Someone said that people exist because they think.

It was a phrase I had read somewhere. As a prince, I had to be careful even when reading a book, so after ascending to the throne, Idren read countless books to catch up on the reading he had missed.

In one of those books, there was such a sentence.

I don’t know why that phrase, which I had passed over without much feeling at the time, comes to mind now.

Idren sarcastically twisted those words that espoused an extremely idealistic and exploratory philosophy. Then do I not exist?

But he existed and life was ongoing.

So it seems some lives roll on without thought.

Idren raised his head after reaching this conclusion. A road close to wilderness stretched out before his eyes.

They were now heading towards the Kirios Mountains for war with Brinwell.

As they got closer to the northern mountains, the wind grew fiercer. It would soon be summer, but the land beyond Edegrun was always frozen.

And he almost reflexively thought of the woman whose birthday was in summer.

Born in a country used as a synonym for spring, a woman who gave the impression of snow. A woman who was painfully honest one day and told nothing the next. Who made him an terribly easy person whenever she felt like it…

“Ophelia.”

The coldness he felt when he held her hand still remained under his skin.

“That can’t be. Ophelia, Ophelia…”

The words he had stumbled over to deny her actions.

“…Why won’t time go back?”

The time he had clung to irrational things, even giving up on denial.

Idren didn’t know how to shake it off.

Now he acknowledged that there are things in the world that cannot be done through effort.

He acknowledged that what he had was not hope but recklessness, and that love was not something so petty, vague, and stubborn.

But even acknowledging all of that didn’t bring the woman back to life, and he couldn’t return to how he was before.

He had been bound to the other for too long to live as he did before. The foundation stone he had built from age thirteen could not be torn down, even though he had laid it with his own hands.

Even despair was late. Getting hurt was the same. He was cursedly late for everything.

The debt of overdue emotions piled up to an unmanageable degree, and Idren finally gave up on settling it. Instead of counting the debt owed, he decided to bury it deep where it wouldn’t be noticed.

But God kicked him in the chest again just as he was trying to crawl out of the pit.

The moment he decided to accept that Ophelia had died, regardless of the reasons and process, Idren felt as if the ground beneath his feet was collapsing. The meaning of that sensation he had once felt in the hallway of Reden’s palace was singular.

When he opened his eyes again and saw the sky of the canal spread above him, Idren thought for the first time that he wanted to quit living.

Though it must have been air he had felt without issue until yesterday, he couldn’t breathe. The insides of people’s eyes churned, and thinking of a future he couldn’t even predict made everything go dark.

To the extent that if Ophelia had felt exactly this, he could understand why she had taken her own life.

But Idren did not hang himself or throw himself from a high place.

Instead, he took care of things he hadn’t done or had done too late in his past life.

He killed the southern lords entangled in crimes with him, including Taeran Rohos, and beheaded the long-standing nobles of Edegrun, ignoring customs and traditions. He didn’t bother counting the number of families he had exterminated. There was no time for that.

The wealth confiscated from those he killed was immediately used as war funds. Brinwell had held him back the first and second time. To prevent the same thing from happening again, he had to trample them in advance.

Not everyone agreed with what he was doing.

Idren knew that the eyes of the royalist elders looking at him had changed. More and more people were regarding him as a dark lord succeeding the previous king. Chesa and the head chamberlain, who had all but put him on the throne, also seemed to wonder what they had done.

But he didn’t care.

Living like this, it seemed someone might grab him by the scruff of the neck and hang him in the execution grounds, just as he had done to his father. It was the outcome one could expect when a king with no one to trust his back to acted without regard for reputation.

If he wanted to die like that, it would have been better to jump from the castle walls, but Idren didn’t do that.

It was stupid to the point of being disgusting, but he still had the delusion that if he presented the woman with different options, the future might change.

He couldn’t bring himself to attach the word hope to that senseless emotion. But even knowing his thoughts were close to those of a madman, Idren couldn’t discard or change them.

How could he want to kill himself while also desperately wanting to live with someone?

Because facing his own contradictions was too nauseating, Idren gave up thinking. Only then did his conflicting ego and pride die.

When he gave up on judging right and wrong or rationality and irrationality, there was only one thing he felt.

Terrible fatigue.

He admitted it. Now he was tired.

After repeating age twenty-three several times, Idren was weary of life.

If Ophelia had felt this way, he could understand why she had grown tired of him. How noisy and grating he must have been.

Nevertheless, the reason he was heading towards the snow-covered mountains was singular.

Because his longing for a woman he had never held dominated even his fatigue.

When he stopped thinking, the reason to restrain his greed also disappeared.

A lit wick believes it can burn the whole room, not knowing it’s trapped in a glass lamp.

Idren couldn’t tell how he was any different from that wick.

Just as a lamp can’t extinguish itself, he felt he wouldn’t be able to stop this greed until his head was cut off.

After gazing at the wilderness before him for a moment, he gestured. The red-haired knight waiting nearby read the hand signal and called for the advance. Idren spurred his horse before the mobile unit that had read the commander’s signal could move.

In any case, the mountains were ahead, and he had to cross them.

This man must have really gone mad.

As they drew closer to Edegrun, Ophelia became more convinced of this thought.

At first, she had only thought he was upset with her.

But as she followed his actions, she came to think that such things couldn’t be done out of simple discontent.

How on earth does he plan to deal with the aftermath of this?

She had never questioned his choices before, thinking his political sense was better than hers, but seeing the heads hanging from every castle they came across made her think this involuntarily.

The Idren she knew wasn’t like this.

Perhaps because he had gained the throne through rebellion, he adhered to procedures and norms more than other kings. He was as wary of losing public support as he was of losing the lords’ backing, and he didn’t particularly like bloodshed.

But as she encountered one after another of the things he had done, Ophelia began to wonder if this was really the same man she had known.

She wasn’t the only one bewildered.

“…To think His Majesty would do such things.”

When they encountered the third castle with the heads of an entire family hanging in a row, Ophelia heard Penrel mutter.

The knight quickly closed his mouth with an expression of having made a mistake, but the perplexity etched on his face didn’t fade so easily.

Instead of rebuking the knight for voicing his master’s flaw, Ophelia said,

“We need to get to Edegrun as quickly as possible.”

Penrel, who might have hidden his true feelings to some extent at other times given he was before a foreign princess, immediately agreed.

“I will readjust the schedule.”

And true to his word, the knight made them ride without rest.

Meanwhile, they encountered severed heads several more times, and the worry on Penrel’s face deepened.

One night, with just a few days left until they reached Edegrun, the knight came to her and carefully said,

“If anything threatening to His Majesty occurs in the capital, I will ensure your safe return to your home country.”

“Unless the king withdraws his proposal, that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?”

“…It would be better for me to be beheaded than for Your Highness to come to harm and cause conflict between our countries.”

Ophelia looked down at the knight who was assuming that the monarch he had long served might cut off his head.

“I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s no need to send me back.”

This knight didn’t know, but she knew something.

Of course, seeing what Idren had done… he seemed a bit different from the man she had known, but Ophelia could be certain of one thing.

“The king won’t threaten me.”

After saying those words, Ophelia realized she had sounded like someone reaching out her hand in front of a beast’s cage.

But words once spoken couldn’t be taken back, so she avoided the gaze of the knight who was now looking at her as if she would soon have her hand bitten off.

Several days had passed since that conversation.

Ophelia raised the curtain of the window that had been lowered all this time.

The gray castle walls, more densely hung with heads than ever before, came into view.

It was Edegrun.