Chapter 73

The Fairy and the Young Lord

“This place… is a fairy ruin?”

Elias tilted his head. Riding leisurely, the young master of the ducal house scanned the surrounding brush before muttering, “I can’t tell at all.”

Ulrich pulled on the reins, bringing his horse to a stop, and pointed at a fallen pillar beside a tree. Vines clung to it, and at its top were carvings of four figures.

Three figures carved along the side appeared to be offering tribute to a person standing on a raised platform to the right.

“If you possess knowledge of antiquity, you can infer more than just from the carvings. You can recognize that this was once fairy land—and identify whose style these ruins belong to.”

The young master stroked his chin and glanced at the fairy.

“Bel, is that true?”

The fairy Vermelani hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

“Yes.”

“What? Then you knew all along?”

Elias grumbled, asking why she hadn’t said anything.

“Try to understand. She is a fairy, so it would be difficult for her to speak of it. These are the ruins of Lacorinto. You know what that implies.”

Elias let out a low “Hmm,” and nodded.

The group urged their horses forward again, leaving the ruins behind. As their conversation faded into silence, Fritz glanced around, clearly curious. Seeing his expression full of questions, Roberta spoke up.

“Lacorinto was the name of the last kingdom of the fairies.”

“The last… meaning during the Age of the Fairies?”

“Yes. It was essentially a unified dynasty in that era.”

Roberta cast a sidelong glance at Vermelani.

The fairy was riding behind them alongside the young master, avoiding the priestess’s gaze as she looked toward the brush instead.

“You can probably guess from the phrase ‘last kingdom.’ That nation brought about the downfall of the Age of the Fairies. It committed countless wrongs, suffered internal strife, and even went so far as to serve an evil god—nearly driving the fairy race itself to extinction.”

Lacorinto was both the final kingdom of the fairy age and the very cause of its end.

But that alone didn’t fully explain why Vermelani had hesitated to speak, and the question remained in Fritz’s expression.

After a brief hesitation, Roberta lowered her voice and continued.

“And the Age of the Fairies was also the final era in which Hestio… Lord Hestio was active. Lacorinto was the nation that persecuted him during that time—”

“Persecuted…?”

Fritz’s eyes widened.

“They even defied the emperor who founded the First Empire. That’s why there’s nothing favorable about them in our scriptures.”

Saying “nothing favorable” was putting it mildly.

Whenever Lacorinto is mentioned in the sacred texts of the Holy Church, it is accompanied by harsh condemnation.

Naturally so.

The Church is a human religious order that venerates Hestio as the god of humanity—and Lacorinto was the nation that oppressed him and drove him into suffering.

The enmity between Hestio and Lacorinto ran deep.

He remained active until the very end of the Age of the Fairies, and by that time, Lacorinto had subjugated nearly every nation—there was nowhere beyond its reach.

Even until just before Hestio’s disappearance, Lacorinto did not cease its persecution.

Some theologians even suspect that his disappearance was caused by that nation.

Hearing this, Fritz scratched his head awkwardly.

“I… haven’t really read the scriptures, so I didn’t know about that relationship.”

One might question how a member of a noble family hadn’t read the scriptures, but Roberta knew the secrets of the Meyer family and chose not to ask.

“Well, Lacorinto committed so many wrongs afterward that it’s hard to list them all. The era didn’t collapse without reason.”

Just as the conflict between the Jokuster Dynasty and the Kormilius family shook the Third Age, the many failings of Lacorinto—having effectively unified the realm—shook the Age of the Fairies itself.

The chaos that followed wiped out more races than even the interspecies hunts of the Isturia Dynasty.

The Four Kings of Spirits perished, and even dragons were pushed to the brink of extinction.

Only humans endured the turmoil, and it was only after the first emperor established the First Empire that order was restored.

Yet the radiant core—the fairy kingdom—refused to submit to the Empire.

They clashed repeatedly, and the insults they hurled directly at the emperor have been preserved in the scriptures.

“…It is a shameful history.”

The fairy Vermelani spoke softly.

To the fairies, Lacorinto was something both loved and hated.

It was a glorious history that proved their race once ruled an era—

And at the same time, a sinful history that destroyed that very era.

It also bore deep hostility toward the race that now ruled the world. It had treated the being called the Father of Humanity with cruelty and had opposed the one who founded the Age of Humans.

How could one easily speak of such a civilization’s ruins?

***

“It is the past.”

Ulrich nudged his horse forward again, moving slowly ahead.

“Lord Armin… do you feel nothing about it?”

Roberta rode up beside him.

“Is it not a distant past, too far removed to judge now?”

“It has been more than half a million years…”

She quietly watched him, waiting for him to continue.

Humans consider something old after merely a decade, and after ten generations, they see it as belonging to others.

Lacorinto, however, was history far beyond even that.

Without religious conviction, it was a past that held no emotional weight for those living in the present.

But Ulrich was different.

From what Roberta knew, he did not regard Lacorinto as mere history—so his words about it being “too distant to judge” were not something she could take lightly.

“Roberta, why do you think Lacorinto fell out with Hestio?”

