“Father.”

Elios called to Ikanel. Emperor Ikanel Riman Akelan did not respond.

“If the true culprit is revealed, the country will be turned upside down. So I plan to keep the identity of the true culprit hidden for now.”

He didn’t explain the reasons in detail as he had done with Crusis. His father was an Emperor who had ruled this country for over ten years. He would understand the hidden meaning without having everything spelled out.

“…Well done.”

Another short, gruff answer followed. His voice was cracking.

“Father, may I ask you something? Is your throat very uncomfortable?”

Elios asked somewhat cautiously, unlike before.

“What do you want to know?”

Ikanel knew that Elios would ask something related to the Saint, or perhaps related to Freia. He had known this would happen from the moment Elios ran out to chase after the Saint who had fallen out the window. He was mentally prepared.

Elios felt guilty about requiring answers from his father whose throat was in pain. But he couldn’t delay. It was a matter of his father’s life, the fate of Akelan engulfed in calamity, and Snow’s well-being.

“Why did the Saint try to assassinate Father, His Imperial Majesty, the sun of Akelan?”

Ikanel faced Elios while lying in bed. Suddenly, he recalled what Mihail had once told him about Elios.

“Prince Elios can draw people in and bring quarreling groups to harmony because he is more human than anyone else.”

More human than anyone else. Elios was like Ikanel in his early days as Crown Prince, when he had many dreams and smiles. Perhaps it was because he was his son that they resembled each other.

“Elios. You know the Saint personally as well.”

“…Didn’t Father thoroughly block me from meeting her personally?”

His words were thorny. Elios bit his lip hard. He hadn’t meant to speak in such a tone.

Elios had called the Saint “Snow” in front of Ikanel, and the Saint had also called Elios by his name. It was certainly all exposed now. His father must have realized from this that he and she were at least somewhat acquainted. That must be why he spoke that way.

His father had just been strangled. “Speak more gently”, Elios repeated to himself several times.

Meanwhile, Ikanel merely smiled bitterly. It was none other than Ikanel himself who had caused Elios to harbor resentment toward his father.

Ikanel, anticipating a long conversation, invited Elios to sit. Elios sat in the chair where the Empress had been sitting until just now. His body swayed once during this. The Emperor’s voice asking “Are you alright?” echoed hazily. Elios pressed his forehead firmly and answered as if nothing was wrong.

“I was just dizzy for a moment.”

Ikanel looked at his son somewhat suspiciously but soon dismissed his doubt. It was largely because Elios was trying so hard not to show that he was sick.

“Do you think I didn’t know that you were meeting the Saint personally?”

“…Since you never tried to stop it, I thought you didn’t know.”

Elios had tried his best to hide his meetings with Snow from his father, but once the Emperor set his mind to something, it was nearly impossible for anything to remain hidden. However, since Elios believed his father wouldn’t remain silent if he knew about his meetings with the Saint, he had been confident that his father hadn’t even suspected.

“Father, right now that’s not as important as—”

“I know. Although I don’t approve of you and Saint Bernadette meeting in such a manner, what’s more important now is why she tried to assassinate the Emperor of this country.”

Elios simply nodded. No matter the situation, he had expected his father to explode in anger at him, but his father was unexpectedly calm. Since there was no need to forcibly bring up something that wasn’t being pointed out, Elios decided to just act brazenly about it.

“So I will ask you first, Elios. Since you have seen the Saint many times in private, you must know well what kind of personality she has and how she usually behaves. Is that correct?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

He answered truly brazenly. He admitted that despite his father’s strict prohibition against meeting her, he had been meeting her all along and had roughly understood her personality. However, the Emperor merely nodded a few times and continued his questioning.

“Then let me ask you this. Was the Saint you saw today the same person as the one you usually see?”

Elios furrowed his brow. It wasn’t a question about whether her personality or speech patterns were the same. Was she the same person? Someone who didn’t know would think it was a strange question, but for Elios, who had definitely felt that Snow was acting strangely earlier, he seemed to understand why his father was asking such a question. So he answered:

“No, she seemed like a different person. To be more precise, she would be the person I know, then act as if she were someone else, then return to being the Snow—I mean, the Saint I know, repeatedly.”

Ikanel shifted his gaze from Elios and stared into empty space for a moment. He stroked the silk cloth wrapped around his neck with his fingertips and muttered, “As I thought.”

