If she had died properly and her body had decayed like others, his brother would have suffered for a few years and then moved on.

Crusis deliberately changed the subject. He talked about how their mother was doing and what studies his younger siblings were engaged in lately. Elios smiled with a faint but genuine smile. Crusis preferred this.

“Brother. Try to smile and live a little.”

“What?”

“It’s not that happy people smile, but that smiling people become happy.”

Elios looked at Crusis with wide eyes. After staring for a while, he let out a deep sigh. And for the first time in a very long time, he revealed his deep inner thoughts.

“Crusis. I… I don’t know if I deserve to be happy.”

Again, again, again. He talks like someone carrying all the world’s sorrows and misfortunes. Crusis felt intense resentment toward Saint Bernadette, whom he had never properly conversed with. He had the spiteful thought that she was the reason his brother had become like this.

He wanted to cheer his brother up, even just a little more. Crusis, who had just turned twenty, was still more of a young ruler than a young adult, and so he had a habit of trying to act as mature as possible. Voice low. Expression solemn. Not to be looked down upon.

But in front of his brother, he was still Crusis, the younger brother who was picky about food. He hoped that his brother, who had become indifferent to everything, would smile even a little at such behavior.

Though he would like to stay longer, both for his brother and himself, Crusis was now His Majesty the Emperor. He couldn’t leave the imperial palace empty for so long. In the decentralized Akelan, it was already a huge topic of conversation for the Emperor to come down to another fief including vassal states like this. Before anything happened at the imperial palace during his absence, he had to return now.

Crusis boarded the carriage, surrounded by countless guards, after being seen off by his brother. He greeted his brother several times at the end. Crusis knew he wouldn’t be able to come this often anymore. He told his brother he would send letters. Elios just nodded with a smiling face. Again. Again that forced smile.

Though exchanging letters would be more convenient, the reason Crusis personally came to this remote place despite all the variables was because he wanted to see with his own eyes Elios’s real smile—warm like sunshine as before, not a forced one—someday.

He didn’t know when the next time would be, but he hoped that by the next time he came, his brother would be able to smile again.

That’s what Crusis thought.

♣ ♣ ♣

Blizzard. Blizzard. Blizzard. The world had been all blizzard. It was just about 4 years ago.

It wasn’t as long a period as the one year calamity. For just a few days, exactly a few days, the empire had frozen solid. But it was clearly a calamity.

The homeless froze to death, those who lived day-to-day starved to death, and fetuses in their mothers’ wombs couldn’t withstand the extreme cold and were stillborn. All this happened in just a few days.

Those were such days.

When the blizzard finally stopped, people naturally looked for the saint. Everyone thought the saint must have stopped the blizzard. Since it was the saint who had once driven away the witch’s calamity before, they thought it would be the same this time.

The temple said that the saint had driven away all the calamity and returned to God’s embrace.

It would be natural to rise up against such an absurd story, but things were different when it was the official statement directly from Ceres Martadia. Many people believed those words. They had to believe it since the raging blizzard had suddenly stopped all at once.

However, there were just as many people who didn’t believe those words as those who did. They thought there must be something more behind it. It was said that the saint performed a miracle to stop the calamity and right there, both her soul and body returned to the Goddess’s embrace, but the only witnesses to this scene were Ceres Martadia and one red-haired priestess who had cared for the saint since childhood. There were many suspicious aspects.

However, investigating matters related to the saint by looking for various clues could constitute blasphemy, and whatever happened could all be explained away with the single word ‘miracle,’ so it was impossible to properly investigate.

The two people with the greatest authority in the empire at that time—Emperor Ikanel Riman Akelan and Prince Elios Riman Akelan, who was virtually confirmed as the Crown Prince—both accepted the Ceres’s statement, so the matter was not properly investigated and was vaguely passed over with an “ah, I see.” In other words, the Emperor and the first Prince stepped in to cover up the matter.

During the approximately one-year period from when the calamity occurred until the death of the previous Emperor, Ikanel Riman Akelan, the empire was in great turmoil. The saint had disappeared as if she had evaporated into the sky, and the culprit who dared to attempt to assassinate His Majesty the Emperor couldn’t even be traced.

Regarding the Emperor’s assassination attempt, it was quite serious at the time. Unbelievably, no clues emerged.

None of the guards who had collapsed in the corridor saw the culprit’s face, and even the Emperor himself, whose neck had been directly strangled, couldn’t remember anything. No, he said he couldn’t remember. Elios and Count Callisto, who were present at the scene, similarly couldn’t recall the culprit’s appearance.

