The creaking of the carriage wheels— monotonous and insistent —was the only sound slicing through the heavy, viscous silence inside.
Amanda sat opposite Randel. Her posture was relaxed, almost careless, yet her helmet was turned toward the window. Stripes of daylight, fighting their way through the clouds, glided across the polished golden surface without lingering. She was motionless, like an ancient spirit coldly surveying the bustle of mortals from the height of its eternal solitude. Grandeur and detachment radiated from her in waves.
Randel watched her. (This woman… is she even “human” at all?)
There was nothing crude or primitive about her. Every line of her armor breathed elegant, lethal beauty. This being had just overturned his entire fate. And now he was carrying her to Eichenwald.
(But… how do you even speak to her? How do you address a seething volcano pretending to be a statue?)
He gathered his courage. His voice came out uncertain, slightly hoarse.
“In my lands… there are breathtaking views, my lady.
Especially in the north, among the mountains. When the sun sets, the sky turns into a sea of molten gold…”
Amanda didn’t move. Didn’t answer. The silence rang louder, grew even heavier.
(…Failure. Complete disregard.)
The carriage jolted over a rut. Randel’s heart did the same. Her gaze—he felt it, even without seeing her eyes—was fixed on the world outside the window, as if rejecting his very existence.
He remembered a sensation from childhood: trying to talk to an unmoving statue. But her silence, the atmosphere of being drawn far, far away, stirred something deep inside that he had kept locked for years. It wasn’t awe. It was a hunger for conversation as equals. For words with someone who had seen the world beyond palace walls and tactical maps.
“May I… ask one question?” He dropped ceremonial etiquette. His voice still trembled, but now it carried resolve.
The golden helmet turned. Slowly, from the window—toward him. An unseen gaze fell upon him with almost physical weight, as though the air in the carriage thickened.
“You have already asked one question, Duke,” her voice was even, devoid of inflection, like the surface of a dead lake. “But… I will allow another.”
Randel drew a breath, staring straight into the blind mask.
“Who are you?
And why? Why did you save me?
You said, ‘The world would be duller.’ But that isn’t everything. There is a deeper reason… isn’t there?”
She exhaled. A faint, barely audible sound. In it one could hear weariness, boundless loneliness, the weight of countless years.
“Randel. I already told you.
Names are merely cages.”
She fell silent, as if weighing how much truth he could bear.
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“If you need a label so badly… consider me one of the last supreme archmagi still walking this continent. The final guardian of the ancient forest. One who was here long before your kings and empires, when the trees were young and magic flowed through the earth’s veins like blood.”
Randel’s breath caught. A supreme archmage. Childhood fairy tales. Yellowed pages of manuscripts he had once flipped through in his youth with a condescending smirk. (Priests’ and poets’ inventions… or so I thought.)
“Incredible…” His whisper was not denial, but the sound of colliding with impossible reality. “So you… you are…”
“Everything you read in books,” Amanda interrupted, and for the first time a bitter, caustic irony crept into her voice, “is nothing more than a faded echo. A roar reduced to a distorted whisper. Yes, Duke. I am that very ‘fairy tale’ your lineage has already managed to forget.”
(…She’s real.)
“I keep my distance from people,” her voice grew colder, sharper, like a winter wind. “I have watched their ‘progress’ gnaw at the roots of this world.”
(What…? Progress? The roots of the world?) Randel’s thoughts tangled, finding no foothold.
“I do not save every lost prince who stumbles into trouble,” her helmet tilted slightly toward the window. “I could have watched them hack you to pieces with the same indifference I feel when a leaf falls. Most of you are merely fleeting sparks flickering in a long night.”
(Sparks…?)
“But your spark…” her voice paused for a heartbeat, “…could kindle a blaze. Or plunge everything into darkness. That is my calculation, Randel. No mercy involved.”
Those words—cold, merciless—should have crushed him. Instead, the opposite happened. Something flared hot inside him. (This isn’t a deity’s whim. This is strategy. And I… am her key.)
His mind boiled. (Supreme mages… they exist. She is real. She… protects the world? From us? And I am a ‘spark’? Because of my bloodline? My reforms? Or… my rage?) Questions collided, spawning new riddles. His thoughts blazed.
He stared at her—at that unshakable radiance —trying to discern even a hint of vulnerability. (…In vain.)
And then a new, contradictory feeling pierced him.
(She… is beautiful.)
Not the beauty of court ladies—calculated, draped in silks and elaborate coiffures. Hers was the beauty of a perfectly honed blade, of a thundercloud on the horizon —scorching, deadly, breathtaking in its perfection.
(I’m a fool.) He had brushed off beauties who threw their hearts at his feet. And he thought she might see a man in him? (Laughable!) He was merely a tool. A grain of sand on the scales of fate.
Yet in that moment he felt not despair, but burning curiosity.(What does she see in this grain of sand?)
He didn’t notice how intently he was staring. It was not a reverent gaze. It was the gaze of a commander studying a new, unknown weapon. Penetrating, analytical.
Suddenly she turned her helmet toward him.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Duke?”
Her voice was quiet. And… soft ? The steel-cold edge had vanished, replaced by faint, weary curiosity.
(…What is this mood?) Randel’s heart lurched.
That shift in her tone struck him harder than any display of power. It disarmed him.
(What… is happening?) He tried to gather his scattered thoughts, but felt warmth spreading across his cheeks—insistent, against his will.
“Forgive me, I…” he faltered, losing his usual rhythm, all his normal confidence gone. “I’m only trying to understand. To glimpse the person inside the legend. And to grasp the weight of the responsibility you have placed on me.
You called me a ‘spark.’ But what if… what if that spark burns the hand that saved me? What then?”
She listened in silence. Her helmet tilted slightly to the side, as if in thought.
“There is always risk,” came the quiet answer. “But I prefer to take risks rather than merely watch. For now.”
(…For now?) A new whirlwind of thoughts flared in Randel’s chest, mingled with that strange, unsettling warmth. The conversation had only just begun, but the rules of the game had already changed. He was no longer speaking to an impersonal force. He was speaking to someone. And that someone had just cracked open a door into her abyss—and allowed him to peer inside.