Transparent tears soaked the woman's face.
He looked down at her pitiful appearance with emotionless eyes before lowering himself onto one knee in front of her.
“As you said, Your Majesty, I cannot understand your suffering in the slightest. But I do remember the helpless despair of a child with nowhere to turn.”
Light slowly returned to the eyes that had been as empty as a black abyss.
He took a handkerchief from inside his coat. Then, just as she had once wiped his face, he gently dried the tears from her wet cheeks.
“For the sake of His Highness the Crown Prince and Her Highness the Imperial Princess, please find the strength to carry on.”
The Empress's face became stained with guilt and shame.
The woman, whose frail shoulders trembled faintly, lowered her head weakly.
“I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said something like that to you......”
He gently patted the Empress's shoulders as she sobbed like a young girl.
A short while later, after she lost consciousness from exhaustion, he carefully lifted her into his arms and laid her on the bed. Quietly leaving the room, he found Gareth leaning against the wall in the corridor.
“Come with me.”
The boy, whose bloodshot eyes burned ominously, grabbed him without warning and pulled him along.
He silently followed behind the Crown Prince.
“Look over there.”
After dragging him up to the watchtower connected to the main palace, Gareth leaned against the railing and pointed outside.
He stepped up beside the boy.
In the garden of the detached palace used by the Emperor for rest, a man and woman were enjoying a secret tryst.
He recognized the Emperor's dark hair and sharply defined face without difficulty. The man, his curly hair hanging loose over broad shoulders built of bone and muscle, lounged lazily in his chair while idly caressing a woman's waist.
He carefully examined the slender woman leaning against the Emperor. Other than her long, light-colored hair and a figure so perfectly proportioned that it felt unnatural, he noticed nothing remarkable about her.
Just what was it about this woman that had driven the Emperor of the Empire to break the oath he had sworn before God and cast away his honor?
As he looked at her in silent curiosity, the woman suddenly lifted her eyes, as though she had sensed his gaze.
In an instant, every hair on his body stood on end. His skin turned cold, as though something unimaginably dangerous stood before him.
The woman stared directly at him before narrowing her eyes into a mocking smile. Then she seized the Emperor by the hair and pulled him roughly toward her. She handled the most exalted person in the Empire as though he were nothing more than an insignificant possession.
Within those arrogant hands, the ruler who had seemed forged from steel collapsed like a castle of sand. Their bodies, overflowing with vitality, clung greedily to one another beneath the brilliant sunlight.
“Filthy beasts.”
Gareth muttered like a growling animal.
“He brought that woman to the detached palace a week ago and started this disgusting affair. That bitch even dared to set her filthy feet in the gardens of the Empress's Palace and humiliate my mother.”
The boy's bloodshot eyes, fixed upon the tangled couple, were filled with fury.
Gripping the railing tightly with both hands, he spat the words through clenched teeth.
“That's why Mother drank poison. Because of that filthy whore......”
Gareth's body trembled violently before he suddenly kicked over a cabinet in a fit of rage. Then he began trampling everything that spilled onto the floor.
The violent outburst only ended after every object in the room had been smashed to pieces.
“I will become Emperor no matter what. And when I do, I'll force that woman to kneel before me and pour the very poison my mother drank straight down her throat.”
Standing amid the wreckage, breathing heavily, the boy turned tear-soaked eyes toward him.
“When that day comes, your role is to drag that prostitute before me and force her onto her knees. I'll become Emperor of the Empire, and you'll become the ruler of the East and my closest confidant. Together we'll repay the humiliation Mother suffered.”
He turned his gaze back beneath the railing.
Over the image of the two lovers embracing each other in broad daylight, the figure of the steadily wasting Bernadette overlapped.
She was the one who had rescued him from a place no different from a prison and raised him like her own child for seven years.
Why was it that he could not feel the same overwhelming fury as Gareth?
All he felt was pity for the Empress and a faint disgust toward their conduct.
Gareth suddenly seized the hem of his clothes.
“You'll do it, won't you, Brother?”
Varkas lowered his gaze again and met Gareth's unstable eyes.
He could not share the boy's emotions, but he clearly understood one thing.
He owed the Empress a debt that could never be repaid.
He reached out and gently smoothed Gareth's disheveled curls.
At that moment, the young boy's figure suddenly crumbled away like sand. The scenery surrounding him also faded like smoke.
The next instant, he found himself standing in one corner of a dim corridor shrouded in darkness.
Somewhere, he heard quiet sobbing.