A few hours later, Erger exchanged tearful farewells with the people of the Mage Tower. The tears were shed largely by those mourning the fact that they would no longer have access to his cock and his magical energy. Erger himself still couldn’t quite grasp that this was real, and not a single tear came to him.
Erger, who had spent his days wearing nothing but loose shirts, trousers, and the occasional robe, dressed himself in formal noble attire for the very first time. He was the son of the Empire’s foremost ducal house — yet being illegitimate, he had lived a life far removed from anything resembling nobility.
He had been sent straight into the Mage Tower the moment he was taken in by the Duke, so he’d never had the chance to live the life of a young noble.
Once or twice a year, the Duke would stop by the Mage Tower to visit Erger — ostensibly to educate him in basic noble etiquette. But every time they spent that father-and-son time together, Erger only grew to dislike his father more.
Etiquette was tedious and nothing but a nuisance. And his father was so coldly distant and hard to read that Erger could never warm to him no matter how hard he tried. He’d have much rather bolted out of there to go play with the slimes he’d conjured with magic.
Living with my father as a proper noble would have been absolutely dreadful. But fate could not be entirely escaped.
Erger arrived in the capital dressed as a perfectly turned-out noble gentleman. He’d used a teleportation formation to cover in an instant a distance that would have taken ten days by carriage.
Imperial palace guards who had been waiting at the formation in advance escorted Erger to the palace. The moment he stepped into the lavishly gilded imperial carriage, a sigh slipped out of him.
“Damn.”
The cravat around his neck felt like it was going to suffocate him. Through the carriage window, he could see the people of the capital all bowing their heads toward the carriage as it passed.
A carriage bearing the Igvaltwyn seal was itself an object of reverence. No one even knew who was inside — and yet they all bowed without question.
Erger felt something tighten painfully in his chest. The entire journey to the palace, he kept his eyes shut and tried, with great effort, to avoid facing this reality.
But before long, the carriage door opened and a courteous voice reached him.
“I will escort you to the audience chamber.”
Erger climbed out of the carriage with his face thoroughly twisted in displeasure. Armed guards swarmed around the carriage, but he paid them no mind whatsoever. They’re only human, after all. Erger was confident he could hold his own against any human.
What if I just turned this whole place upside down and ran? The disloyal thought flashed through his mind, but he stomped it down. The Empire’s survival depended on him doing indecent things with the Emperor and producing a child.
Without the prophecy of rifts, no matter how capable the people of the Mage Tower were, holding back demon beasts in time would be an impossibility. Even with the prophecy, each rift still claimed a fair number of lives.
So the suffocation he felt right now was the anger of being bound without any choice in the matter. He simply had no option but to accept the situation.
Erger followed the guards down the corridors of the imperial palace. He had expected gold slathered over everything the way it had been on the carriage — but surprisingly, there was nothing ostentatious or gaudy about it. The atmosphere was quiet and refined.
As he drew closer to the audience chamber, the paintings hanging on the walls began to catch his eye. Vague recollections of the Empire’s history he’d learned at the Mage Tower surfaced in his mind. For what it was worth, Erger had generally failed his history classes.
The scenes rendered in bold, powerful brushstrokes depicted the heroic deeds of past emperors. The achievements of an imperial line stretching back centuries unfolded one after another.
Frustratingly, Erger couldn’t help but feel the authority that the name Igvaltwyn carried. The thought struck him that he was, in the end, simply a citizen of the Ferson Empire — helpless against it. Perhaps adoration of the Igvaltwyn bloodline ran in his very blood.
Would the thirty-fourth Emperor, Liard Igvaltwyn, carry that same overwhelming dignity as the figures in these paintings?
And that man is an Omega. Someone he would ultimately have to take to bed. The situation was quite absurd when he thought about it.
Shortly after, when Erger arrived at the audience chamber — the Emperor was not there. He had entered half-tense, half-strangely expectant, and now the air went right out of him.
In the Emperor’s place, an old man who introduced himself as the head chamberlain greeted Erger with impeccable courtesy.
“You must be weary from the long journey. His Majesty is still attending to prior affairs of state and will arrive shortly, so if you would please wait here a moment, young lord Crowell.”
There was something oddly unsettling about having someone so much older than himself bowing before him. At the Mage Tower, everyone lived on more or less equal footing regardless of rank.
Nobles’ children who first arrived at the Mage Tower would strut around for a while — but it never lasted long. After enduring the daily deluge of lessons and experiments, and the mock battles that genuinely felt life-threatening, they would inevitably become as close as comrades-in-arms, rank forgotten.
The Empire was a rigidly hierarchical society — but the Mage Tower was different. A space that belonged to the Empire yet operated with its own autonomy. Like an island set apart from everything else. Quite literally so, in fact — the Mage Tower was built on an artificial island in the middle of a vast lake.
