With a sigh, he finally seemed to make a decision, rose from his chair, and strode to the door, flinging it open. There he encountered someone standing outside.

Even when Elios refused to back down, the Emperor truly called in one of the knights from the Pavante Knights, one of the Emperor’s direct knight orders. In the end, Elios had to clench his fists and withdraw on his own to avoid the humiliation of being dragged out by the knight.

When Elios returned to his room, he noticed that all the maids were watching him carefully. Having just had a dispute with his father, Elios’s expression was likely not very pleasant. Elios thought that was the reason the maids were being cautious.

As soon as he entered the room, he instinctively looked toward the window.

Thud—his heart sank.

He rushed to the window. The closer he got, the more he felt a piercing coldness spreading. He tried to open the window. Snow had accumulated on the windowsill and frozen solid, preventing the window from opening.

An ominous wind was blowing. The thick branches of large trees bent like sturdy grass in the wind, then snapped. A few snowflakes fluttered weakly, mixed with the wind.

Elios forcefully yanked the window open. The glass window opened with a sharp cracking sound. The sudden gust of wind swept the objects in the room backward, instantly creating chaos.

“…Is anyone outside?”

‘Snow, what’s happened to you?’

“Is anyone outside, I said!”

His voice came out trembling with emotion. Soon, a maid’s voice was heard in response. The door rattled a few times, apparently difficult to open due to the wind blowing from outside into the room, but then it opened.

The maid’s clothes fluttered wildly in the wind. She tried not to grimace despite facing the headwind. Elios spoke to the maid who could barely keep her composure because of the wind:

“How long has the weather been like this?”

A deep anxiety clung thickly to his voice. He stood with his back to the window, facing the swirling wind. The maid, gathering her skirt with her hands to keep it from flying up, said:

“About two hours ago, it gradually started to become windy when Your Highness went with Lord Callisto to seek an audience with His Imperial Majesty.”

“Haah”

Elios exhaled rapidly. The maid standing before him had not been serving the first prince for very long. The usually kind and smiling first prince seemed particularly irritable today, and now he was even raising his voice—though she tried to appear calm, she was terribly frightened.

Elios saw her shoulders trembling. Though his mind was not yet at ease, thinking that he had taken out his anger on an innocent person, Elios forcibly suppressed his emotions and spoke to the maid with restraint:

“…I understand. You may go now.”

Elios held back his emotions until the maid had completely withdrawn from the room. The moment she closed the door, emotions of worry, anxiety, and impatience once again threatened to explode, filling him to the top of his head. Though he didn’t know why, it was certain that Snow had experienced some kind of negative emotional change. However, he was in no position to go meet her because of his father.

His father would never permit Elios to meet Snow. Despite the fact that he would meet the holy maiden in four months anyway, when his own coming-of-age ceremony would take place. It seemed as if his father wanted to delay Elios’s reunion with Snow as much as possible.

Understanding his father was something he had given up on long ago. Yet the reason Elios had endured the past six years without seeing Snow was because of the memory of his seemingly unlikely father embracing and comforting him. And also because of the memory of his father quietly apologizing by saying, “I’m sorry.”

His father’s command “Do not meet the holy maiden” seemed at that time not like an emperor’s order to a prince, but like the earnest request of an ordinary father with a son. He simply could not disregard it.

But now Elios had reached the point where he wondered if the embrace he had felt from his father might have been just an illusion caused by emotional deprivation.

In childhood, his father had been excessively aloof. As time passed and the third prince was born, and then the youngest princess, his father’s coldness somewhat softened. However, Elios still sometimes felt a vague difficulty in dealing with his father. And just now was one of those moments.

Elios turned around to face the window he had been backing. The wind stinging his eyes made him furrow his brow. What could have happened to her? No matter how much he thought about it, he couldn’t know by just sitting here.

He knew almost nothing about Snow. She was a girl he had met only once. He didn’t know what she liked, what foods she was picky about, what habits she had, or what she usually did when bored. So he couldn’t possibly know why she was suddenly unable to control her emotions when she normally maintained a gentle temperament.

It was his fault. He had ignored Snow for the past six years. Perhaps Snow had completely forgotten about him.

Would Snow remember the boy called El, with whom she had once watched the stars and talked?

A new kind of anxiety bound him tightly.

‘I think of her every day. When the sky darkens, I worry as if it’s my own concern, but what if she doesn’t feel the same?’

