“Oi, Estelle, put this on for me real quick.”

  Mother handed me a blindfold.

  I blinked, staring at it as I settled down into the chair in the otherwise empty room.

  A grand runic circle stretched from wall-to-wall underneath me.

  I hesitantly accepted it, looking at it inquisitively.

  “What’s this about?”

  Mother just sighed.

  “It’s just a safety precaution. You know, relating to that. I think you have a decent picture of it by now. Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing weird and I don’t expect anything to go wrong, just the standard paranoia and thoroughness that a witch has to have when it comes to experiments. It’ll isolate anything from trying to reach your eyes in case the absolute worst case scenario happens. Which, again, should be impossible, but every Citadel witch learns to be paranoid and to protect against the impossible as standard procedure.”

  “I hope Luna doesn’t try to learn something like that,” I mumbled.

  “Eh,” Mother just shrugged, picking up her chalk again to add one final layer to the inscriptions surrounding me, “she’s a softie. She doesn’t have the heart to actually get into the Citadel, she’ll snap out of it eventually. The awakening might be a little rude though, watch over her for me, yeah? I only get to see you two on weekends now.”

  I nodded absently, fiddling with the offered blindfold.

  I was participating in another one of Mother’s tests to figure out what exactly was running around in my mind.

  I was normally a bit hesitant to be Mother’s lab rat for the day, but this time, I ran at the opportunity.

  I just wanted to distract myself from what had happened yesterday, with Hayate and his…

  Confession.

  I-...

  I didn’t even know how to start pulling my thoughts together.

  I was at least offered a small mercy by him, being told that I didn’t have to answer him immediately, and I could get back to him over the weekends.

  I took that mercy and ran home immediately, desperately trying to avoid thinking about the subject.

  I didn’t even have it in me to tease Luna about it.

  I really just wanted to think about anything else.

  My eyes idly trailed over to the gleaming, iridescent crystal being tossed around in Mother’s other hand.

  It was… strange. It looked too perfect, too prismatic, almost reeking with otherworldly, unfathomable arcane energies.

  “What is today’s test even about? What is that crystal?” I stared at it as it spun through the air, up and down.

  “Hm? This thing?” Mother snatched the crystal out of the air, standing up and flipping it around to look at the strange object from several different angles, “Yeah, freaky, isn’t it? Don’t worry though, it’s not like Azybantum or anything. Not an extraplanar anomaly like I usually work with. Just a fancy new discovery from the Citadel that’s got everyone up in a tizzy. Expensive as shit, hope it’s worth the price.”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s called ‘Memorium’. Not gonna get into the details of how it was discovered or how to refine it. Shit’s gnarly. All you need to know is that it’s ultra rare, ultra difficult to stabilise, costs a small fortune, and has the potential to blow open just about every single field of study. Might be one of the most revolutionary discoveries ever. Well, at least until the Paradox Engine gets up and running.”

  She snorted, finding her own delusions of grandeur to be a tiny bit amusing.

  “I’m guessing it has something to do with memories?” I frowned.

  “Yeah, they really weren’t that creative when it came to naming the damn thing, were they?” Mother rolled her eyes.

  She circled around the chalk circle beneath me, scribbling as she scuttled around.

  “It’s capable of some really strange shit, mostly relating to the mind and mental energies. Responds really uniquely to the brain’s signals, and has a really weird affinity for memories particularly. It has the ability to latch onto memories, scan them, form an imprint of them, then crystallise a copy of them inside of its lattices.”

  The impossibly radiant crystal held a dream-like shimmer to it as I followed it across the room with my eyes.

  “Manifesting memories and crystallising them. Turning unspoken thoughts and incommunicable concepts into reality. Hell, in a sense, they literally turn dreams into reality. Has all sorts of implications. Can turn binding oaths into fonts of power, enforce arcane contracts through the law of the world itself, all sorts of nonsensical stuff. It’s so weird that even I can find some use for it.”

  The constant scratching of chalk came to an end.

  “There we go, that’s good enough, I think.”

  She tossed the stick of chalk away lazily.

