Instead, he had written on paper treated so that the ink would only appear once the child arrived at the duke’s estate — content that could prove Avelos’s identity. And he hadn’t forgotten to send along the wooden doll that Avelos’s mother had reportedly gifted him during his time as Crown Prince.
He reasoned it would serve as the most compelling piece of evidence, since Avelos had been holding it when he was kidnapped. Of course the imperial household would run a bloodline test through magical artifacts, but he’d worried that even that test might never come to pass, so he’d prepared everything as thoroughly as he could on his end.
This is more careful than any possessor I’ve read about in Korean novels.
“…And then… the drug… gave it to him one more time…”
He seemed to scrunch his face slightly with a look of grievance before his body tilted to one side. His reflexes snapped him upright, but his eyes were already halfway shut. His words came slower and slower as they did.
In any case, Uriel felt wronged.
“It’s not fair.”
Uriel’s head tilted gently to one side. It was less the helpless slump of someone too drunk to hold himself up, and more the way an animal tilts its head when focused on its owner’s reaction. Drunk, Uriel was acting entirely as he pleased.
It was nothing like the Uriel who would freeze up in fear at the mere sight of Avelos. Avelos reached out on impulse. Uriel’s flushed cheeks were pleasantly warm and soft.
Uriel tilted his head again, leaning into the direction of Avelos’s palm. Even in a bedchamber alone with an Emperor stroking his cheek, he didn’t seem to feel the least bit of tension. Uriel neither pulled away nor showed discomfort, so Avelos pressed a little more firmly, dragging his thumb slowly across his cheek. There was an odd pull in his body, an uncomfortable restlessness.
It had always been Uriel who tensed whenever he and Avelos made contact — but now it was the other way around. Avelos exhaled a low breath at the stiffness in his neck and shoulders, knotted tight enough to ache. The breath that left his body was far too warm.
It wasn’t as though this were the first time he had touched Uriel. There had been more than a few encounters of deep contact — trailing from the nape of his neck down along the line of his chest to the flat of it and further, to the soft rise of his nipples.
Compared to those touches, the stroke of a cheek now was at the level of a child’s game. And yet his body tensed on its own. As if to prove it, his fingertips had begun to tremble, just barely. He wanted to touch more of Uriel.
No one would blame him if he did so right here and now. Moving his hand a little lower from the cheek — to the nape of his neck, flushed the same way as his cheeks, and the hollow collarbone beneath it, and lower still, to the red peak. If I take what I want, I might be able to understand the reason behind this strange impulse.
Just as Avelos moved to do so, Uriel — face still resting against his hand — murmured in a small voice.
“…I used to… think young Avel…os was… cute, you know…”
“Hah…”
The absurdity of it punched a helpless laugh out of him before he’d even thought about it. Who was calling whom cute. Avelos took his hand from Uriel’s cheek and raked it roughly through his own hair.
“What was I going to do with someone this drunk…”
“Mm…”
“Uriel, you would do well to drink in moderation.”
Avelos’s low voice came out slow, and Uriel answered with a sound somewhere between a hum and an agreement. It wasn’t entirely certain whether that sound had actually made it out of his mouth. The strength was draining from his body by degrees, his consciousness blurring at the edges. It felt as though something beneath the floor was tugging at him, pulling him down into a deep bog.
.
.
.
“—Ah.”
Uriel shot upright from where he lay and looked around. The familiar worn ceiling and walls stared back at him. The cool, dry air — so different from the Emperor’s bedchamber, which had been filled with warmth and a pleasant scent — told him he was in his own quarters, the slave’s room.
What on earth. Uriel frowned and tried to piece together the night before. But no matter how long he searched, all he could retrieve were a few pointless things he’d apparently said. Nothing at all came back with any precision.
What expression had been on Avelos’s face when he heard him? What had Avelos said in reply? What had the atmosphere been like? Not a single thing came back to him. Only a vague, unpleasant sensation, as though something were hovering just at the edge of surfacing.
The moment he recalled even a fragment of what he’d said, the first thought that struck Uriel was: I’ve lost my mind. I’m done for. He had gone ahead and said everything — all of it — from everything about Uriel himself to the fact that he’d given Avelos the memory-erasing drug.
“Ha ha… damn it.”
