"It's been four days since you fell asleep," Sera answered, still holding tightly onto Alex in a hug.
Alex jerked away immediately, pushing her back. He looked at her with a face broken and torn apart, his eyes wet with tears that flowed freely like water from a cracked dam, showing no sign of stopping. His hair was tangled and disheveled, and his lips opened and closed wordlessly as his mind struggled to process what his mother had just told him. Four days. He had been asleep for four days.
"You used magic on me." He screamed the words at her, unable to believe that his own parents had betrayed him so completely and so thoroughly. They had put a long slumber magic on him and had kept him unconscious all this time.
"Son," Sera bit her lower lip, deep lines forming across her forehead, and with a sigh that carried the full weight of guilt and grief she said quietly, "It was the best we could think of."
"What do you mean by best?" Alex growled, unable to contain the rage building inside him. He had wanted nothing more than to run after the emperor, to chase down his carriage and force him to stop, to make him change his mind. But that chance had been stolen from him while he lay unconscious, and during those four lost days the princess had been engaged to someone else. The Prince of the Elf Kingdom. Suddenly the image of the elf, the one who had beaten him nearly to death during the battle royal test without a single trace of mercy, rose up sharply in his mind along with the name he had learned from the princess afterward.
"Lucian Vaelorian?" The name left his lips in barely more than a whisper, his voice hollow with disbelief at the cards the fate had chosen to give him to deal with.
"Yes," Sera said, clenching her fists at her sides, her face full of remorse. "She is engaged to Lucian. Don't worry about this, Alex. Let the past be the past."
How could I let this go so easily? He pressed both hands against his head, unable to contain the flood of emotions crashing down on him. Everything felt unreal, like he was having a nightmare, and before he could stop himself he raised his hand and slapped himself hard across the cheek, the sound cracking sharp through the room and making his mother freeze where she stood.
"What are you doing?" Sera's voice broke with horror.
But Alex did not stop. He kept slapping himself across both cheeks in quick, punishing succession until his mother lunged forward and caught both his hands in hers, her face twisted with fear and desperation. "Stop it, Alex," she shouted at him.
Alex tried to wrench his hands free. He wanted to keep hitting himself, wanted to feel more pain if he could manage it, because the pain and helplessness pressing down on him from every side had become so unbearable that a part of him simply wanted to disappear. He was a failure. So utterly and completely a failure. A creature robbed of every happiness life had briefly placed within his reach. He could not level up. He had been beaten to death during the last test. And now he had been robbed of the only friend he had ever truly had.
Suddenly, the door to the room swung open without warning and his father entered in long, hurried strides, with Ariana following close behind him a moment later. Despite the careful composure on her face, it was evident that she had not slept properly in days. His father looked much the same, torn visibly between the sorrow of a man who had failed as a father and the helplessness of one who did not know how to begin putting things right.
His father crossed the room in an instant and pulled Alex into a hug, tight and suffocating yet deeply familiar and safe, and Alex felt something close to peace settle over him for the first time after feeling so much deep suffocating torment. He did not try to understand this feeling he was having. He simply grabbed hold of his father's back and pulled him closer, tightening his grip and not wanting to let go for even a moment.
"Father, I hate you," Alex mumbled into his father's chest, making no effort to hide the raw feeling behind the words. His father should have stopped the emperor. Father should have stood in front of that carriage and refused to move, should have fought back against that decision and refused to let the agreement be dissolved so easily.
Alex wanted to demand answers, to ask why he had been betrayed, why his father had not pushed back harder, why his father had physically stopped Alex from chasing after the emperor himself.
"I really hate you," Alex mumbled again, and began punching his father on the back with both fists, all restraint gone, his voice cracking around the question burning in his mind. "Why did you not stop the emperor?"
"I tried to change his mind, I tried my best," Shane said in a low voice that carried none of the strength one would expect from a man of paragon rank, a warrior whose name alone would inspire fear across the empire. "His Majesty had already made his decision. My pleas were not heard."
Alex went still. Hearing his father confess that he had been powerless against the emperor was something he had not been fully prepared for, even though he had always known to some degree that the emperor was extraordinary. The princess herself had told him countless times that her father was the strongest man in the empire, without equal, though Alex had quietly doubted her words back then, telling himself that a daughter could hardly be expected to admit that others might stand on level ground with her father. But now, standing here with his father's arms around him and his father's voice stripped of all its usual certainty, Alex understood at last that she had been telling the truth all along.
The emperor was beyond what his father could challenge, so far beyond that even a paragon rank warrior had been rendered completely helpless when standing before him.
"Sorry, son." His father's embrace loosened slowly, and when Alex was gently pulled back to see his face, he noticed a single tear tracking down his father's cheek. His father's eyes were red, shot through with visible veins, trembling faintly as though barely holding back everything they were carrying.
***
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