  “Alright, hopefully, if everything goes according to plan, and all my calculations are correct, here’s what should happen. This ritual will let your brain resonate with this bit of Memorium, and it will synchronise with your memories. It’ll pull ‘em from your head, then crystallise them inside of itself. Hopefully, I can use that data to nail down exactly what the hell’s going on when it comes to why Null energy seeks you out so much.”

  I paused.

  “I-it’s not going to… steal them, or anything, right?” I wriggled uncomfortably a little bit.

  “Nah, don’t worry about anything like that. It’ll just create a copy of them, you’re not gonna lose the set of memories in your head.”

  “A-are you going to watch them?” I blushed.

  I trusted her with my life, and Manusyara was a weird place, filled with magic and all sorts of strange fantastical creatures…

  But it still would have been really weird to discover your daughter used to be a young man in his twenties from a completely alien world, no?

  “Maybe in like a decade, that’ll be possible,” Mother shrugged, “we currently don’t know how to do stuff of that level just yet. All the data’s kind of just unformatted gibberish, we just know that it’s definitely meant to make up a person’s memories and mindscape. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

  She flicked me in the forehead, earning a flinch from me.

  Ow.

  They only got stronger with time.

  I guess she was holding back when I was younger, and she thought I could handle it now.

  Mother just chuckled.

  “Don’t worry your silly little head about that stuff. Those are your memories. The time you spent before I picked you up is yours alone to remember.”

  She nodded towards me, gesturing at the blindfold I was still fidgeting with in my hands.

  “Alright, kid, let’s get this over with. Put it on.”

  I sighed.

  It looked like I couldn’t delay any longer.

  I pulled the blindfold over my eyes and tied it behind my head.

  I vaguely felt the world around me light up.

  My consciousness felt clear all of a sudden.

  All those decades of memories rushed through my mind.

  Every last second, minute, hour and day that I had ever spent on this planet and the one before it, flashing with crystal-clear clarity, as if they were happening right in front of me in the present moment, all at once.

  And the world dimmed again.

  And all I saw was the darkness of the blindfold.

  “Alright, we’re good.”

  I blinked behind the cloth.

  “Huh? That quick?”

  “Yup.”

  “That was… anti-climactic.”

  I was expecting something a bit more intense or involved, given the delicate hours of setup this had taken.

  Great, what now?

  I was hoping to be distracted for a little bit longer.

  I squirmed uncomfortably as I took the blindfold off, just watching awkwardly as Mother cleaned up the chalk.

  “Something wrong, kid?” She arched an eyebrow at me, noticing I hadn’t moved from the chair in several minutes.

  “U-umm… is there anything I can help you out with?” I looked down shyly, fidgeting with the blindfold.

  Mother stopped.

  She looked at me for a few seconds, before frowning.

  “Something happen over the week? You usually sound a bit more… I dunno, alive? When you want to help me out.”

  I flinched.

  I was really easy to read, huh?

  “U-uhh…” I twirled my braid in my fingers.

  I felt the embarrassment and awkwardness creep in.

  My cheeks grew hot.

  “H-have you… “ I mumbled, “h-have you ever… b-been… confessed to? O-or… had a crush on someone?”

  “...”

  “...”

  An awkward silence passed.

  “Huh,” Mother eventually just made a simple sound of surprise.

  She raised a curious eyebrow.

  “Wadatsumi finally get the courage to ask you out? Wow, that’s surprising. Thought he would have fumbled around for like another four years at minimum. The noble kids are usually clueless on how to court someone without an engagement or an introduction from their parents.”

  “W-was it that obvious?” I felt the heat in my face intensify.

  Mother snorted.

  “I mean, yeah, kinda.”

  Seriously, did everyone except me know?

  Was that why Kagura and Setsuna kept calling me thick and dense?

  Mother chuckled.

  “Well, I don’t think I’m in that much of a position to tease you about it, though.”

  She snapped her fingers.

  From a forgotten corner of the room, something buzzed and whirred, coming to life with mechanical groans.

  The impossible machine that she called the ‘Helios Engine’ floated to her side, humming vibrantly as its incomprehensible mechanisms spun around.

  She stroked it lovingly.

  Her eyes softened, and a fond smile spread across her lips.

