Avelos slid his fingers free without a moment’s hesitation, as though he had never done anything of the sort, and rose from his seat. Had it not been for the wet tips of his fingers, no one would have ever thought him the same man who had just pushed his fingers into Uriel’s mouth — his expression was that calm.
And yet Avelos’s violet eyes continued to ripple, fixed unwaveringly on Uriel.
“I’ll see you tonight.”
Avelos’s voice, low and sunken, sent a chill down the spine.
With those words, he turned away without looking back. When Avelos and those who had been trailing behind him had all gone, only the stable hand, Uriel, and a single servant who had not followed Avelos remained.
The servant who had stayed behind ordered Uriel to return to the slave quarters and wait.
Following the servant’s instructions, Uriel slipped quietly into the quarters and pushed open the creaking wooden window. Whether because warm weather was on its way again, the breeze that drifted in through the open window wasn’t cold. It moved gently through Uriel’s damp clothes and hair.
The imperial palace, built so long ago, still held the remnants of magical legacy in every corner. One of those remnants was the plumbing system.
Unlike the outside world, where water was difficult to come by, the still-functioning magical artifacts meant that even Uriel, a slave, was permitted to bathe on designated days. On those days, the slaves also washed the clothes they had been provided. But today was not one of those days.
Uriel’s two spare outfits were filthy — they hadn’t been washed in some time. Compared to those, the clothes currently being worn, wet as they were, at least had no grime on them. That made them the better option.
I’ll just have to let them dry like this, Uriel thought, settling in to rest — when someone knocked at the door. Opening it revealed the same servant from earlier, face flushed and breath coming in short gasps, as though he had run the whole way.
“Hah — hah — follow me.”
Avelos had said he would call for Uriel at night, after finishing the day’s schedule — so it was strange that less than an hour seemed to have passed. Uriel wanted to ask whether Avelos had already sent for him. But the servant, as if to make clear he would not be taking questions, said only what he had come to say and turned his back.
The place the servant led Uriel to was not Avelos’s presence. It was the servants’ bathing room.
“Wash yourself thoroughly here.”
“I — “
Once again the servant was about to say his piece and leave, but Uriel stopped him. The servant’s eyebrow arched, apparently irritated at being called back by a slave.
“What do you want?”
“I’m not permitted to use this place.”
The moment the words left his mouth, Uriel regretted them. It seemed obvious the servant already knew that. And from the servant’s expression, it seemed the feeling was mutual.
“Obviously I know that. It’s an order from above, so drop whatever useless thoughts you’re having and go wash. There are clean clothes prepared for you as well, so do something about that outfit — throw it away or whatever you like.”
The servant snapped back irritably, then hurried out as if he couldn’t stand to share the space with Uriel any longer. On his way out, it sounded like he muttered something unpleasant about slaves getting above themselves — but Uriel simply pretended not to hear.
A servant would be at least a nobleman. Even under the Emperor’s orders, being made to escort a slave and bring clothes must have felt demeaning enough, and it was easy enough to understand why someone might be in a foul mood over it.
Since coming to the imperial palace, Uriel had splashed water on himself a time or two, but this was the first real bath — the kind where you actually sank into the tub. The worries that had been circling in his mind earlier — Avelos, the slave brand — grew dim and hazy in the face of a bath that felt almost too good to deserve.
And there was even soap here, probably because this was the servants’ bathing room. It was a poor thing compared to Korean soap — barely any scent, barely any lather — but having something was better than having nothing, and so Uriel scrubbed every inch of himself clean. By the time he’d finished and was wondering what to do next, the servant came back in and tossed him a cloth to dry off with and a new set of clothes.
“Get dressed quickly and go back to your room.”
Uriel gave the servant a respectful bow of his head in thanks. The servant’s eyes landed briefly on Uriel’s unclothed body before quickly looking away. He acknowledged the greeting in a perfunctory way and stepped back out.
Once the servant was gone, Uriel dried off the remaining water with the soft cloth and picked up the new clothes. A deep navy shirt and dark brown trousers — the fabric felt a bit thick for the current weather.
If I work in these, I’ll be sweating in no time. Still, new clothes, thick as they were, were far better than what he’d been wearing — worn out and a size too small.
Back in the room, Uriel passed the time resting, and the sun set before long.
“Please follow me.”
Once the sun went down and the world outside grew dark, it was not the daytime servant who came for Uriel but the Emperor’s personal attendant — the one who always came to fetch him when it was time for the slave brand.