“Because they regarded humans as an inferior species, perhaps? The scriptures say that from the Age of the Gods through the Age of the Fairies, other races did not treat humans as equals.”

There were many reasons humans were looked down upon, but the greatest was that their creator was unclear.

Humans were a race that had evolved over time, and because of that, they were mocked by other races—like children without parents being shunned.

“That is not entirely wrong—but neither is it entirely correct.”

Ulrich continued calmly.

“It is true that the fairies of Lacorinto looked down on humans. However, they did not persecute all humans.”

He paused slightly before finishing:

“They only treated Hestio with cruelty.”

Roberta asked, sounding incredulous,

“Why? Why specifically Lord Hestio?”

“Try thinking of it from another perspective. Imagine someone appearing before you—a priest—claiming to have met the gods.”

He then changed his tone and spoke as if acting it out:

“My friend, what you are doing does not align with their will. And your interpretation is wrong. That is not what they meant.”

After finishing, he turned his head and looked at the fairy behind him.

“Vermelani, have you not had a similar experience? The descendants of someone you once served acting foolishly in the name of their predecessor.”

“I cannot say I haven’t.”

Vermelani gave a bitter smile. Her gaze briefly drifted toward the young master, and he, noticing it, coughed awkwardly and turned his head away.

And that was among their own kind.

Hestio, on the other hand, was of a different race.

If even one’s own kin behaved that way, it was a problem—how much more so a human, whom the fairies believed to be inferior.

“But Lord Hestio dwelled in the heavens, didn’t he? He was the adopted son of Lady Ganymea, the god of knowledge and order, and one who received his name from Lord Dieus, the king of heaven. And yet the fairies looked down on him?”

A thought suddenly came to her.

“Could it be that they didn’t know who Lord Hestio truly was?”

“No—they knew.”

“They knew, and still acted that way?”

Her voice rose in disbelief.

“Because they knew, they acted so. They envied him—for he saw what they could not, and could never see.”

Envy?

It was unexpected—but suddenly, Roberta understood.

She understood why the fairies of Lacorinto had envied him.

After the heavenly gods departed, the fairies—born at the beginning—guarded the world in their place. Yet even those primordial fairies eventually crumbled with time.

And yet—

What if a human, also born in the beginning, still lived on without aging?

What if that human remembered their creators—and pointed out that they had gone astray?

If one reversed the situation—

What if a being connected to Hestio appeared before her and told her that they were in the wrong?

“…That’s petty.”

Fritz said with a grin.

“You could see it that way.”

“And what do you think, Lord Armin?”

Roberta glanced briefly at the young master and the fairy behind them.

“About what that nation did.”

Ulrich answered calmly,

“I think it was pitiful. It is true they committed reprehensible acts—but they had their reasons.”

The Age of the Fairies existed only once, yet it spanned thousands of years.

But by the standards of fairies, that was merely a few generations.

And within those few generations, their era came to an end.

They could not overcome the void.

After the gods departed—and after the ancestors who remembered them passed on—they no longer treated history as history, but clung to it dogmatically.

They tried to follow, without deviation, every word spoken by Ophilus—the creator of the fairies—when he had existed in this world.

They even sought meaning in words that held none.

In doing so, they tried to avoid confronting the absence of the gods.

Perhaps that was why Hestio was hated—

Because he was a human who possessed what the fairies did not,

And because he revealed the reality they wished to avoid.

“…Thinking back on it, it’s quite strange.”

“Strange?”

“According to the scriptures, Hestio was only persecuted by the fairies—but in truth, before that, he also received much from them. After Ganymea and Dieus, the one who extended a hand to him was Ophilus, the father of the fairies.”

Roberta furrowed her brow, searching her memory.

There was nothing.

It wasn’t mentioned in the canonical texts, nor in the apocrypha or forbidden writings.

Above all, there were almost no records remaining about the relationship between Hestio and the father of the fairies.

“He was a good man. Then again, among those we revere, who is not? If Dieus was the father who gave him a name, then Ophilus was the teacher who gave him guidance.”

Ulrich fell silent for a moment, as if lost in memory, guiding his horse forward.

“Hestio learned much from the way he loved and raised his creations as if they were his own children. The reason he could be called a father… is because he learned from the father of the fairies.”

Fritz and Roberta both turned to look at the fairy, Vermelani.

She listened to the conversation without any expression.

“That is why, unlike the others, the fairies must have felt the loss more deeply. The father who loved his children so dearly suddenly declared a parting. That is why I find them pitiful.”

The conversation ended there.

They rode on in silence for a long while until they reached a narrow path. The group followed it, descending along the mountain ridge.

After some time, with only the sounds of birds and insects filling the air, Vermelani spoke.

“From whom did you hear such a story?”

“I heard it from no one.”

He did not add that he had witnessed it himself.

But Roberta felt as though she had heard those unspoken words anyway.

At his firm answer, Vermelani’s expression grew complicated. Like someone facing a puzzle with no clue to begin with, she stared intently at Ulrich’s back.

After some time, the group exited the mountain.

And a few days later, they arrived at the city of Rilmer, where the relatives of the two children they had rescued lived.