  “I always was rather hopeless myself. Don’t think you would have found someone more clueless about romance than me in my youth.”

  She laughed loudly.

  “How long did he spend pining after me? Who knows, honestly? Maybe it was since the first time we met. I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t care about anything other than my research and my dreams. I didn’t realise he felt something for me until many years down the line, and only after I started falling in love with him.”

  The machine hummed comfortingly as her fingers passed by its interlocking rings and gears.

  “But to answer you, no, I was never confessed to. I never had to struggle with how to deal with other people having feelings for me. I was too much of an idiot to ever even consider it. And he… he respected that. He never pushed his feelings onto me before I was prepared to deal with them. He just… let me deal with the feelings in my own time, let me come to my own realisation of what he meant to me.”

  Mother walked up and ruffled my hair.

  “Sorry, I can’t be of much help. We just skipped over that embarrassing part of our teenage years. By the time we got together, it had long since passed the phase of simple teenage crushes. We were fully-fledged emotionally mature adults, prepared to spend the rest of our lives together.”

  I bit my lip.

  “W-what was it like? Being in love?”

  “...”

  Mother smiled warmly, caressing the Helios Engine again.

  “Well, that’s a loaded question, isn’t it?” she chuckled, her voice full of wistful nostalgia.

  She closed her eyes, pondering the matter.

  “Hmm, let’s see, how do I explain this… what did it feel like, hm? What does love mean to me…”

  She chuckled to herself, her voice underlined with a small bit of melancholy.

  “I guess some small part of that stupid brat still lingers in me. I’m still not very good at talking about my emotions, even after everything. Well, I don’t know that I can tell you how it feels, but I can tell you what it didn’t involve, and I’ll tell you what I thought about when we spent time together.”

  Mother lifted her hand, raising the Helios Engine to eye level, staring right into its glimmering core.

  “It wasn’t physical. It wasn’t about how he looked, about what his body felt like. Didn’t have anything to do with personality, either. Wasn’t because he was cheery, or optimistic, or dumb as bricks, or anything like that. Wasn’t because of what he was either. Couldn’t give a rat’s ass that he was the son of some fallen noble lineage, or a promising knight or whatever. None of that mattered to me.”

  The soft infinity of the Helios Engine’s light warmly wrapped around its owner’s palm, massaging her wrists with its familiar touch.

  “The only thing that mattered was that when he was by my side, I didn’t need to think about anything. I didn’t need to worry about my research, I didn’t need to think about my dreams, I could just be there with him. Nothing else mattered. It was just him and I, alone, underneath the stars.”

  She looked up and away, towards the distant peak of Vertandhi, where those precious memories laid at rest.

  “I would close my eyes, and I would see the two of us, old and grey, surrounded by children and grandchildren. For me… that’s all it was. The knowledge that he would be by my side, all the way into the future. It was certainty. It was comfort. No matter what… we would be there for each other. He was my everything, and I was his in return.”

  She looked back at the contraption in her hands, chuckling.

  She smiled wryly.

  “I guess it still is that way, even after he’s departed. It hasn’t changed even though he isn’t physically here anymore. Those feelings, those memories… they’re eternal. I still carry that last part of him with me, no matter where I go.”

  She flicked the Helios Engine, letting a metallic clang ring across the room.

  “Sorry, I’m not being very helpful in figuring out how to navigate a confession, am I?” She smiled with a small bit of chagrin, her fond, remembering eyes flicking towards me.

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  “N-no, it’s fine,” I shook my head, “t-thank you either way, Mother, for sharing your thoughts with me.”

  “Well, if you-”

  Before she could say anything else, a familiar alarm went off.

  Mother made a sour face.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, really?”

  She sighed.

  Not a second later, the strangely normal sound of an exploding house, followed by scattering wood and crumbling furniture, echoed through the trembling room.

  “Ah, well… there’s Chang’e, I guess,” Mother grimaced, her voice containing no panic, only resignation.

  We really were getting a bit too used to having the house completely destroyed every couple of months, weren’t we?

  “ESTELLE~ AUNTIE CHANG’E IS BACK!”

  I giggled at the look of misery on Mother’s face as she prepared to fix half of the house again.