Erger shifted slightly in the plush chair. He was uncomfortable and tense. Everything about the imperial palace felt like the opposite of the Mage Tower.
The head chamberlain seemed to notice his discomfort, and with a gentle smile, struck up conversation.
“You’ll be seeing quite a lot of me from now on, young lord. You may call me Haiman.”
“O— understood. Then, Haiman, if you could call me Erger…”
Young lord Crowell. A title he had never once heard in all his years at the Mage Tower. Just hearing it made his skin crawl.
Haiman’s age-creased eyes went wide.
“I’m afraid that won’t do. Call you by your given name? You’ll be His Royal Highness, the Imperial Consort, once the ceremony is held.”
The ceremony. Right — that was why he’d come here. Erger suddenly felt like he was going to be sick. It seemed that once they were formally wed, he would be addressed as His Royal Highness within these walls.
Oh, I genuinely might throw up. Erger scrunched into himself and leaned sideways against the back of the chair.
Haiman, with the same unfailingly proper manner, asked if he would like tea or dessert. Erger shook his head. He wanted to undo his cravat at least until the Emperor arrived — but not trusting himself to tie it back neatly the way it was now, he gave up on the idea.
Haiman looked at him with the expression of a kindly grandfather and spoke softly.
“My, you’ve grown so much. When I spotted you from a distance, I was puzzled for a moment because the clothes you were wearing weren’t the ones sent from the imperial side…”
“Ah, yes. They didn’t fit.”
Every year on his birthday, the Emperor had sent both a letter and a gift of clothing. This year had been no different. He had sent a fine formal outfit, with a note saying it would make him very happy if Erger wore it when he came to the palace.
But the clothes hadn’t fit Erger’s frame at all. Naturally — they had been made to standard men’s measurements. If he’d tried to squeeze himself in, he’d have split the shoulders clean open.
The last gift to actually fit had been the one that arrived when he was eleven. Everything after that had been impossible to deal with and had piled up in some corner of his laboratory. The fabric was fine enough to be worth roughly a year’s living expenses for most common folk — setting that aside, they were gifts from the Emperor, so he couldn’t simply throw them away either, and so year after year he had just let them accumulate.
“Oh dear… you should have told us your measurements.”
“I had no way to write back.”
“Ah, I see.”
Whether Haiman looked troubled or not, Erger answered bluntly. Everything had always been one-sided. The engagement, the gifts — all of it.
Is that how it is with all highborn men — his father, the Emperor? Both equally insufferable. He disliked them both.
Not a single human element could be found in the letters that had arrived year after year. The elegant script and the Igvaltwyn seal proved they were personal letters written by the Emperor himself — but the content was as dry as it got.
A perfunctory inquiry after his health, and the wish that his life at the Mage Tower would continue without incident. And yet somehow every letter was padded out with an absurd amount of flowery, pointless prose on either end.
With each birthday gift that arrived, Erger’s dislike for the Emperor had grown. It made him feel, in the most tangible way, that obligation was the sum total of what existed between them.
Would it have been better if they’d at least let me see his face a few times as I grew up? No. That might have only meant getting hurt, at far too young an age, by the Emperor’s indifferent manner.
The Emperor was shameless enough to enter into an engagement with a child of only ten — all for the sake of producing an heir. And then to simply leave that child entirely unattended, without so much as a scrap of genuine interest.
If all he needed was a descendant, marriage wouldn’t even be necessary. He must have been unwilling to have his heir branded illegitimate. He intended to go through with the wedding for the sake of legitimacy. Everything was to preserve the authority of the imperial house — and he himself had been swept up in it since childhood, too young to know any better.
A man that consumed by his own ambition could hardly be good-looking on top of it all. And old, too. There was no question his body wouldn’t respond at all. Would he have to put a spell on himself before they had intercourse?
Wrapped in his own prejudice, Erger mentally tore the Emperor to pieces. Meeting for the first time in ten years, and he can’t even come out to receive me first — making me wait, and on a day like today of all days, he’s still late. He truly felt nothing warm toward the man. His married life was going to be deeply miserable…
“His Majesty the Emperor.”
Just then, after a long wait, the Emperor arrived at the audience chamber. Erger, who had been slumped in his seat, scrambled awkwardly to his feet. His face was written all over with sullenness and barely concealed rebellion.
The door opened, and the Emperor stepped inside. Proper etiquette called for a deep bow, to be held until the Emperor gave permission to rise and meet his eyes — but Erger stood there with his neck stiff and straight, staring outright.
And so he found himself looking directly into a pair of clear, pale blue eyes.
“So you are the young lord of the Crowell house.”
Erger stared blankly ahead, forgetting even to blink. After ten years, the fiancé before him was nothing at all like what he had expected.
…Oh, damn.
Someone really should have warned me that the Emperor was absolutely, insanely attractive.
