The bound man pressed his lips together with a furrowed brow.

“……”

“Your Majesty. Please take your seat.”

At the chief justice’s appeal, the man, Kyle, let out a low growl.

“Shut your mouth.”

Kyle looked back at the man before him, his uncle by name only, Lucas. Lucas was currently on trial for treason.

“How do you intend to compensate for the delusion that dragged my honor through the dirt?”

Kyle fixed Lucas with a piercing stare.

“……”

“This is your last chance. Do you have no apology to offer?”

If treason were proven, the standard consequence was full confiscation of assets and the stripping of his title, but a display of genuine remorse might yet spare his life.

After a long silence, Lucas’s tightly sealed lips finally parted.

“My sister, who was empress dowager, and my young nephew were traveling by carriage to my estate when they were killed by an assassin’s blade. Isn’t it rather obvious?”

Kyle steadied his breath through trembling lips.

“I state this plainly. I did not kill my mother and my brother. No…… your sister and your nephew.”

At that, Lucas let out a short laugh and fixed his gaze on Kyle.

“Your Majesty was not originally in a position to inherit the throne. I suppose you quietly eliminated those who could have become a source of rebellion.”

“……”

The color in Kyle’s face deepened slowly.

“There was no precedent in the Empire for an illegitimate child ascending to the throne. Especially not one with the bloodline of a war prisoner from a minority people. How unsettled you must have been, Your Majesty.”

“If you say one more word, I will not let you……”

At that moment,

“Ptuh!”

A gob of spittle laced with hatred and contempt struck him squarely on the temple.

“I’d rather die with my honor than apologize to a monster.”

“……”

“You son of a demon.”

Lucas sneered to the very end.

In an instant, the tendons in Kyle’s hard forearm stood out as his hand moved toward his sword hilt. The blade hadn’t even cleared the scabbard when a red aura of sword energy poured from it and coiled around Lucas’s throat.

“Urgh…… may God strike you down with divine punishment!”

Lucas cursed and thrashed with his whole body, and in that moment Kyle, staring at the blood and pus seeping from Lucas’s throat, slowly dragged his tongue across his lower lip.

The muscles in Kyle’s face twisted gradually and began to convulse from side to side, his lips pulling apart in a grotesque way.

With nothing reaching his ears through the haze of agitation, Kyle could just barely make out the blurred shape of Chancellor Lemiere through his clouded vision. The chancellor’s alarmed expression seemed to be mouthing ‘You must calm yourself, Your Majesty.’

Kyle glanced down at the hand gripping the sword, more than halfway drawn from its scabbard.

His fingernails were in the process of turning pitch black and curving into hooks.

“……”

“Your Majesty! Violence is forbidden in a sacred courtroom!”

The chief justice issued an urgent order to withdraw.

The shout pulled Kyle back to his senses just barely in time, and he quickly curled his nails inward and hid them. The sword energy withdrew, and the chair Lucas had been thrashing in toppled sideways. He lost consciousness shortly after.

The courtroom security detail rushed to Lucas. Several guards positioned themselves around him to prevent Kyle from inflicting further harm.

Kyle felt nausea rising in his throat. His consciousness grew murky, as if fog had settled over it. Even so, he forced his trembling, unsteady body upright.

‘Not here.’

He clenched his teeth and pushed through the crowd that had witnessed his behavior, barely making it out through the exit.

Only Chancellor Lemiere followed after him.

A brief silence fell, and then shock and whispers swept over the courtroom.

*

He turned two corners and climbed the stairs. Kyle walked at a relentless pace and reached his chambers without stopping. He closed the door behind him without looking back.

Thud.

Click.

The sound of the bolt sliding into place came from inside.

Kyle leaned his back against the door and closed his eyes for a moment, steadying his breathing. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and moved toward the window. He yanked the curtains shut with a loud scrape, and the room went dark in an instant.

“Your Majesty, are you all right.”