  “Well, uh,” she sluggishly continued cleaning up the chalk on the floor, “have a good day, I guess.”

  “I will,” I nodded simply.

  Maybe Auntie Chang’e would prove a bit more useful in taking my mind off things.

  Chang’e’s distraction was less helpful than I would have liked, unfortunately.

  I couldn’t help but keep thinking back on all of those troubles and doubts.

  How was I supposed to respond to Hayate’s confession?

  I had never even considered the idea of romance in this life.

  The only thing I wanted to think about right now was whether or not Luna would grow up healthily, and if there was any way I could fix my poor grades in magic classes.

  Sure, I was planning on travelling the world and eventually finding someone to share everything I had with, but that was just a distant dream that I didn’t think I would have to actually think about until years, if not decades down the line.

  What would that person look like? What would they do? What was their personality like?

  I didn’t know! I thought it would just… happen? I guess?

  I don’t know, I thought I would just… know who it was when I saw them, we would just spend time together and it would… click. I didn’t plan on… well, being confused about it, about suddenly having a close relationship with a friend suddenly spiral into something more complicated.

  Hell, I had hardly considered the idea of love in my previous life.

  It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in finding a girlfriend or anything.

  God knows that my parents wouldn’t stop nagging me about finally getting a partner so I could stop being a lonely wanderer all the time.

  It was just… that… well…

  I was just being a lonely wanderer all the time, always running away, never staying around anyone long enough to form an enduring connection.

  Even before I started travelling, the whole idea of dating was just… weird. Looking at my classmates that way just felt… strange.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t think a few of my classmates weren’t pretty or they weren’t nice to spend time with, or that I was interested in the other gender or anything.

  I guess it was just… well, the whole thing with my little sister.

  I never stopped seeing the girls around me as people to protect and worry over. The idea of them being partners in the romantic sense was just… off.

  I sighed, curling up into a ball atop the gigantic tree branch upon where we sat.

  Chang’e had taken me out to Shugokage, and we were currently resting atop one of its many outer branches, at the very edges of its shelter, looking out at the picturesque view of the sea.

  Well, picturesque for her, anyways.

  It probably freaked everyone else out.

  “Ah, look, Estelle! Isn’t it so beautiful!? The Infinite Dark!?”

  A big, creepy, black blob of storm clouds stormed furiously in the distance, smothering and devouring the horizon as it roared with a terrifying howl.

  The waves endlessly roiled and smashed against one another in destructive tidal waves whose collisions could be heard even all the way from the shore.

  I did love Chang’e and her strangeness in a way, but her obsession and cheeriness over that nightmarish looking storm was freaky even to me.

  “And right beyond it is home. Ah, what a beautiful place, have I ever told you about my home? Let Auntie Chang’e tell you all about where she came from! You see, grandfather and grandmother…”

  I tuned her out as she blabbered on about her homeland and upbringing.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about my current predicament.

  None of that was even considering the whole mess with my two lives and my sudden gender swap.

  Did I even like girls back then? Even setting aside the issue with not seeing everyone around me as surrogates for the little sister I never met, could I actually say I was actually attracted to them?

  Did I like boys?

  I don’t know… again, I never even really considered the whole romance thing in my past life.

  Was I something else?

  Maybe I was just asexual, or something?

  What about now?

  Did something change between my two lives?

  Did I suddenly think differently about the two genders compared to before?

  What if I did like girls before, and now I just didn’t?

  Why would it even change? Biology? Hormones? Neurology?

  It was all very confusing.

  I sighed tiredly.

  “Hm?” Chang’e stopped in the middle of her excited rambling, blinking at my expression, “Is something wrong, Estelle?”

  I frowned, looking at her.

  From what I remembered, Chang’e said she swore the Oath of the Avowed at her wedding altar, right?

  That Order was typically for those who dedicated themselves to love.

  Maybe she had some insight?

  “A-Auntie Chang’e,” I squirmed, “h-have you ever… been confessed to?”

  Her face lost all emotion.

  Lavender eyes pierced me with a deadly, lifeless glare as her rabbit-fox ears twitched.

  “Who was it? Who dared to confess to my little Estelle and try to snatch her away from her family? I’ll kill him.”