While the investigation made no progress, the Emperor fell ill and soon passed away. It was unreasonable to pursue the assassin during the period of national mourning. The newly enthroned Emperor acted as if he had almost forgotten about finding the culprit.

In the end, that case too fell into an unsolvable mystery.

Elios had bought an empty mansion in the capital as soon as the calamity ended. He selected only very discreet people to manage the mansion. No one knew who lived there. Most people didn’t even know that the building belonged to the royal family member Elios Riman Akelan.

When his father passed away and it became likely that Elios would ascend to the throne next, he took Crusis to that mansion.

Seeing the saint lying plainly on the bed when she was supposed to have returned to God, Crusis was so surprised that he collapsed.

Elios had been hiding Saint Bernadette in that mansion.

“If you ever wake up, I wanted you to at least have the opportunity to choose for yourself. Whether to return to the temple, to being a saint. Or to live an ordinary but free life of your own.”

Elios spoke to Snow, who lay quietly on the bed as if time had stopped for her alone.

Yes. Time had stopped for her.

Rather than saying she was dead or sleeping, Elios thought that was more accurate.

She didn’t breathe, and her heart and pulse didn’t beat. Yet her skin had color. Despite the color, when he gently placed his hand on her cheek, it was ice cold. Her body wasn’t stiff, nor had her skin turned pale without a trace of blood. She simply existed unchanged, as if time had stopped for her alone in the world.

While Elios grew from just before his coming-of-age ceremony to having a slightly larger frame and becoming a full-fledged young man, Snow remained exactly the same. She remained unchanged from her nineteen-year-old appearance.

When he first found her in the snow field, Snow had pierced her chest with an ice crystal, and even the hand holding that crystal was completely frozen. Elios still didn’t know why he had been able to wake up before Ceres Martadia and Arianne. Martadia and Arianne only opened their eyes when Elios had been wailing for nearly an hour and was exhausted.

Snow’s condition was strange. She was dead but not dead. She had said she was going on a long journey. She said she might return someday. That’s why Elios couldn’t give up on her, even knowing her breath had ceased.

If Snow ever opened her eyes, he wanted to let her decide her own life. She had lost more than she had gained by being a saint.

Ceres and Arianne couldn’t give up on Snow either. They thought the same as Elios. They were people who loved and cherished Snow more than themselves. The three thought about what would happen after Snow’s return.

By the three people who were the only ones present at Snow’s final moment hiding the truth, Snow truly became a dead person. She was completely freed from her position as a saint. Elios secretly purchased a mansion in the capital and hid Snow there. No treasure, no matter how precious, was more important to Elios than Snow. He truly hid her safely and securely.

And as he had mentioned before, Snow was a girl whose very existence was a miracle.

As the blizzard stopped and the weather warmed, the ice covering Snow’s hand and chest melted away as if by magic. Judging by the torn part of Snow’s clothes where the ice crystal had touched, it was clear she had been pierced by it. However, there wasn’t even a scratch on the skin visible through the torn clothing.

Since the external wound had disappeared, he was excited and expectant to the point of losing sleep every day, thinking that Snow might wake up as if she had just been sleeping. Elios visited the mansion where Snow was sleeping almost every day. Because if there was no one she knew when she woke up, Snow would be very startled. Each day of excited waiting felt like an eternity.

But Snow didn’t wake up after a month, half a year, or even a year had passed.

Elios was pushed, regardless of his own will, to become the next Emperor.

Another two years. He handed over his position to his younger brother and came down to a rural barony. It was to hide Snow more safely. In the capital, there was no one who didn’t know the saint’s snow-white hair and silver eyes. No matter how careful they were, there was a risk of being discovered. Elios chose a remote fief that was as disconnected from the capital as possible.

Ah, it wasn’t just Elios and Snow who came. Arianne came too. Arianne followed Snow to this fief. The temple no longer held any meaning for Arianne. She returned to secular life without regret. She was no longer a priestess. She immediately became Elios’s maid in name and followed him to the barony.

She was a maid in name only. Arianne found her own way to make a living. Drawing on her experience of once helping her birth mother, she became a midwife. However, since she was still nominally a maid, she used that as an excuse to frequently visit Elios’s mansion and check on Snow.

Another year passed. Elios turned twenty-three, and Snow still remained at nineteen.