He had shared just one day out of the thousands of days of Snow’s life. There was no guarantee that it had been as special to her as it had been to him.

Anxiety turned into impatience, and impatience turned back into fear.

“I must see her. I must see Snow.”

He suddenly muttered. It was extremely impulsive.

Elios closed the window. The wind that had swept through the room stopped, but a harsh sound still beat against the glass. He began to put on several thick clothes in multiple layers.

Elios casually draped a gray cloak that he often wore when leaving the palace inconspicuously over his left arm. He was about to set out just like that, but then took out another slightly smaller light beige cloak.

When he walked straight to the door and flung it open, the maid standing guard in front jumped slightly in surprise. It was the same woman who had answered Elios’s question about the weather earlier. Elios said:

“The wind is blowing so fiercely that I’m worried about my horses.”

“I will tell the stable keeper to pay special attention to Your Highness’s horses.”

“No. I need to see for myself. I think I’ll only feel at ease if I check with my own eyes.”

Among the first prince’s horses were several valuable bloodline horses gifted from neighboring countries, and the prince usually cherished them greatly. The maids accepted the prince’s explanation.

Elios quickly left the fortress-like enormous palace. Many servants he encountered along the way greeted him, but he barely acknowledged their greetings as he walked rapidly. At the stable where his horses were kept, he selected an ordinary-looking horse and untied the rope securing it to the post.

“Whoa, whoa.”

Though ordinary in appearance, the horse, trained in the imperial household, docilely followed Elios’s lead.

He took the horse along the back road he often used when leaving the palace. Perhaps because of the weather, everyone had gone inside the buildings, and he no longer encountered anyone.

Elios mounted the horse. He galloped at full speed along the wide main road. Riding a horse at such a low temperature, his ears began to hurt as if they might fall off before long. He ignored the pain and increased his speed even more.

Both the royal palace and the great temple were located in the capital. While the royal palace was built almost at the center of the capital, the great temple was situated a bit more to the south. It was a distance that would take a good half hour even on horseback.

Elios felt urgent. The scenery split on both sides of his vision, flashing by.

He wanted to meet her quickly. In his memory, she was regretting their parting and whispering her other name, known to no one else, into Elios’s ear.

“Snow, my name is Snow.”

The whispered words and her breath had tickled, making Elios laugh while hunching his shoulders. Elios tightened his grip on the reins.

At last, the great temple began to come into view. Elios slowed the horse’s pace.

Columns that were slightly thicker in the middle than at the ends were a distinctive feature of temples dedicated to the Goddess Amir. Countless such columns stood in rows, supporting the white, flat ceiling.

Large and small temples of this style filled Elios’s view. The great temple was a collective term for all these many temples. It was truly comparable to an entire village.

Normally, priests wearing white robes made of plain cloth would be walking around like villagers, but due to the weather, not many people were outside.

Elios left his horse at the stable of an inn on the outskirts of the great temple. He couldn’t ride the horse directly into the temple. Elios briefly stroked the head of the horse, which was exhaling steamy breath.

“Good job.”

At the end of December, though it wasn’t that late, the sun was already setting, dyeing the white temple crimson. After safely tying the horse in the stable, Elios came out of the inn. His steps quickened again.

Although Elios was a prince, he was also an excellent knight who had been trained from childhood by the empire’s finest knights. For Elios, who often sneaked out of the palace, infiltrating the temple was not difficult if he set his mind to it. While the temple’s security was not lax, it couldn’t compare to that of the palace.

The palace had to prepare for special situations like war or civil unrest, but the temple was different. Not only Amir’s temple but all temples on the continent were strictly inviolable areas. Moreover, the status of the Goddess Amir was even more special in Akelan, the Holy Empire.

There were no crazy thieves who would dare attempt to rob the goddess’s great temple, and even in times of war, the great temple would remain the one safe place. Even if a heinous criminal were to hide in the temple, the state could not rashly invade the temple, which was the domain of the goddess.

The temple is a place protected by the goddess, not humans. If dozens of holy knights were to patrol with grim faces, strictly guarding the temple, such symbolic meaning would fade before the people.

Therefore, the great temple deployed only enough visible holy knights to maintain authority, and instead placed temple guards disguised as priests throughout. Such individuals had a different aura from ordinary priests.

These individuals were always wide-eyed, fiercely scanning their surroundings, so discerning who was a guard disguised as a priest was no challenge for Elios.