  I jumped, paling rapidly.

  “W-Wait, A-Auntie, no! Don’t do that, H-Hayate’s a friend of mine! D-Don’t harm him!”

  Alongside the personal issues that came with such an idea, that would have been a colossal diplomatic nightmare.

  I didn’t want to explain to Duke Wadatsumi why his son got smashed to paste by the hero of the Black Moon Expedition.

  “A friend?” Her glare only deepened as her eyes widened in cold fury, “so the greedy type, hm? Being friends with you wasn’t good enough? He wants more? I see, a peaceful death won’t be enough then. I’ll make sure he screams.”

  “Y-you can’t torture the son of Duke Wadatsumi!”

  “Tch,” she clicked her tongue in annoyance, “a noble, hm? Is he trying to win you over with his wealth and status?”

  “N-no! He’s a very nice boy, he wouldn’t do that! He doesn’t like flaunting or abusing his status at all! I-it’s not like he’s been showering me with gifts or money or anything, w-we’ve just been normal friends for over four years!”

  “Grr…” Chang’e gnashed her teeth, her eyes darkening, “so the careful, plotting kind it is. Don’t fall for his tricks, Estelle. Auntie Chang’e will solve everything. I’m sure Duke Wadatsumi is in need of a renovator.”

  “Auntie!” I screamed, “He’s not capable of something like that! He’s nowhere near smart enough to do something like that!”

  It took a bit longer than I would have liked, but I did manage to convince her Hayate was harmless and that harming him wasn’t worth it after a couple minutes.

  I sighed, feeling the energy drain from me with every passing second.

  “A-anyways, Auntie Chang’e, could you please help me out a bit… I-I don’t know how to respond. W-were you ever confessed to? How did you get together with your husband?”

  “Hm? Confessions? Yeah, I received them all the time,” Chang’e just inspected her hair, frowning idly as if it was no big deal, “I turned all of them down, though. They were all just really annoying. I didn’t care if they were packmates, from the same tribe, important politically, or whatever. They weren’t going to be my husband, so I didn’t care.”

  I made a sour face at her nonchalance.

  I wish I could have had that kind of resolution.

  “As for my husband,” she giggled, her eyes glazing over as she grinned dreamily, “that was easy! I didn’t wait for something as silly as a confession! I wasn’t going to wait for him in case some hussy came in and tried to steal him or get between us! The moment that I knew that he was the one, I just pushed him down! You see, one day, I-”

  “T-that’s alright, A-Auntie!” I scrambled to interrupt her.

  I really didn’t need all the… descriptive details of her first time with her husband.

  I sighed, trying to get us back on track.

  “U-umm…”

  I thought about what Mother said, about what ‘love’ meant to her, what it meant to be by her fiance’s side.

  “What does your time with your husband mean to you, Auntie? O-outside of the bedroom, I mean. ‘Love’... what does it feel like?”

  “Love…” Chang’e tasted the word on her tongue.

  It rolled deliciously off her tongue.

  A mad glint flickered in those lavender eyes of hers, filling me with unease.

  Would I look like that in the future?

  “Estelle, dear,” she giggled, “Love is nothing like that silly crush your friend has. You see, there’s a big, big difference. Crushes are an extension of attraction, and attraction is a feeling. Love is not something as silly as a whim of one’s heart, like simple happiness or sadness. It doesn’t come and go with your mood. No, dear, love is something far, far deeper than that. Love is a promise.”

  Despite the mad light in her eyes, her smile was filled with nothing but warmth.

  “What does it mean for me to love my husband? It means resolution. It means that he is my everything, he is the sun, he is the moon. He’s the world itself, which I must eternally yearn for and hold as close as possible. It means dedication. It means I will never stop giving him everything, and that in turn, he will never stop giving me everything. There needs to be no greater meaning to life, no greater meaning to the world. All we will ever need is each other. No other dreams, no other hopes, nor regrets or sorrows need to exist.”

  She laughed loudly, the sound almost carrying a melodic ring to it.

  “Forsake everything, receive nothing! Without reward, without hope!”

  She repeated the Oath of the Avowed.