Uriel’s body went rigid with tension. He had been all right until earlier in the day, but now that the hour Avelos had spoken of was approaching, his body remembered the pain of the brand on its own and seized up.
“Um — where are we going, if I may ask?”
“Tonight, I have been ordered to bring you to His Majesty’s bedchamber.”
Uriel asked cautiously, noting they were heading in a different direction from usual, and the attendant answered in formal, deferential speech. Direin, Avelos’s personal attendant, had always spoken to Uriel with deference. It had made Uriel uncomfortable enough to ask him to stop, but Direin had insisted that he could not speak informally to someone His Majesty the Emperor addressed formally, and had continued doing so ever since.
Not just Direin — all those who knew of the ambiguous relationship between the Emperor and Uriel used formal speech with Uriel. That did not mean they gave him any special treatment different from the other slaves, or waited on him hand and foot. They simply spoke to him the way they spoke to Avelos himself — and nothing more.
“Please go in.”
Even after more than a year as Avelos’s slave, this was Uriel’s first time at the bedchamber. When they arrived before a towering door that stretched all the way to the ceiling of the high-ceilinged corridor, the attendant gave a light knock. No answer came from Avelos inside, but a knight standing guard at the door approached and opened it. Avelos had apparently given word to let his guest in at once.
Uriel calmed the trembling of his heart as best he could and stepped inside.
From what Uriel had heard, Avelos detested having anyone enter his bedchamber. Because of that, it was said that the palace’s long-serving head steward personally cleaned the room himself.
The first time Uriel had heard that, the thought that had come to mind was: that’s probably because of Uriel. After possessing the body, in order to avoid the death route of the original story, the first thing Yuri had done was search for the original Uriel’s diary.
Though Uriel’s memories had been clearly inherited, strangely, anything pertaining to magic or Avelos simply would not come to mind. The harder Yuri tried to focus and recall them, the more a thick fog seemed to settle over his thoughts — hazy and suffocating. That was why he had looked for Uriel’s diary.
The diary tucked deep in Uriel’s desk drawer was largely torn to pieces.
[Third day of the third month, Year 1782 of the Sacred Calendar
I put him to sleep with the drug again today. He clearly has no mana, yet he seems to have been born with an unusually sharp mana sense. If I don’t give him the drug, he wakes the moment I enter the room, so I have no choice. Tonight I went into his room again…]
[First day of the fourth month, Year 1783 of the Sacred Calendar
He is growing too quickly. I think I’ll have to give him less. Even with only one meal a day, he’s growing at an alarming rate. I need to reduce the amount. At this rate, it’ll be like before…]
They were torn in this manner throughout, so they hadn’t been much practical use. Still, since the original Uriel was a supporting character in the source material and had been written over only vaguely, the diary at least gave a rough picture of certain things. For instance — how the original Uriel had drugged Avelos to sleep and then slipped secretly into his room on multiple occasions.
No matter how formidable a swordsman he was, falling into sleep would leave him far more defenseless than when he was awake.
What the original Uriel had done in Avelos’s room while he slept was unknown. Given Uriel’s personality, it was hard to imagine anything overtly forceful had taken place. But regardless — it seemed likely that those experiences were what had led Avelos to dislike anyone entering his bedchamber.
Click.
As Uriel stepped into Avelos’s bedchamber, the attendant standing outside pulled the door shut behind him. The room felt slightly too warm — a comfortable heat. It seemed to be coming from the fireplace on the wall, which crackled and glowed with a live flame.
No separate lighting had been lit. Even so, the elegantly engraved candles set about the room, the burning fireplace, and the moonlight filtering in softly through the full-length windows that opened onto the terrace together gave enough light that Uriel had no trouble making out the room around him.
He had expected Avelos to be in the bedchamber, but he was nowhere to be seen. Uriel slowly looked around the room where he stood. Compared to what he had imagined — an imperial bedchamber gilded and extravagant in every corner — it was rather spare.
There were furnishings, certainly — a bed, a sofa, a table, chairs — all of them far more refined-looking than anything Uriel the slave was given to use, or even the furniture that had filled the previous Uriel’s manor. But the sort of ostentatious decorative pieces he had expected were nowhere in sight.
Avelos wasn’t in the room — and yet, simply knowing he was standing in Avelos’s bedchamber stirred something strange in Uriel’s chest. In all the time that had passed — more than a year — Avelos had never once called him here.
