* * *

We put Siegren in my room as a temporary measure to take care of his wounds. However, his fever did not break. He wasn’t regaining consciousness either, and I was getting quite worried.

Two whole days passed in this way, but when the doctor arrived he had good news to share. “His injuries may be serious, but he’ll definitely survive.”

I let out a huge sigh of relief. The world was not going to end.

Once the doctor left, I pulled up a chair beside the bed to watch over Siegren. Lying there with his eyes closed, he looked so peaceful. It was difficult to imagine this boy growing up to become the dashing hero who would save the world. He was just so young.

“I suppose he’s around fourteen,” I said.

Now that things were settled, it gave me more time to process the timeline and figure out where in the story we were. As of now, Siegren was only a boy. This meant we were currently in a time period that isn’t mentioned often in the novel. Though I had written one or two lines about his past, I had never discussed his childhood in-depth.

As the male protagonist, Siegren had a secret. He was an imperial prince of our empire, but he was like me—a bastard child. Siegren was the son of an ordinary commoner woman without any magical power. Many considered his birth a shameful secret to the imperial lineage, a small defect to be removed.

So Siegren had always lived a life of fear. Having discovered the plots against his life, his mother had tried to run away to another country to save her child. But she failed. In the end, she was murdered, leaving her young son alone in this world. After the death of his mother, he then ran to the northern border, to Heylon—far away from the reaches of his enemies. Thankfully, once Abel met Siegren, he recognized the boy’s natural talent and took him in.

This was the story of Siegren’s childhood... In the novel, he only mentions this in passing to the female protagonist. His backstory wasn’t treated with much importance. After all, a fictional character’s past was only a literary tool to give insight into what kind of person they were now.

I knew this was a common storyline for most fantasy characters. But that didn’t take any of my guilt. It was my fault that the boy had suffered.

You must have been miserable. I ran my fingers gently through his hair as he slept. I’m so sorry...

Though I planned on leaving this place someday, never to return, I decided then and there to be as kind as possible to him until I left. This would be my atonement. There was also the fact that Siegren was technically supposed to kill me. While I certainly didn’t plan on antagonizing him, I still worried about what I had written. How much of my life is up to fate? Could I change it? There was no way to know. But if I wanted to save myself from a horrible death, it definitely wouldn’t hurt to become friends with him.

I’ll do my best, okay? So please be nice to me. Actually, no. You don’t even have to be nice. Just please don’t kill me. I slumped forward onto the bed and let out a deep sigh. I hadn’t wanted to abandon an injured child—one who had nearly died—I had been caring for him diligently these past few days. Fatigue had steadily built up in my body, and now I could barely keep my eyes open. I sat up straight again with a yawn.

Should I get some sleep? I could figure out what to do with Siegren later. I won’t worry about it until he wakes up, I thought as I closed my eyes.

* * *

When I woke up, the evening sun had set the room ablaze with its fiery red light. A bit dazed, it took me a moment to remember where I was and what I had been doing.

Right. I had fallen asleep while watching over my male protagonist. I stretched out my neck, rolled my stiff shoulders, and then looked toward Siegren. To my surprise, I found his gray-blue eyes staring back at me.

“Oh,” I said.

He was awake.

“D-did you sleep well? It’s nice to meet you.”

Even with such a grim expression on his face, I couldn’t deny his beauty. He was pure art—his features delicately carved by a genius sculptor.

Perhaps because he was still a young boy, his wariness made him seem more like a small, aloof cat than anything else. It was kind of cute. He was just so different from the protagonist I had imagined. His image was more... relaxed?

Siegren narrowed his eyes, looking quite feline.

Now that I think about it, I had been so distraught over him lying unconscious that I had never considered what to do when he actually woke up. He looked at me the way one would look at some strange animal, then spoke up with a voice hoarse from disuse.

“Where am I...?”

“You’re in Heylon Castle,” I said.

“And who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Fiona. What’s your name?”

His immediate response was to frown. “Sieg... ren,” he answered, clearly hesitant about revealing his name. Turning his attention to his own body, he wriggled his fingers and touched his hands to his torso and legs, as if making sure everything was still there.

“How am I still alive...?” he asked.

Did he not remember saving my life? Considering how injured he had been, perhaps he had been acting on pure instinct at that moment. This was definitely my male protagonist, saving a girl he didn’t even know when he could barely protect himself.

“I brought you here and had a healer take care of you. You had a high fever for two days. Thank goodness you’re okay,” I said.

Siegren looked at me as if I had said the most ludicrous thing in the world. But I was too concerned with his overall health to worry over a strange look. Though he might be the inordinately strong protagonist, he was still a child. Moreover, I still hadn’t fully processed the fact that Siegren was a living, breathing human being in front of me right now. The difference between my imagination and reality was huge, and seeing him in the flesh and blood was a lot to take in.

Let’s say a person who didn’t fear zombies in movies watched someone actually turn into a zombie in front of them. That person would be taken aback, right?

Reality is always different from fiction, and this was unsettling indeed. In other words, I felt incredibly guilty seeing Siegren so injured. Why did I have to give the male protagonist such an awful childhood?

“Let me check if you still have a fever,” I said.

As I reached out to feel his forehead, Siegren batted my hand away.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarled.

For such a pretty boy, he was rather aggressive. But I knew it was because he was afraid, and there was no way I could get angry at him.

“At least tell me if anything hurts,” I said.

“Go away. I can take care of myself,” he snapped.

I gently touched a suture on Siegren’s stomach.

“Aah!” he screamed. I knew it. I knew he had just been pretending. At the end of the day, he was only a teenager putting up a front. Of course he was hurt. He had recently been slashed up by a demonic beast and only just stitched back together.

“Wh-what are you doing...?!” he asked.

“You’re seriously injured right now,” I said, my hands around my waist. “Are you aware? You need to tell me if anything hurts.”

“Why do you care? You don’t even know me,” he said. A survivor of several assassination attempts, Siegren did not trust easily.

“But you saved me too,” I replied in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What are you talking about? I’ve never—” he protested, interrupted when the door suddenly swung open.

“It’s a hundred years too early to be inviting men into your room, little girl,” said a familiar voice.

“He’s not a man. He’s just a boy,” I grumbled, turning around to find Abel leaning his weight against the door frame. Even when relaxed, he was still intimidating. He resembled a predator about to strike his prey.

“Same thing,” he said.

Oh, come on. It’s not the same thing at all, but I decided not to push it. Abel already looked annoyed, and nothing good would come out of unnecessarily aggravating him.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Because of him,” said Abel, pointing a finger at Siegren with a frown. “I received a report that I now have another burden to look after.”

Was I supposed to be the first burden?

“He was seriously injured and needed treatment,” I said.

Abel scanned his eyes over Siegren from head to toe.

“Where is he from? He doesn’t look like he’s from my estate,” he said.

That was a good question—I had no idea where Siegren was from. In fact, I didn’t know much about the young Siegren at all. Though I was the author, where he had grown up was a mystery to me too. This was because I hadn’t considered his backstory to be of much importance when I had been writing my novel.

“Karl Mercenaries,” Siegren said.

I turned back in surprise.

“Mercenaries...?” Abel asked, one eyebrow flicking up in interest. “Do mercenaries recruit kids these days?”

Really Abel? Are you one to talk? I thought, then I inched closer to Siegren to whisper something into his ear.

“This is the lord of the castle, Duke Abel Heylon.”