He was certain he’d seen it in the original novel — that those who could handle mana didn’t get drunk. So why had he ended up in such a complete state? He couldn’t understand it.
In that moment, a thought cut through his mind. Could it be that mana and magic power were different things? Either that, or it was the collar Avelos had fastened around his neck when he first became a slave — one of those two had to be the cause. Why hadn’t he thought about that sooner.
Uriel realized he had been forgetting about the mana-sealing collar this entire time. Being a magical artifact, it was absurdly light and had the pointless property of never getting wet or dirty, which was exactly why he’d stopped thinking about it.
Only now dimly making sense of why he’d gotten drunk, Uriel let out a low sigh. Small mercy — despite having confessed to Avelos that he’d given him the memory-erasing drug, nothing had happened. With the caveat of for now, of course.
Uriel looked out the window to gauge the time. The sun was well up and the light was bright. He couldn’t know the exact hour, but he felt he ought to go in for work.
He slowly checked over his own body. His clothes were still the same ones from yesterday, at least. He focused his attention, checking whether there was any unfamiliar soreness below or around his waist. Fortunately, nothing seemed to be there either.
Yuri had never once been in a relationship. His health hadn’t been good, and the environment itself had never been one that allowed for it. But he considered himself to know everything worth knowing on the subject. From what he’d come across through novels and online, the ache afterward — in the hips, below, in the lower back — was supposed to be tremendous, so if anything had happened, he would certainly have known right away.
Fortunately, it didn’t seem like Avelos was the type to do anything while someone was drunk. Uriel exhaled in belated relief and made himself a promise. He would never drink again.
The source material for this world is a suffering novel. Letting your guard down with alcohol is not something you can afford. The setting itself was a dangerous one — it didn’t have to be Avelos; anything could happen. Uriel shook his head to scatter the thought.
Having confirmed that nothing had happened, Uriel belatedly found himself curious about the reason Avelos had summoned him and given him alcohol in the first place.
Contrary to his expectations, it hadn’t seemed like the purpose had been to brand him. Then — was it really that Avelos had simply, genuinely, wanted to have a drink together? Uriel shook his head. If it were me, I don’t think I’d want to drink with someone I hated like an enemy. Not unless there was some kind of purpose behind it.
Uriel kept stringing together one theory after another, but couldn’t land on any satisfying answer.
“Starting today, your assigned area has been changed. I’m told it’s the main palace, but no one’s told me the details. Go find Palace Steward Haynes — he’ll fill you in.”
“Pardon? Just like that, all of a sudden?”
“I know, it’s a bit sudden. Normally once an area is decided it doesn’t change. And yours only changed not long ago, and now it’s changing again — this is a first for me too, so I really don’t know.”
The old servant who answered Uriel’s question kindly seemed just as much in the dark.
Assigned areas couldn’t even be requested for reassignment until at least a month had passed — and for slaves, even that was off the table. Typically, once an area was decided, it stayed that way. Occasionally, when a section ran short of hands, a servant or maid would be dispatched there on a temporary basis, but the main palace was a sought-after posting, so even that rarely happened.
It was very strange — he had just been transferred from the main palace to the stables only a few days ago, and now he was being moved again so soon. The only explanation he could think of was Avelos.
But even so, it was no less puzzling. For an entire year after Uriel became a slave, Avelos had paid him almost no attention whatsoever — and now, in the span of recent days, he had changed his assigned area twice. Why was he suddenly taking an interest in where he worked?
Uriel felt an ominous premonition he couldn’t trace the source of. The attention of a superior so far above him was not something he welcomed. Even less so, given the history between Avelos and Uriel.
With the feeling of an animal being led to the slaughterhouse, Uriel went to find Palace Steward Haynes.
“You’re here. I trust you’ve been informed that your area has changed. Starting today, you’ll be assigned to His Imperial Majesty’s reception room and private library. You won’t be working alone, so there’s no need to worry. The servants who normally handle those areas are already there — simply follow their lead.”
Palace Steward Haynes, who had brought the drinks to Avelos and Uriel the night before, received Uriel with a blank expression. Regardless of his careful use of formal speech, he had always been cold toward Uriel.
“You’ve cleaned the reception room before, so you should know it well. As for the library, there is someone else responsible for organizing it — you’ll only be doing light cleaning. Today you may simply go back for now.”
“Pardon?”
