rose to my face, and the moment my fingertips brushed my skin I realized my cheeks were wet.

Tears.

There were tears all over my face.

I had been crying in my sleep so much that even now my skin still felt damp from it.

Slowly, I pushed myself upright into a sitting position.

My head still felt heavy and a little strange, as if part of me hadn’t fully returned from whatever that dream had dragged me through, and for a moment I just sat there breathing while the last of the tears clung to my lashes.

Then I turned my head.

Papa was sitting in a chair beside the wall.

He was asleep, leaning back against it with his arms crossed and his expression far more tired than I was used to seeing on him.

Even like this, he still looked imposing.

Still looked like the Duke of NightBane.

But there was something strangely human about the sight of him dozing in a chair near my bed, as if he had refused to leave the room and had simply worn himself out waiting for me to wake.

I stared at him quietly, my hand still resting against my wet cheek, while the last pieces of that dream settled heavily in my chest.

I stared at Papa for a few quiet seconds before finally speaking.

My voice came out small and rough from crying.

"...Papa?"

The word had barely left my mouth before his eyes opened.

For a brief moment he looked disoriented, as though he had only been resting lightly and had snapped awake the instant he heard my voice, but the confusion vanished the second he turned fully toward me and saw that I was sitting up.

"Lillith."

He was out of the chair almost immediately.

The tiredness was still there in his face, but it was pushed aside by something softer, something that only ever appeared when he looked at me and forgot that he was the Duke of NightBane and not simply my father.

Then his expression changed again when he saw my face properly.

I must have looked awful.

My cheeks were still damp with tears, my lashes heavy with them, and even now I could feel more threatening to spill if I wasn’t careful.

Papa’s gaze softened in a way that made something ache in my chest.

He sat down at the edge of the bed and lifted one hand to my face, brushing his thumb carefully along my cheek as if he were afraid that if he touched me too suddenly I might shatter.

"My poor girl," he murmured.

"You were crying in your sleep."

I didn’t answer right away.

I just leaned slightly into the warmth of his hand, closing my eyes for a second as he gently wiped away the tears still clinging to my face.

He let out a quiet sigh and then, very carefully, smoothed a few strands of hair away from my forehead.

"Do you know," he said softly, "that every time I look into your eyes, I think of your mother?"

I opened my eyes again and looked at him.

There was no teasing in his expression, no sternness, no trace of the cold, unshakable duke that most people knew.

There was only a tired man looking at his daughter with a kind of love so deep that it made him gentler than anything else in the world.

"Your eyes always reminded me of her," he continued.

"The same colour. The same sharpness when you are angry. The same softness when you are hurting, even if you try your best to hide it."

His thumb brushed under my eye again.

"She would have cherished you more than anyone, Lillith."

My throat tightened painfully.

I looked away from him for a moment, because hearing him speak about Mother always did something strange to me.

It made me feel comforted and guilty at the same time, as if I were being offered warmth from someone I had never even gotten the chance to know.

Papa noticed the shift in my expression immediately.

He always did.

So instead of pressing further, he simply rested his hand lightly against the side of my face and smiled in that small, sad way he sometimes did whenever Mother was mentioned.

"You frightened me, you know," he said after a moment.

"Not because I thought I couldn’t stop you. You are still much too young to defeat me no matter how dramatic you become."

I gave him a weak glare from beneath my lashes.

He huffed a quiet laugh and continued.

"But because you looked at me like you truly believed I was trying to take something irreplaceable from you."

I swallowed and lowered my gaze to the blanket gathered over my lap.

For a few seconds I said nothing.

Then, in a voice far quieter than before, I admitted, "I did believe that."

Papa didn’t interrupt.

He just waited.

"When Leon isn’t with me..." I said slowly, while my fingers curled into the blanket, "it feels like anything could happen. It feels like the world could just decide to take him away if I look elsewhere for even a second. I know you think I worry too much, but every time he leaves my side I keep thinking of all the ways he could get hurt, all the ways he could disappear, all the stupid things he could throw himself into because he decided something was ’interesting’ enough to risk his life for."

A faint, helpless frustration crept into my voice by the end.

Papa gave me a long look and then he sighed and moving his hand from my cheek to the top of my head, stroking my hair once.

"Lillith," he said patiently, "you do worry about that boy too much."

I immediately frowned.

"No I don’t."

"Yes, you do."

"He has no mana an—"

"And despite that, he is still one of the strongest people I have ever met."

I clicked my tongue in annoyance and looked away.

Papa, of course, didn’t let that pass.

He folded his arms and spoke in the calm tone he always used when he knew I wasn’t going to like what he had to say.

"You keep treating his lack of mana as though it makes him helpless," he said.

"It doesn’t. He is strong in a way you are not used to measuring. You think strength begins and ends with the ability to break a mountain or freeze a battlefield. Leon has neither of those things, yet that boy has still managed to make dukes, merchants, military officers and even the crown start to pay attention to him before he has even reached adulthood."

"He is clever enough to build what others cannot imagine, stubborn enough to keep walking where most men would turn back, and bold enough to gamble on things that would terrify people with far more power than him. That sort of person is not weak simply because he lacks mana."

"I don’t care," I said immediately.

The words came out so quickly that Papa paused.

I turned back to him and met his gaze directly.

"I don’t care how clever he is. I don’t care how many people he impresses. I don’t care if everyone else in the world thinks he’s strong. If he isn’t by my side, then he isn’t safe. That’s all there is to it."

For a second Papa simply stared at me.

Then he sighed the way only a father burdened with an unreasonable daughter could sigh.

"I see the fever has not left your head after all."

