Soon after Deculein departed on the command to track the prisoner, Empress Sophien stood on the uppermost floor of the main building he had designed and silently took in her surroundings as a strange sense of nostalgia washed over her, drawn not from memory but from the familiarity of the architecture.0

The place had been designed to resemble the Imperial Palace, and aside from the desert stretching beyond the windows, everything inside felt familiar as a gesture from Deculein—his way of offering Sophien a sense of comfort and a feeling of being at home.0

Thud, thud—0

Sophien walked to the bed with heavy steps, let herself fall onto it, and stared at the ceiling, her mind clouded with scattered thoughts and a simmering anger that refused to fade.0

“... It is indeed difficult,” Sophien muttered.0

I’ve made sense of cause and effect, governance and politics, scholarship and the martial arts, even magic and swordsmanship—and yet, it’s human emotion that proves the most difficult of all.0

Because I didn’t know of the emotions—mine and his—and everything felt unfamiliar, was I fooling myself into thinking he held deep affection for me? Did I presume too much—that he would accept me without hesitation? I thought I had approached him as I would any political matter, guided by reason and past patterns, but was my calculation off from the beginning? Sophien thought.0

“Tch.”0

When it came to human relationships, Sophien was impatient, often too uncertain—understandably so, since in all her long...0