  “Someone who I can entrust everything to, who can bear all that I am, who I can never stop yearning for. That’s what ‘love’ means to me. I close my eyes… and I can see no one but him.”

  Chang’e followed along with her own words, and closed her eyes.

  The slight hint of insanity faded from her smile, replaced by a genuine, soft warmth.

  “I-I see…” I nodded slowly, pondering what had been shared with me, from both Mother and Auntie Chang’e.

  What was love?

  For Mother, it was certainty and comfort. It was anything but physical. A spiritual connection that transcended life and death.

  For Auntie Chang’e, it was resolution and yearning. And for her, it was physical. It was the world itself, it was the very act of living.

  But for both, it was not something as simple as a ‘feeling’.

  Mother was unable to put what it ‘felt’ like into words, and Auntie denied the idea of a ‘feeling’ all together.

  For the both of them, love meant absolute trust.

  It meant eternity. An absolute binding vow.

  It was clarity. It meant freedom from worry. It meant you could uncage your thoughts and heart. It meant sharing everything with someone else. It meant spending every passing second by their side, going through all of life’s troubles together.

  It was life itself. It was time itself.

  …

  I see.

  How enviable.

  Having something like that would have been nice.

  “So, then, Estelle~” Chang’e called out to me in a sing-song voice, propping her knuckles underneath her chin as she folded her fingers together, “What do you think you want? When you close your eyes, do you see him? Can you envision yourself spending the rest of time with that silly boy, whose attitude towards you is substantiated by something as silly and fleeting as a feeling of attraction?”

  Love…

  I closed my eyes, and thought about it.

  That person…

  I don’t think I cared whether they were male or female.

  I didn’t care who they were, really.

  It could have been anyone, there was only one thing I needed from them.

  Things slowly started to take shape in my mind.

  I felt the clarity come to me.

  I was struggling a bit over how I should have felt about Hayate, but…

  That was never part of the problem, was it?

  I heard the woman in front of me giggle.

  “So, your answer’s clear, now, right? You know what you should do, and how to respond to him, no?”

  I opened my eyes and smiled calmly.

  “Thanks, Auntie. Could you give me a lift down to Wadatsumi Manor?”

  “Hey, uhh… yo, Estelle… you, uhh… w-wanted to see me?” Hayate greeted me lamely as he blushed and his eyes nervously flickered side to side.

  I just smiled, surveying our surroundings.

  The Wadatsumi family’s garden was a nice place.

  They treated their family members well, and they had a good handle on nature.

  But, well…

  I guessed that was natural for elves.

  Well, I supposed now was the time.

  “Yeah,” I nodded, “I hope I’m not taking too much of your time, Hayate.”

  “Uh, n-no problem,” Hayate shook his head, “a-anythin- er, I always have time for friend- er…”

  He stuttered and trailed off incoherently.

  I just giggled.

  He blushed at my response.

  “S-so… I-I guess… you’re here about… that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I smiled sadly.

  “Tell me, Hayate,” I closed my eyes, inviting him to imagine something alongside me, “if I said yes, what do you imagine that would look like? In the future, us as a couple… what do you think that’s like? How would a day in our lives look? What do you do for a living, what do I do for a living?”

  “I-I…” Hayate just heated up even further in embarrassment, looking away as he scratched the back of his neck, “I never really thought about it. I-I guess I was just hoping to court you? M-maybe eventually I-I’d even take you as a fiance… y’know, make you Duchess Wadatsumi?”

  “Duchess Wadatsumi, hm?”

  I envisioned that future.

  I couldn’t help but laugh, honestly.

  “Right, you’ll be Duke Wadatsumi when you grow up.”

  “Y-yup, that’s me,” Hayate gulped, doing his best to straighten himself out, “future Duke of Tenmai, bannerman, leader of our armies… flyer of the Elven Banner, Wadatsumi Hayate.”

  “That’s a lot of responsibility,” I nodded, “you’ll be a very important person.”

  “D-do you not like that?” he wilted.

  I just shook my head.

  “No, it’s very admirable. I’m sure you’ll do a good job. It’s just…”

  I chuckled wryly, looking away.

  “I’m a very needy, greedy, desperate and lonely person, you know?”

