CHAPTER~06
The Only Thing You Want From Me
Hiding her scarred bare feet beneath a skirt hem so long it dragged along the floor, Airi crossed the snow-covered garden, cradling the faint glow of a lantern within her cloak.
Entering the imperial palace, Airi walked without pause, following the lights affixed to the walls.
With every step deeper along the corridor, her parched breaths spilled from her lips in pale white clouds.
Even with her vision blurred, her feet moved forward without hesitation, finding their way.
What sustained her breathing was nothing but inertia.
When morning came, she would go out for walks, embroider by habit, lose herself in something to forget her loneliness, then suffer when the dry winds arrived with winter.
No matter how much she quenched her throat in the garden where water flowed, the fundamental thirst was never resolved.
And so, time and again, Airi went to seek her son and her husband.
She did so even knowing that nothing would change.
It felt as though she could not go on living otherwise.
On the final night of the banquet, guards stood before the Emperor’s office, yet that night alone, they did not stop her.
Whether it was pity for an Empress who never once showed her face at banquets and lived shut away, or whether it was due to an order from the Emperor, she did not know.
For three years now, she had visited the Emperor on every banquet day, and at some point, the soldiers guarding the door began stepping aside as though granting them time alone even before the Emperor arrived.
A soldier glanced at the lantern in Airi’s hand and opened the way.
Leaning against the closed door, Airi listened for a long while to the footsteps fading down the corridor before entering the room.
As her feet stepped onto the carpet, a soft, brushing sound followed beneath her.
Even that sound felt dry enough to cut at her ears, and as Airi halted her steps, she noticed small bundles of fabric piled in one corner of the Emperor’s office sofa.
Stopping before the couch, Airi looked down at the cloth, and the lantern light in her hand flickered once beneath her chin.
They were clothes she had made by hand for the child over the past three years.
At some point, the Emperor had grown pathologically averse to anyone entering his office, and even hired hands sent to clean could not carelessly touch the objects inside.
The baby clothes she had offered for him to deliver must have piled up here in that way.
Perching on the couch, Airi turned over the small garments one by one.
Some were familiar, while others left her unable to recall when she had made them at all.
Only hazy memories remained of days spent sitting by a sunlit window, imagining the tiny baby who would wear them, desperately airing out her dampened heart.
Yet not a single one of these had ever reached the child.
Airi’s eyes sank as though submerged in water.
She had, in truth, suspected this outcome for quite some time.
That was why, since the beginning of this year, Airi had stopped making clothes for her son.
Even so, for the sake of a single request to hand to her husband, she made one more handkerchief for him.
Whatever it took, whatever he wished, she would make it come true, so please, at least love the child.
There were moments when she wondered if it might be better to return to the sea together with the child rather than be ignored forever.
But if she were to take the child away from him, she would truly be no different from the monster they spoke of.
The child was innocent.
If something had to disappear, there was only one thing that should.
A single impurity that had intruded upon this peaceful world.
Airi’s steps stopped before the Emperor’s desk, piled high with documents.
It seemed he had left in the midst of work, as the unorganized desk was laid bare in the lantern light.
Beside the tightly stacked paperwork lay the handkerchief she had given him not long ago, neatly folded with the embroidered letters facing up.
Airi quietly etched the gold-threaded letters into her eyes.
— Michael de Histania.
Embroidering a cloth to be tied to the weapons of one heading to the battlefield to pray for their safe return was an old tradition of this land.
Along with the departing one’s name, the place to which they would return was stitched, in hopes that they would safely complete their perilous journey and come back home.
Turning her gaze away from Michael’s handkerchief on the desk, Airi gently unfolded the white handkerchief she had been holding all along.
Along the edge of the new handkerchief she had begun making after hearing of Michael’s marriage prospects, crooked embroidery in blue thread was stitched.
Picking up the lantern she had set on the desk, Airi headed toward the corner of the room.
As the lantern light illuminated the cabinet, tightly packed firearms came into view, along with a long hunting rifle leaning against the wall.
After taking a small, steadying breath, Airi reached out and tied the handkerchief she had brought to the long barrel.
She did so carefully and meticulously, making sure the embroidered letters showed clearly.
Ever wary, the Emperor kept loaded guns in every room.
With those guns, her husband must have exacted revenge for humanity slain by the sea.
A grudge he never forgot even in the moment he lay down to sleep, kept by his bedside.
What it was that he had wished to achieve throughout his life was now something she could not help but understand, no matter how much she wished not to.
Only now, when she had lost everything.
‘You no longer need to give it.’
I think I understand now what the only thing you ever wanted from me was.
Boom, bang!
Frozen in place, Airi lifted her head slightly at the sound of fireworks exploding.
Golden sparks bloomed and vanished like star tails over her wavering eyes.
She fumbled her way to the window and opened it.
The sudden rush of cold air made the lantern flame waver, and Airi’s short-cut hair scattered wildly.
Ignoring the cold that carved at her cheeks, Airi leaned against the window frame and watched the fireworks bursting across the night sky.
The gunpowder, said to have been brought from the far eastern lands across the sea—on the day she first saw it dye the sky, she had truly thought the stars themselves were falling.
The golden light, resembling the imperial crest, was more brilliant and hotter than the starry sky reflected on the sea.
Staring at it made even her vision feel scorched, a light and warmth that could never bloom in the sea where Airi was born and raised.
Igniting light was the privilege of humans who lived outside the water.
As the fireworks signaling the end of the banquet faded from the sky, Airi retrieved the lantern she had set on the desk.
She picked up the hunting rifle leaning against the wall and lit the fuse connected to the firing mechanism.
Hiss.
The smell of burning rope filled the room.
Airi drew that air deep into the very depths of her lungs.
She liked this smell of burning gunpowder, which shook the surroundings every time fireworks bloomed in the sky.
Cradling the matchlock gun, nearly half her body’s length, upside down, Airi watched the fuse slowly blacken and burn.
She liked watching the moment something caught fire.
A warmth she could never feel in her underwater homeland.
She loved the heat of flames more dazzling than sunlight beneath the sky, hotter than a sunlit sea.
Like the quiet fire that burned in her husband’s eyes every time they lay together and brushed lips…
Ah, if only there were a flame that would never go out.
If only there were something eternal on this land, like the ever-undying sea.
The memories of loving as flames burned were torn apart by cruel reality, growing faint.
The warmth of his once-gentle gaze, the careful touch as light as brushing downy feathers.
The more she tried to hold on, the more they faded, like scenery slipping past a carriage window.
She could no longer clearly recall what it had felt like to be loved by him.
All that remained in her mind was his ice-cold gaze.
Blue eyes like the depths of the deep sea.
Resembling the sea she had loved most in this world…
— Never even dream of getting along with humans, Airi.
Why was it that now, of all times, her father’s words resurfaced, his face frightening as he issued that warning.
— They are nothing but monsters who commit massacres.
Just as humans were monsters to Sirens, the reverse was the same.
If only she had taken her father’s words to heart, that this was not something to be resolved by her resolve alone…
Then perhaps you and I might have met a different ending.
No, even so, it would likely have been the same.
A powerless smile flickered across Airi’s lips and vanished.
At the burning tip of the fuse, memories of some distant day seemed to bloom.
She could never forget the day they first met.
On a day when she was still painfully young, my prince was suddenly swept in by the waves.
The boy’s white hair, soaked in sunlight, shone more brilliantly and dazzlingly than rippling wavelets.
After laying the boy down on the shore, Airi stood there for a long time, entranced, gazing at the white eyelashes of the boy lying so beautifully still.
