Chapter 35: Sentences Left Behind

My lessons resumed. It had been exactly a week since the chaos erupted from the Goddess coming to see me. Mitchel had returned to the Temple, and Felix, who had been pathologically obsessed with my condition, was finally beginning to loosen his grip on me a fraction.

Naturally, Zeimer was right there with me from the very start of the lesson today. It seemed his anxiety was overflowing every bit as much as Felix’s.

“Zeimer, just go.”

“I’ll leave soon.”

Despite bringing a whole armful of his own work as if he intended to sit there until the bitter end, he offered a shameless, harmless smile while claiming he would leave shortly. I shot him a look of utter disbelief.

He clearly intended to plant himself down somewhere, whether it was the sofa or the desk. As we engaged in this silent war of nerves, the sound of a knock and the door opening made me turn my head first.

“Hello, Teacher.”

“Hello, Lord Ian. It has been a while. Are you feeling any better?”

Seeing her face after a week, when I’d only met her twice before, felt a bit awkward. Of course, Teacher Anne was naturally brusque, but I felt a strange sense of shame, as if I couldn’t look her in the eye. This world was a difficult place to live when you were faking an illness.

True to form, Teacher started the lesson the moment our brief greetings wrapped up. Perhaps because I had missed a week, she explained that we wouldn’t be tackling new material; instead, we would review the previous two lessons before ending early. The class wrapped up much faster than usual.

“We will proceed normally starting next lesson. Do you have any final questions?”

“Excuse me…”

I hesitated, reading her expression for a moment before finally speaking up.

“Go ahead.”

“I have a notebook that I used to write in by myself, a few years ago.”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering… if you could take a look at it for me…”

No matter how softly I whispered, there was no way Zeimer—who was still holding his ground on the sofa—wouldn’t hear me. Still, I lowered my voice and let my words trail off. Teacher Anne was here to instruct me, so while it was a bit embarrassing, it wasn’t shameful; but asking or getting caught by my friends felt entirely mortifying.

“Of course. Where is the notebook?”

I gestured toward the desk with a tilt of my chin. Unless someone had moved it, it should still be sitting right there—the things that a version of me from several years younger had meticulously jotted down. Catching my drift, Teacher Anne started to approach the desk, only to be cut off as Zeimer stepped directly into her path.

“What is it? I’ll grab it for you.”

Teacher Anne backed down, looking a bit overwhelmed by Zeimer’s intense aura as she turned back to me. I couldn’t blame her for losing against Zeimer. Praying that he wouldn’t actually open the notebook, I called out an explanation to him as he walked toward the desk.

“It’s a notebook with a brown cover. There’s a faded purple stamp from a general store on the bottom edge of it.”

There was only a single notebook on my desk, so there was no real need for such an exhaustive description, but I dragged out the explanation anyway. Part of me desperately hoped he wouldn’t see the words ‘Swordsmanship Stances’ scribbled unevenly across the cover.

Zeimer scanned the desk and ended up pulling out not just my notebook, but all the other books stacked there as well. The basic alphabet workbook I had acquired when I first entered the palace, along with two foundational magic texts. I couldn’t conceal my dismay. Zeimer stared intently at the books as if measuring them, then called my name.

“Ian.”

“Ye-yes?”

“Do you mind if I take a look at these?”

Seeing those tattered, worn pieces of paper held in Zeimer’s perfectly clean hands created a striking, uncomfortable contrast. Feeling my face burn as if I were being stripped naked by the sight of those yellowed pages, I shook my head.

“…No.”

Though I expected him to stubborn it out and keep hold of the books, Zeimer unexpectedly complied without a fight. He slotted them neatly back into place and walked quietly back to me, holding only my notebook.

“Here you go.”

I accepted the notebook from him and offered a small nod of appreciation.

“Thank you.”

Zeimer stared down at me intently for a moment, then suddenly cleared the items off the sofa table with a flick of his wrist. It looked rather comical watching the papers and folders float mid-air, stacking themselves neatly. Meanwhile, Teacher Anne flipped the notebook open.

“I’ll take off then, since your lesson is practically finished. Ilya will be dropping by for lunch later. Enjoy your meal, and I’ll see you later.”

Zeimer departed rather abruptly, and I shifted my focus to the notebook I had spent a full year filling out, six years ago.

Though it was absurd to think two days of lessons would change anything, this was something I had written when I first arrived at the palace. Since I had spent the subsequent five years reading books, my skills had technically improved compared to back then; a single glance at the pages revealed so many spelling errors that my face turned crimson entirely on its own.

Asking her to look over this felt embarrassing, and it felt like I was simply wasting Teacher Anne’s time, so I gently reached out to pull the open notebook away from her hands.

“Teacher, I think I’ll just do this by myself later. I’m sorry.”

At that, Teacher Anne’s grip on the notebook tightened firmly.