  I smiled sadly.

  In the end, that was what it had come down to.

  I had always been terrible at letting things go.

  Anything that passed into my arms, I would latch onto desperately, holding on for dear life and refusing to let it go.

  Ever.

  That was the core truth of who I was. Who I am.

  I wouldn’t have had any of these troubles, I wouldn’t be in any of these circumstances at all, if I just never got attached to that little sister of mine that I never had the chance to meet.

  It was the same for my need to be blameless and to be granted salvation, it was the same for Luna, it was the same for Mother.

  It was just simply not possible for me to not cling onto every little thing that passed my way with everything that I had.

  I crept closer to Hayate, making him step back.

  I smiled.

  He flinched at the look on my face.

  I wondered if I looked mad in that moment, if I shared that same bit of insanity that Auntie Chang’e sometimes had.

  He seemed to be a bit terrified by the expression on my face.

  “With all of those responsibilities, with all of the things that you need to take care of… Tenmai, your family, the Duchy, your land, your people…”

  I stepped even closer.

  He stumbled backwards.

  “You’re a noble. You’ll need to spend time socialising. Doing diplomatic and political work, you’ll need to worry about many, many other things, about whether or not your people will be fed, whether or not your land is fertile, whether or not the harvests are good, you need to maintain relationships and alliances.”

  I chuckled.

  And I stepped even closer.

  He tripped over his feet, falling to the ground.

  I stood over him.

  I leant down and lowered myself to my knees, straddling him as I brought my face closer to his.

  “Will you have the time for me? Again, I’m a very, very lonely and needy person. I won’t be satisfied with simple affection. I won’t be satisfied with just a comfortable life, or the knowledge that you care for me.”

  I felt the mad smile on my face widen.

  “Can you dedicate everything to me? I’m a greedy person… I want it all. Not just your affection. Not just your comfort. Not just your wealth or your title or your companionship. Not even your time.”

  My hands twitched.

  “I mean everything. Are you willing to give me your life?”

  My hands gently wrapped around his neck.

  Hayate just looked up at me and stuttered, unable to form a response.

  “...”

  “...”

  An uncomfortable silence passed.

  The madness in my smile fell

  “I thought not.”

  It was replaced by a faint sadness and a touch of regret.

  “Your life doesn’t belong to me. It can’t. The Duke of Wadatsumi can’t swear everything to just one person. He has to live for his people.”

  He looked away from me, guiltiness flickering in his eyes.

  “Don’t feel guilty,” I retracted my hands, “it’s nothing wrong with you, it’s quite the opposite. I’m just a strange person, is all.”

  I pulled myself away from him, standing back up on my feet.

  “Don’t feel bad, really, I mean it,” I shook my head in amusement, “that responsibility you have, your dedication towards it… that kind of selflessness and honour is really admirable, you know? Anyone would be lucky to be your partner, really.”

  I giggled.

  “It just happens that I’m a weird girl. Why else would I have sworn myself to be a Knight of Burden?”

  Hayate got back up on his feet, opening his mouth.

  Still, he failed to formulate a proper response.

  “You’re a nice boy, really, don’t feel bad about this. I’m sure you’ll meet a nice girl one day, and you’ll make her the happiest girl in the world, it’s just…”

  I chuckled sadly.

  “That girl isn’t going to be me. You’re a bit too good for me. You don’t deserve someone like me. I’m sorry, Hayate, I don’t think it would work out between us.”

  “I-I-...” Hayate made a pained face, “I see…”

  He chuckled in self-depreciation, scratching his head.

  “Ah, dear Hinanhoro… I guess this was why Kagura and Setsuna never had any faith in me… huh? Ah, geez, this sucks.”

  He started to tear up.

  “Oh, wow… this really hurts, doesn’t it?”

  He winced, lightly thumping his aching heart with his fist, trying to calm it down.

  “I’m sorry,” I frowned.

  “N-no, it’s fine,” he shook his head desperately, “I-... uhh…”

  He gulped, looking at me with painful eyes.

  “Just… can we still be friends after all of this?”

  I smiled.

  “I would be honoured to be called a friend of yours, Hayate.”