"It hasn’t."

That actually made him laugh, very quietly, and for a moment the room felt lighter.

But it didn’t last long, because the next thing I asked was the only thing I had truly wanted to know since waking up.

"Papa..."

This time my voice came out much smaller.

I pulled the blanket tighter around myself without meaning to and looked at him through the last remnants of my tears.

"Please. I want to see Leon."

The words sounded pathetic even to me, but I couldn’t stop them.

"I’m worried about him. I know you keep saying he’ll be fine, but I want to see him with my own eyes. I want to know where he is and what he’s doing and whether he’s eating properly and whether he’s thrown himself into something idiotic while I was asleep."

Papa pinched the bridge of his nose.

The expression on his face was one of long-suffering resignation.

Then he said, "For the moment, you do not need to panic quite that much."

I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously.

He ignored that and continued.

"It has been decided that one of the territories that the kingdom’s main offensive will set foot from is the Aldric territory. Troops, supplies and command structures will be moving into the region. In other words, the border around Leon is about to become far less isolated than it was before."

I looked toward the window, my thoughts immediately turning in that direction.

The Aldric territory.

So the war was going to move closer to him, not further away.

But if the kingdom’s attention was focused there, then at the very least there would be more eyes, more soldiers and more resources in the area.

It wasn’t enough.

It would never be enough.

But it was something.

"That will do for now," I muttered after a moment.

Then I frowned and looked back at Papa.

"But one of the biggest dangers to Leon isn’t the war."

Papa raised a brow.

"What is it, then?"

"Himself."

He blinked once.

I sat up a little straighter beneath the blankets and gave him a completely serious look.

"Leon has ambitions that are genuinely deranged. He looks at impossible things and instead of deciding they’re impossible, he decides they would be interesting to build, conquer, improve or dig up. Every time he leaves my sight he ends up chasing some dangerous new idea like a lunatic. It isn’t enemies that worry me half as much as Leon deciding to go bother them personally because he wants something."

Papa listened in silence while I spoke.

That only encouraged me to continue.

"You don’t understand how bad he is. He does not know how to leave things alone. If there is a dangerous mine, he’ll go into it. If there is some bizarre magical beast or unknown resource, he’ll immediately start planning how to get his hands on it. He sees disaster and starts thinking about how he can use them."

I crossed my arms.

"He is a menace."

Papa stared at me for a moment.

Then, to my irritation, the corners of his mouth twitched upward.

"That sounds exactly like him," he admitted.

I glared.

"I’m serious."

"So am I."

He leaned back slightly, his expression turning thoughtful.

"No matter how absurd that boy’s ambitions seem, he has an irritating habit of making them work. Every time I hear about one of his plans, I think it sounds ridiculous. Then, somehow, I hear a few months later that he has done it anyway."

He shook his head once, though there was unmistakable admiration in his voice now.

"Everything about Leon Aldric sounds strange at first. Then he goes and proves that everyone else was simply too small-minded to keep up with him."

I didn’t like how correct that sounded.

So instead of answering, I pulled the blanket higher around myself until only my eyes were peeking out over the top.

Papa looked at me in complete silence for a few seconds before letting out a quiet, amused breath through his nose.

It only made me grumpier.

"I’ll stay," I muttered from beneath the blanket.

He waited.

I glared at him over the fabric.

"I said I’ll stay until the next academy break. Begrudgingly."

Papa gave a slow nod as though he were accepting the surrender of a hostile nation.

"How generous of you."

"Don’t be smug."

"I wouldn’t dream of it."

I narrowed my eyes further.

"However," I continued coldly, "if anything happens to Leon while I’m here, I am holding you personally accountable. Completely. Entirely. Without exception."

Papa didn’t even flinch.

"Of course you are."

"And I mean anything," I pressed.

"If he loses another limb, gets stabbed, gets caught in an explosion, gets dragged into some war nonsense, gets buried under one of his own projects, or decides to fight something he absolutely should not be fighting, then I am blaming you."

Papa actually looked as though he was trying not to laugh at that point.

He hid it fairly well, but not well enough.

"You are asking me to monitor Leon, the border, war, and apparently his own self-destructive curiosity all at once," he said.

"Yes."

"That seems unreasonable."

"I don’t care."

At that, he finally gave up and laughed softly under his breath.

Then he reached over and tapped my forehead with two fingers.

"Very well," he said.

"I will do my best to ensure that your troublesome future husband does not get himself killed."

I relaxed only slightly at that.

Not because I fully trusted the promise, but because it was the most I was going to get from him.

Papa stood from the bedside a moment later and adjusted the chair he had been sitting in, though he didn’t leave yet.

Instead he looked down at me one last time, and his expression softened in that quiet, familiar way that only ever appeared when we were alone.

"Rest for now," he said.

"The world has not taken him from you yet, Lillith."

I held the blanket close and looked away toward the window again, where the evening light was beginning to thin over the capital.

Not yet.

Those two words settled uneasily in my chest, because they were comforting and threatening at the same time.

But for now... for now they were enough.

I would stay in the capital until the next break.

I would return to the academy.

I would endure the distance for a little while longer.

And when I finally saw Leon again, I would make absolutely certain he remembered that wandering off to the other side of the kingdom and nearly driving me insane with worry was not something he was allowed to do whenever he pleased.

Papa moved toward the door after that, leaving me with the fading light, the quiet room and the lingering ache of everything I had remembered.

But as I sat there in the bed with the blanket still drawn up to my nose, only one thought remained at the front of my mind.

Leon was alive.

And knowing him... he was almost certainly doing something deeply concerning already.