* * *
I repeated what I’d just heard to the person standing before me, who looked utterly disbelieving.
“What? Count De Winter has been imprisoned?”
“Yes… for regicide,” the man stammered, clearly hesitant.
It was Zeu, one of Haen’s subordinates.
He had been sent here and now added that strange, incomprehensible phrase so carefully.
Regicide.
The word felt both foreign and oddly familiar as I mouthed it, prompting a dry laugh to escape from me—Hessia.
It hadn’t even been a few months since I cleaned up the last mess, and now this?
It’s been, what, half a year?
Two seasons?
“The duke is dead. So we must find a new one. We can’t leave the ducal house unattended.”
The man I served wasn’t someone worthy of high regard, but Haen—he had been someone who, despite the betrayal everyone in the estate felt, kept his head and vowed to protect the ducal house.
He maintained reason when everyone else fell into chaos.
So why would he suddenly kill the heir, a collateral line we struggled so hard to recover?
“What was the reason? Was this duke another piece of trash too?”
The question slipped out more in frustration than anything else, and Zeu hesitated before finally responding.
“…Actually, the count had been suffering from madness.”
“Madness? …But he didn’t show any signs of it.”
He often visited me, looking pale like someone who had just awoken from a long nightmare.
But madness?
No, I never saw any signs.
As I racked my brain, recalling Haen’s occasional hand tremors and his murmuring of strange, incoherent things, Zeu continued, a faraway look in his eyes.
“After Lord Vivisian was fully cleared of all charges, the count’s condition worsened. Starting that evening… whenever he slept, he would try to kill someone in the castle. At first, everyone assumed it was a form of violent sleepwalking—he never harmed anyone unless physically stopped. But recently, someone actually got hurt. Just when everyone was about to raise the alert… this morning, the count went to the duke’s quarters and killed him.”
There didn’t seem to be a clear connection between his madness and the murder.
If anything, it sounded like he just attacked whoever was in front of him.
But now they say he went to the duke?
“What the hell is this…”
I had hoped I could finally go back to Vivisian, but everything was tangled up again.
Among the elders, there were some who accepted Letiyan’s guilt but still resented me for how I handled it.
And now even Haen—the one most lenient toward me—ended up like this.
I had no idea how this would play out now.
“Do I need to play the prince card again? Stir up the past and drag the empire into this mess…”
If this escalated into a conflict between nations, it would be the weak who suffered.
Vivisian—who had started this whole mess—would never want that.
And I, Hessia, who had traveled far and met so many people, hated seeing the powerless get caught up in the battles of the powerful.
“Damn it… I’m going to lose my mind. The count asked to see me, right? I need to see him. Take me to him.”
Zeu nodded and led the way to the prison where Haen was being held.
The knight standing guard stepped aside without issue—likely informed in advance.
The prison door creaked open easily.
I stood there for a moment, simply staring.
“I’ll wait here and make sure no one else goes in,” Zeu said. “There’s a lamp inside, but the floor is very slippery, so please be careful. Count De Winter is the only one inside, in the solitary cell at the very end.”
I nodded, and without hesitation, stepped into the dark prison.
The heavy door slammed shut behind me, echoing through the cold corridor.
A chill crept into my bones from the icy drafts that slipped through the cracks between the prison walls.
“It’s damn cold in here.”
There were no real windows—just small slits that barely deserved the name.
But even those couldn’t be the source of all this wind.
The entire place was built like this.
Prisons are meant to hold people, make them reflect, or isolate them from society—but the dungeon under the ducal estate seemed to exist simply to let people rot away and die.
And Vivisian spent over eight years in here, starting at age fifteen, marked with a sealing spell on his heart that could explode at any moment.
There’s just no way to ever like this place.
With a stiff expression, I followed the dim light, moving carefully.
Even a faint glow can cast a shadow, and my silhouette flickered across the walls, only to vanish again into the grime.
I walked for what felt like a long time before reaching the end.
There he was.
Haen sat upright on the bed, staring into space.
As soon as he sensed my presence, he turned toward me.
His face, pale as death, showed a brief flash of relief.
“Thank goodness. I thought I would die without seeing you again.”
He said it almost like a joke, but it wasn’t something to laugh off.
I felt that instinctively and halted a few steps short of the iron bars in front of him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Oh, it’s simple. There’s someone trying to kill me.”
He said it flatly, almost casually.
“The emperor of this country, to be exact.”
His expression was calm—eerily serene—as if he had come to fully accept everything that was happening.
“So the murder of the duke was a conspiracy, too?”
I asked, just in case.
Haen shrugged and leaned back against the wall, looking more at ease than I had ever seen him under the daylight.
Resting his hands on his stomach, he began to hum a lullaby that sounded familiar.
The only light in the room came from the tiny slit near the ceiling, but his voice filled the space.
“I did kill the duke.”
His face was too calm for someone confessing to murder.
It wasn’t guilt I saw—but someone resigned to fate, as though he were following a prophecy that led him to his own ruin.
“Or maybe… the duke offered himself willingly. It’s a matter of perspective.”
“What are you talking about? Speak clearly, Count.”
I scoffed, frustrated by this cryptic talk that bordered on incomprehensible.
Then Haen, still not really looking at me despite facing my way, suddenly muttered,
“I keep seeing Vivi. Do you see him too, Your Highness?”
It was random—completely out of nowhere—but it explained every erratic thing he’d done until now.
“You see Vivi?”
“Yes. So vividly.”
His voice was firm, yet dreamlike, as though walking through a memory.
His eyes, floating in that distant place, slowly turned toward me.
“The ducal house will be wiped out. And even if it survives, the royal family will take over its management.”
“And you… you wanted that to happen?”
“Seems like it.”
It was a chilling thing to hear from the man who supposedly loved the ducal house more than anyone else.
Haen had loved the ducal house so much that he imprisoned his closest friend.
So much that he led every campaign, no matter how brutal, to protect it.
His life had been entirely about service—about making the house flourish, and at the very least, avoiding the worst outcomes.
But that man… no longer existed.
“To think that everything I’ve done was wrong from the start… Your Highness, could you accept such a situation? I thought I chose the lesser evil to avoid the worst. But it turns out I threw away the best, the most precious thing, with my own hands… and chose the worst.”
All my paths, all my choices…
Haen, who had been speaking calmly, finally revealed a mess of tangled emotions at the end.
Hesia, who had pitied him and resented him at the same time for a regret that came too late, blinked slowly.
“So what are you trying to say? I’m sorry to say this, but honestly, I don’t feel that sorry for you, Count. In the end, it was all your choice. Choosing not to trust Vivi, choosing to stand by while everything happened to him.”
Haen couldn’t deny those words.
He simply nodded with a faint understanding.
After all, the reason he sought out Hesia was because Hesia was perhaps the only truly innocent one in this duchy—no, in the entire empire.
The only one who was kind to Vivisian.
The only one who believed in his goodness.
The one who, no matter what anyone said, defended his kindness and said, “That can’t be true.”
He had walked a path completely opposite to Haen’s— Haen, who had stood at the very front, crying out Vivisian’s guilt.
While Hesia had stood at the front of another battle, abandoning everything, just to proclaim Vivisian’s innocence.
Love couldn’t do much—but sometimes, caring for someone could bring about miracles.
Surely, Vivisian had loved someone like Hesia.
Haen, who had been quietly watching that pale, beautiful face often stained by regret, whispered softly:
“I plan to kill myself today.”
If he didn’t make the choice himself, then someone else would bring death to him.
* * *