“No. Let us do it today. We finished earlier than usual, and my workload is light today anyway.”

Her eyes flashed behind her sharp spectacles.

“Would you care to try correcting them yourself first, Lord Ian? These are not difficult sections. The volume is quite large, so let us just aim for five pages today.”

As if reluctant to ruin the notebook where I had clumsily pressed down with my pen, Teacher pulled out a fresh sheet of paper. She copied down the numbers I had assigned to each swordsmanship stance and handed it over to me.

“Here. Please write the corrections cleanly onto this.”

I dipped the quill back into the ink, gripped it tightly, and carefully etched out each character one by one. Leaving the diagrams aside, the awkward handwriting scrawled across the paper was hideous to look at. Unlike tracing massive letters into the dirt with a tree branch back at the orphanage, manipulating a thin, fragile quill to write small text was incredibly difficult. Naturally, my handwriting was practically painful to look at.

Because of that, once the initial period of arriving at the palace and needing to record everything had passed, I avoided writing anything new. I was simply too ashamed of myself. Fortunately, because I had kept reading books, my grasp on spelling itself had improved significantly.

I had sketched about five or six diagrams per page. I had kept them as minimal as possible just so I could recognize the arm placements or foot movements, meaning that even with my total lack of artistic talent, I had managed to fill it with quite a few drawings.

Each time I finished correcting a page, Teacher would accept the sheet, mark the remaining errors in red ink, and hand me a new piece of paper pre-numbered for the next page of the notebook. Interspersed between the stances, she noticed random phrases I had written that had absolutely nothing to do with swordsmanship. Though she looked slightly bewildered as to whether she should number those as well, she soon began assigning them numbers anyway.

1. Walking sideways -> Striking downward from above
2. This time, I want to live too.
3. Ordinary stride -> Shifting diagonally -> Thrusting
4. Cleaving and lifting -> Swinging
5. Chest and shoulders in one direction -> Raising to eye level
6. I want to rest.

“Still, your corrections are mostly accurate.”

Teacher offered the praise with a completely blank face. Rather than feeling pure joy, I lowered my head in embarrassment. To my eyes, many of the old spellings still looked correct, but since I knew they were wrong, I had simply substituted other words to guess my way through a lot of them.

“By the way, may I ask what these sentences mean?”

Teacher Anne, who had been marking the paper with red ink, hesitated slightly before asking. I answered noncommitally.

“They’re just things I scribbled down when I first came to the palace years ago.”

She looked puzzled, but I didn’t dwell on it. I had no desire to pick apart thoughts I had recorded more than five years ago.

The moment Zeimer stepped out of Ian’s room and closed the door behind him, he leaned heavily against the wall and dragged both hands down his face. A deep, heavy sigh leaked through the gaps of his fingers before he could stop it.

“Dammit.”

The quills resting on the desk were of poor quality, their nibs completely blunted. The cheap ink had long since dried and hardened into a solid crust.

The books he had picked up were so thoroughly worn by hands that their covers were slick and polished, and from how many times they had been opened, air had wedged itself between the pages, leaving them swollen. The crinkled edges looked as though they had been dulled by touch a long time ago.

Ian hadn’t wanted him to look inside. It was undoubtedly because he didn’t want anyone to see his clumsy, unpolished self.

Zeimer recalled how Ian had averted his eyes, the tips of his ears flushed a soft pink. Watching those lost eyes darting here and there had left a sharp ache in his chest. Ian was a being who didn’t need to be bound by the trivial customs of ordinary humans. He was, quite literally, the final mercy sent down by the Goddess.

Without even realizing the posture he was taking, Zeimer slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. Through the crack of the door, the quiet murmurs of the conversation between Ian and Annabeth drifted out.

He lost track of how long he stayed like that, staring blankly into space, until the focus suddenly snapped back into his eyes. An interesting question had left Annabeth’s lips.

“By the way, may I ask what these sentences mean?”

Just before leaving, Zeimer had caught sight of a sentence written in the open notebook. His memory, which could recall everything with photographic precision, performed its function flawlessly today as well.

‘This time, I want to live too.’

Zeimer clenched his fist so tightly his short-trimmed nails dug painfully into his palm. Had everything truly been entirely pointless? Had Ian already known everything from the very beginning?

The effort to erase every single trace, to wipe away even my own memories just to protect you—had it all been entirely useless from the start?

You had walked straight into that place, fully aware of everything.

Something massive wedged itself tightly in his chest, cutting off his breath and refusing to let it circulate.

Zeimer’s eyes blurred for a fraction of a second before clearing. Everything as the Goddess wills. He had absolutely no intention of letting it play out that way this time. The one who harbored the Dragon was obligated to struggle with everything he had to tear himself free from that destiny.

Zeimer’s eyes flashed a brilliant, vivid blue. It was the Dragon.