A year had already passed since Avelos had tracked down Yuri, who had been living quietly in hiding, and dragged him to the imperial palace as though kidnapping him.
It had been well over ten years since Avelos had been Uriel’s slave, and three years had already gone by since he became emperor — and yet he still spoke to Yuri with formal speech.
The fact that Avelos, who clearly harbored nothing good toward him, used formal speech only made Yuri more uneasy. He had asked him to speak informally instead, but Avelos continued to use formalities all the same.
When he asked why, the only answer he got was that it was simply what he was used to. What reason would an emperor have to be accustomed to formal speech? There had to be another reason — but Avelos gave no other answer on the matter.
Avelos stepped closer to Yuri and began fiddling with the hem of Yuri’s shirt, which had come untucked from his trousers.
“You’re disheveled again.”
“Ah….”
It had already been a full year since Yuri entered the imperial household as a slave assigned to the emperor’s palace. Having grown fairly accustomed to cleaning by now, he would sometimes get so absorbed in it that his shirt ended up like this.
The heat of Avelos’s fingertips slipped beneath Yuri’s clothes and grazed his back. His fingers were distinctly warm, yet strangely, goosebumps rose along Yuri’s skin.
“I-I’ll tuck it in myself.”
“Tuck it in? Tuck what in?”
Avelos smiled lightly and stroked Yuri’s back, wearing the expression of a child playing a harmless prank.
Knowing from experience that telling him to stop in moments like this was useless, Yuri decided to stay still until Avelos had his fill.
At Yuri’s face, which looked as though he had given up on any futile resistance, Avelos let out a rather satisfied laugh. Avelos liked it when Uriel behaved this compliantly.
“Yes — stay just like that, like an obedient child. It makes me want to keep you alive.”
“Ah— ngh….”
Avelos’s warm fingers, which had been moving slowly downward from his back, reached the slave brand near his waist. The raised texture of the scar had faded considerably.
Avelos, who had stopped smiling at some point, looked displeased that the mark he had left was fading — he rubbed at the area repeatedly with an unsatisfied expression. Yuri simply stood still, half leaning into his hold.
It was a familiar enough thing, since Avelos would often slip his hand under Yuri’s clothes to touch the brand he had made — and if he stayed still, Avelos would pull away on his own, so Yuri didn’t react much.
“It seems it’s time to brand you again.”
“…Yes.”
Yuri’s voice trembled finely as he answered. He was afraid of the pain of the branding — familiar, and yet not familiar at all. When Avelos had abducted Yuri to the imperial palace a year ago, the very first thing he had done was press a slave brand, heated to scorching, against Yuri’s waist with his own hands.
“Ah — aaaaaugh!”
Avelos, having branded Yuri in the very same spot as his own had been, watched Yuri groan and pant in agony and smiled with considerable satisfaction.
Despite having been branded as a slave, contrary to Yuri’s fears about what would come next, Avelos did nothing more than fasten a collar around his neck that sealed his mana — he laid no other hand on Yuri.
Until he discovered that the brand had begun to fade.
“What have you done?”
“I — I don’t know…. I didn’t do anything.”
Barely two months had passed, and the slave brand had vanished without a trace. Avelos rubbed at the now smooth skin of Yuri’s waist — not a single scar remaining — with a dissatisfied expression, then ordered an attendant to bring a branding iron.
“…Aaaaaugh!!!”
The second branding, too, was done by Avelos himself. He pressed the slave brand into the exact same spot as before, and Yuri lost consciousness before he could even see Avelos’s expression.
It continued in much the same way after that. A scab would form, a scar would settle in, and then, little by little, the brand would fade — and after another two months or so, it would be gone entirely. Looking at the spot that vanished so cleanly, as though it refused to be marked as a slave, Avelos murmured a low curse.
The cause was likely the mana that filled his body to the brim, even if he could no longer use it. After that, Avelos made a habit of branding Yuri’s body again at regular intervals.
“At this rate, it’ll be completely gone in less than twenty days.”
“……”
Yuri stood compliantly without a word.