“That’s right. She acted as if she were someone else. You must know who that ‘someone else’ is, as you clearly heard it from her own lips.”

Ikanel said, still staring into space. The room, which he had covered with dark green dye upon ascending the throne, was desolate for an Emperor’s chamber. Dark green. He had simply covered the entire room with that color because it caught his eye, but only now did he realize why he had particularly liked that color.

Green was the color of Freia’s eyes.

“Do you mean Freia Nigritia…?”

While staring blankly at the walls thickly painted with dark green, he heard his son Elios’s cautious voice after a while.

Snow had mentioned the witch Freia Nigritia several times in front of Elios. Not only that, she would speak of Freia as if she were a completely different person, then claim to be her. She said she was not a Saint but a witch.

If so, maybe, Elios brought up Freia’s name. And he watched with a sense of unreality as his father slowly turned his head back toward him.

It truly felt unreal. Freia? Why on earth would Snow act as if she were Freia?

“Yes. Freia Nigritia. And the Saint truly was her, Elios.”

“Pardon?”

He couldn’t immediately understand what his father was saying.

“I’m saying the Saint is Freia Nigritia.”

Nonsense. It would make more sense to think that Snow had momentarily become mentally unstable. Yes. She had said she had a nightmare, and whatever it was, it must have had a profound impact. Snow had acted as if she were a witch due to extreme stress. That made sense.

The Saint being Freia Nigritia was truly—though Elios only thought this to himself and didn’t say it out loud—absurd.

“I was suspecting that the Saint might be in a mentally unstable state, mistakenly thinking she was Freia Nigritia.”

Elios told his father exactly what he had been thinking. But his father’s answer remained consistent.

“No, Elios. I am a person who believes in superstition less than anyone else. Nevertheless, I can say with certainty that she was definitely Freia.”

Ikanel explained the reasons for his conviction. First, Saint Bernadette had recited matters that only Ikanel and Freia would likely know. Second, the current calamity and the One Year Calamity that occurred some 20 years ago were like twins, strikingly similar.

As Elios silently listened to his father’s words, he felt the question he had been harboring even before entering this room becoming more concrete.

“What exactly are these matters that only you and Freia Nigritia would likely know?”

It was a sharp question, but Ikanel showed no particular agitation. From the beginning, he had thought that this was what Elios had come to ask him. Indeed, Elios asked again, just as Ikanel had predicted:

“What was your relationship with Freia Nigritia? Why did the Saint say that to calm Freia’s emotions, she needed to kill the Emperor’s children?”

Ikanel pondered how much he should tell his son. He was telling his child about a woman he had met before marriage. But at the same time, it was a story about how, as Crown Prince, he had completely ruined a noble house, and also about how the One Year Calamity had come about. He felt that if no other prince should know, at least Elios needed to.

So Ikanel spoke as if telling someone else’s story, selecting the facts as best he could. He spoke not of what had happened between Freia Nigritia and himself, but of what had happened between Freia Nigritia and ‘Crown Prince Ikanel.’

During the reign of the previous Emperor, Freia Nigritia and the Crown Prince met by chance at the temple. They gradually developed feelings for each other but deliberately concealed their identities. As they became closer, Ikanel finally discovered that she was the daughter of House Nigritia. Ikanel decided to give her up.

Elios’s eyes wavered as he heard the story from his father. The fact that his father and Freia had been lovers was something he had never imagined. But what was even more shocking was that Freia had been framed by Elios’s grandfather, the former Emperor.

Most people, including Elios, had thought of Freia as a witch until now. When the thought occurred that she might actually have been an innocent person, he felt a chill run down his spine. If so, then all the countless resentments directed at Freia by the empire’s citizens had been acts of tearing an innocent person to pieces millions, tens of millions of times.

‘The Crown Prince collapsed after drinking tea offered by Freia. The Crown Prince thought it was Freia’s doing, but it was the Emperor who had schemed to have poison in it. The Crown Prince, not knowing this, was overcome with a sense of betrayal and accused the ducal house of treason, exterminating them. In the process, he killed Ian Nigritia, her brother, right before Nigritia’s eyes.’

Elios unconsciously applied this to his own situation. If Elios were to misunderstand Snow and come to hate her, and kill her family before her eyes, that is… the priestess Arianne whom Snow so trusted and followed…

He didn’t want to imagine it. The idea that he would come to hate Snow seemed impossible, even if the world were to collapse.