Chancellor Lemiere spoke from outside the door, his voice heavy with concern.

“Tell everyone to stay out of my private residence for the time being! That includes maids and attendants.”

“Understood, Your Majesty.”

Kyle collapsed onto the sofa and drew in ragged breaths. Cold sweat continued to stream down his forehead. A dark shadow fell across his face, and slowly, dark reddish-black feathers spread over it.

Before long, the figure lying on the sofa was no longer a man but an eagle, enormous as a human body.

To transform into an eagle was to be the proxy of the Sun God. Kyle could move freely between human and eagle form. But at some point he had lost the ability to predict when the transformation would come. Whenever he failed to control his rage, as he had today, he found himself shifting into an eagle without meaning to. Worse still, he felt an urge to sink his beak into anything with flesh.

Kyle had begun to fear himself.

The Amondi Empire believed that the nation could only know peace when it was ruled by one chosen by the Sun God. But there were countless people who doubted whether Kyle, with the matrilineal blood of lowly nomads running through him, had truly been chosen at all. No one among the Sun God’s chosen in the history of the Amondi Empire had ever had red eyes.

Scarred by endless conspiracies, insults, and rumors, Kyle moved through the world as if he felt nothing, but when something struck the wrong nerve inside him, he turned violent. He was losing his self-control by degrees.

Every time he behaved erratically in an unintended situation like today, he handed his enemies another excuse for rebellion.

Lemiere was the one person who knew the full weight of Kyle’s circumstances. He and the late emperor had fought side by side on the battlefield in their youth, and the bond between them had been deep. Lemiere had little attachment to power. His heart held nothing beyond genuine care for his country and his friend.

That was why he had brought Kyle, who had been living deep in the mountains of the borderlands with his mother, to the imperial palace. But Kyle, separated from his birth mother at such a young age, could not adapt to palace life at all.

The memory of holding the boy in his arms, the child’s eyes swollen and raw from crying, made Lemiere’s chest ache.

He had thought that once Kyle ascended to the throne, only good days would follow……

He exhaled a long, weary breath and murmured with quiet helplessness.

“What can I do for you, Your Majesty……”

On days like this, when Kyle transformed into an eagle without warning and refused to leave his bedchamber, Lemiere would stand outside and beat his own chest with his fist, checking on him from a distance.

He was standing there with a stricken expression, sighing, when a thought suddenly surfaced in his mind. The snack he had prepared for the emperor that morning.

He turned on his heel and disappeared down the corridor.

A short while later.

Knock knock.

“It is Chancellor Lemiere, Your Majesty.”

“What is it?”

Lemiere cleared his throat into his fist a couple of times and spoke carefully.

“You haven’t eaten a thing all day, so I’ve brought some bread.”

Lemiere waited anxiously for a response. After a brief silence, Kyle’s sharp voice came through the door.

“Have you forgotten that I don’t touch bread?”

‘My memory really is going with age……’

Lemiere pressed a hand to his forehead and let out a quiet groan.

“I thought something sweet might help restore your spirits. My oversight. Then I’ll……”

Just as the chancellor turned to leave with the dish, a subdued voice slipped through the gap of the slightly open door.

“Leave it and go.”

“Pardon?”

Lemiere stopped and looked up quickly. A thin smile of relief spread across his face.

He stepped inside and set the plate of bread and milk carefully on the center table.

“Then I’ll take my leave……”

Chancellor Lemiere gave a light bow and withdrew with a considerably lighter step.

The bread he had sent a servant to procure was none other than Shiloh’s bread.

Lately, Shiloh’s shop had been quietly making the rounds in social circles. Word had spread more than once that the bread and cookies from her limited ‘premium line’ were extraordinary in both taste and effect. One noblewoman had caused quite a stir claiming her wrinkles had smoothed out after eating the blueberry bread, and there was even a rumor going around that a man who had been struggling in that department had become a king of the night after eating the black raspberry bread.