Avelos seemed pleased with Yuri’s compliance — the hand stroking his back moved around to the front. He caressed Yuri’s flat chest softly, so unlike a woman’s. Avelos’s fingers grazed the small nub that had risen on his chest.
The moment those fingers — which felt far warmer than Yuri’s own body — touched the nub, a tingling sensation shot through him and Yuri trembled finely. At Yuri’s reaction, Avelos gave a quiet, amused laugh and rolled the nub lightly between his fingers, as if toying with him.
“Ah… ngh….”
A moan slipped from Yuri’s lips. As Yuri’s legs gave out and he began to sink slowly to the floor, Avelos hooked his forearm under Yuri’s arm and pulled him upright.
“Truly befitting of my great-grandfather’s pleasure slave. He’s only touched your nipple, and yet — reacting like this, it’s almost as if you were waiting for this, isn’t it?”
“N-no, that’s not….”
Avelos spoke in a remarkably gentle, coaxing tone — if one weren’t listening closely enough to the content, it could easily be mistaken for a compliment. Yuri started to protest, then quietly bit his lip.
He had assumed that after returning everything that the original Uriel had done to him — all the physical and psychological abuse and neglect, the same or worse — Avelos would kill him once his fury was spent. But since abducting Yuri to the imperial palace, Avelos had done nothing beyond branding him as a slave and fastening the collar back on.
He had placed Yuri under the imperial slave household, put him to work just like the other slaves, and left him entirely alone, as if he had forgotten he existed. If he hadn’t happened to discover that the first brand had disappeared a few months in, he might have simply forgotten about him altogether.
He was extraordinarily busy as emperor of the empire, and although he had been abused by the original Uriel, he had escaped that place relatively quickly and returned to the arms of his family — perhaps that was why he had not become a tyrant.
Yuri’s actions had diverged things from the original in some ways, but the broader flow seemed to be running similarly — Avelos had Franche, the main companion from the original, with him as an imperial priest. The slight difference was that he wasn’t confining and obsessively monopolizing him the way he had in the original, acting cruelly out of that need — but the overarching shape of keeping the original companion close and cherishing him was the same.
And yet Yuri couldn’t understand why he had brought him here and was behaving like this. Just as in the original, Avelos had become a Sword Master and an emperor of absolute power. With the original’s companion at his side, it was hard to understand why he had brought Yuri here and kept him close as well. If it were truly out of a desire for revenge, he could simply have killed Uriel.
In the first few times the branding was repeated, Yuri had attempted to escape. But the restraint fastened around his neck acted as though there were an invisible wall — it made it impossible for him to leave beyond the palace grounds.
He had wondered why Avelos would seal a mana he couldn’t even use — but it seemed the point was to keep him from leaving the palace.
Over the past year, Avelos had not once held Yuri. He would merely tease and toy with him in a mocking way without crossing a certain line.
The subtly precarious dynamic between them had been sustained by nothing more than this kind of playful contact from Avelos — like it was today.
“You’re having useless thoughts again.”
“…No, I’m not.”
“I’m not so sure. Uriel has a face that shows everything he’s thinking… it’s hard to believe you.”
Avelos smiled with his eyes, as though he knew everything there was to know about Uriel, and radiated the ease of a predator.
“P-please let go. If I don’t finish the cleaning on time, I’ll be scolded.”
Yuri said it with a mildly weary look on his face, like he was pleading. He pushed lightly at Avelos’s body, as if to ask him to step aside.
It was an extremely faint push, but Avelos’s large frame yielded smoothly. He lifted his hand away from Yuri’s chest without any reluctance, smiled with his eyes curved softly, and then leaned back against the sofa at the head of the parlor.
“Pretend I’m not here. You don’t need to mind me.”
Avelos waved a hand lazily and without much effort. Then, as though he truly intended to spend his time that way, he leaned comfortably against the sofa’s back and closed his eyes.
With his eyes closed quietly and his body at rest, Avelos’s face looked like a sculpture. Beginning with his skin, white to the point of pallor, he gave the impression of something that was already not quite human.
