She had clearly heard that Duke Haimenwar was gravely ill and on the verge of death, yet she could not make sense of what she was seeing.

If anything, it was the woman lying beside him who looked as though she were about to die, and so Tatiana trembled with unease even as she continued speaking.

From the bag she had been carrying, Tatiana produced a glass ring of a murky color.

“My name is Tatiana Hennessy, and my grandmother was a great archmage. And this is the treasure she spent her entire life creating.”

The glass ring, crudely set in silver, was clearly old, its appearance made shabby by scratches here and there.

“Before she passed away, she told me that this could turn back the time of whoever it is used on!”

“Time?”

Lindenel’s neat brow twisted without restraint.

Every one of the countless physicians who had passed through Lindenel’s hands had said the same thing without exception, that Astrid could not survive.

And Lindenel had cut down those who spoke such nonsense.

Yet as the days went by, he could not do anything about the unease that steadily grew and spread within him.

He walked up to Tatiana and snatched the ring from her.

Even though it was a cheap ring set with nothing more than cracked glass rather than a gemstone, it seemed to give off a strange energy.

“If what you say is true, why did you not use it yourself and instead bring it to me? If I use this to turn back time, you will receive no reward whatsoever.”

“That would be true of me as I am now. You may bestow your gratitude for my service upon the me of the past.”

“The you of the past?”

“I was told that the caster and the target of this ring’s magic can return to the past while retaining their memories. So please go back to before the princess fell ill, and be sure to find me.”

Tatiana put strength into her eyes, as though this had been the heart of the matter all along.

“Come find me, acknowledge my service, and help the me of the past. The help of someone like you will be desperately needed by the powerless young child I will be then. That is the reason I am giving you that ring, Your Grace.”

“Help, you say…… You intend to have me take part in changing your past.”

“There is nothing wrong with that, is there? If this ring is a fake, you may simply have my head. And if it is real, you need only return to the past and help me.”

Saying so, Tatiana glanced repeatedly toward Astrid, who appeared to be bedridden.

At that, Lindenel, making no effort to hide his displeasure, stepped forward and blocked Astrid from Tatiana’s line of sight. Then he immediately stared intently at the ring.

With this alone, he could return to the past.

In the past, he would not have listened to such nonsense even in passing.

But now that he had been driven into a dead end, a desperate heart had paralyzed his reason.

This ring felt like the final arrangement of a fate gone awry.

As though her emotions had surged, Tatiana’s eyes sparked like flames. She continued in an impassioned tone.

“Return to the past and make me one of your people, Your Grace. So that I may save my family and take revenge on my enemies.”

“……This is supposed to turn back time?”

Looking at the cloudy surface of the heavily scratched glass ring, his thoughts swirled like a storm, beginning with the people who had already departed and could no longer be met, all the way to the toil behind everything he had built over the years that had passed.

Lindenel slowly reflected on the past.

Within the past he looked back upon, there were faces that drifted by.

Dead friends, the sudden deaths of his parents, the death of his young sister……

Tatiana’s resentment-laden voice crying out in indignation, or the reddened rims of her eyes, were none of Lindenel’s concern.

But the words about turning back time were nothing short of sweet.

He knew well enough that, as things stood, he would have to live on while holding Astrid close, never knowing when she might die.

If he could return to the past and erase every mistake, he truly wished to do so.

It did not matter whether he ended up going back to the day he first saw Astrid, the day she was poisoned, or the day she threw herself from the window.

Even if he were to return to the miserable days in Entil, where he had been driven by hunger to pick up and swallow dry dirt, he was confident he could rise again.

Lindenel glanced at Astrid and thought of the past.

“Back to Astrid’s past…….”

When summer came and all living things ran wild, the princess would be so excited she would not know what to do with herself.

Though her frail body often caused her to collapse from heatstroke, she would insist on going out under the blazing sun to gaze at the lake, and would set out on boat rides saying she wanted to hear the lush greenery and the ear-splitting cries of the cicadas.

What had he been thinking back then, as he kept her company?

Had the princess been a nuisance to him?

Or had he still despised her?

He had known her for several years now, and yet those were the only things that remained in his memory.

Beyond knowing that the princess loved summer boat rides, he knew nothing else about what she enjoyed or sought out.

He had killed every one of the princess’s loyal subjects in order to cut off the limbs of the sole heir to the throne.

And in planting his own spies in their place, there was now not a single person left who could tell him such things.

When Lindenel turned away and remained silent for some time, an anxious Tatiana asked again.

“Then, may I turn back time now?”

“Yes.”

Lindenel, with his back still turned, gripped Astrid’s hand tightly.

Having gazed for a long while at Astrid’s unconscious face, Lindenel slowly opened his mouth.

“Begin.”

“Then I will now turn back time.”

Tatiana bowed her head deeply and began to recite the incantation.

Yet the sight of that Duke Lindenel Haimenwar clutching the woman who lay limp as a corpse was so unfamiliar and strange that even as she designated the target of the magic, she kept stealing glances at the two of them.

As Tatiana’s magical energy resonated with the ring, a magic circle was drawn upon the floor.

Light burst forth from the drawn circle, and before long, a haze began to rise.

Beyond the blurring vision, the three figures faded away as though being erased.

***

“Come to think of it, this lake resembles the color of Your Highness’s eyes.”

It had been a remark tossed out at random to change the subject. There had simply been nothing else to redirect the conversation to aboard a small boat floating in the middle of a lake.

The princess, who had been about to raise her voice unable to bear her fiancé’s waywardness, flinched at those words.

She blinked blankly, like someone who had misheard, then looked out beyond the small boat.

“My eyes?”

Lindenel gave a nod.

“Yes. Is it not said that the color of one’s soul is held within one’s eyes?”

‘Indeed, that murky and clouded color suits you perfectly.’

The snide remark was quietly crumpled up and swallowed. For now, she still had to be treated as a princess.

The princess seemed freshly flustered by her own reflection in the lake.

It was not difficult to guess what was going through her mind.

The curve of her ear peeking through her hair had flushed a deep red.

Embarrassed and not knowing what to do with herself, the princess asked with a deliberately cheeky air.

“What color are my eyes?”

“Let me see. The color of water, I would say.”

Even upon receiving such a half-hearted answer, the princess smiled. Her smile was clear and innocent, as one her age ought to be.

The world said that the princess possessed the qualities of a wise ruler, like a sequoia tree stretching high into the sky, but the empire’s sequoia was now blooming and wilting in turn at Lindenel’s every word.

“I feel as though I have fallen into Your Imperial Highness’s world.”

Lindenel worked his silver tongue and thought it ridiculous and beneath him that she would flush at a single word from him.

It seemed the princess had lost the will to reproach her fiancé, for she fell silent, and a stillness soon followed.

The sound of oars came at a steady rhythm, and the surface of the water, soaking in the sunlight, glittered as though set with thousands of minerals.

The princess’s pale hand, which had been gazing at the fragments of light, carefully parted the current.

At last the silence broke as she opened her mouth. Her voice was one of rapture.

“Your Grace, in your eyes…… was I truly this beautiful…….”

No answer came, yet the princess wore a happy smile.

The sight of her in profile, resting her chin on the railing of the boat and gazing for a long while at the brilliantly shining surface of the water.

The scales of water that shattered at her fingertips are etched forever into his retinas.

Moments from a past already worn threadbare, occasionally revisited after everything had been lost.

Now they were nothing more than time that had lost all meaning.