PBGS 49

It started as a headache.

The doctor called it a mild migraine, and eighteen-year-old Ananta believed him. As the doctor said, a few painkillers were enough to get through it.

It didn’t take a year for him to realize it was more than an ordinary headache.

Around that time the painful dreams began.

—Find the half-mermaid.

Night after night he had to endure a voice full of fury from the depths of the water. Only Ananta could tell that these were not ordinary nightmares.

“Kaeli.”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“Did Father’s personal physician quit?”

“If you mean Mr. Roil, he probably returned to the island. I heard he married there when the previous duke went into seclusion.”

“I must go back to the island. As soon as possible.”

Accompanied by his butler Kaeli, he went to see his father’s personal physician.

Just intuition.

It was nothing more than a hunch, but for some reason he had the odd certainty that no one else would know this fact except the previous duke’s physician.

Word spread through the dukedom that the duke, hastily returned from the island, had summoned the physician, but no one was surprised. With the air of people who had simply long been expecting this, they calmly called for Roil, who had been working as a doctor outside the castle.

‘Come to think of it.’

It was strange from the beginning.

The retainers of the dukedom never raised questions that the heir apparent lived secluded on the estate without friends, or that he wasn’t even called by his given name.

They behaved as though everything were natural.

They seemed not like people who had just encountered the rules to be followed in this castle, but rather like those who had lived this way for a very long time—since ancient days.

Maybe he had come at the right time.

Until then, Ananta believed he would soon be able to end this suffering.

“What did you say?”

“I am sorry, Your Grace. But ‘it’ is not a disease that can be cured.”

Maker Roil — the previous duke’s physician — answered calmly.

The answer he offered was the exact opposite of what Ananta had hoped to hear.

“What do you mean…”

“I don’t know exactly either. But the previous duke told me it was a curse.”

A curse?

What a ridiculous thing to say.

Ananta rubbed his head for a moment, unable to make sense of the words coming from that man’s mouth.

A curse. At worst, he thought, it would only mean a bit of headache and nightmares. True, it had been excessively uncomfortable.

“…You have been your father’s physician since he became duke. Do you know nothing else?”

“About that—”

“Anything. Even something trivial.”

“The previous duke did say something before he became duke, but I haven’t heard anything since. Your Grace could probably just let it go and ignore it…”

“Tell me.”

Roil thought for a long while, then slowly began to speak.

“The previous duke’s father—your grandfather, who never became duke and died early—left behind a diary. The previous duke said that if he had not read it, he would have thought this was merely an incurable illness and would have suffered less…”

A grandfather’s diary?

Ananta had never even heard that mentioned in passing.

His father had never once spoken of such a thing.

Roil lingered in the castle for a short time to explain what he had done when the former duke had been in pain, then left after saying to call him again if needed.

And Ananta, to find his grandfather’s diary, unlocked the latch on an old room.

A man who had not become duke and had died prematurely.

The room that the grandfather — a man Ananta did not even know the face of — had used and written in until his death had been locked forever by Ananta’s brother, the duke of that era.

‘They said he was a shameful man who passed the family duty on to his young son.’

That was something Ananta had heard before.

He thought the phrase “family duty” simply referred to the dukedom, a phrase invented to prevent people from entering that room.

After that, he had never taken an interest in the matter.

“Is this it…”

Amid papers scrawled in a messy way, as though someone had been researching something in the room, there was a relatively intact drawer. On top of it lay a diary with an old-fashioned cover, as if someone wanted Ananta to find it.

A book his father had said might be better left unread forever.

After a moment’s hesitation, Ananta opened the diary.

[Belzert is cursed.]

A striking first sentence.

The diary of his grandfather was full of stories about a being and a curse.

[A curse that continues toward the family heads. It repeats forever. Because the heads of Belzert begged for power in exchange for yielding to it.]

Flip.

In a dust-choked room that let in little light, Ananta read that diary through the night again and again.

He could not tell where the truth ended and the lies began, but his grandfather seemed to have been deeply preoccupied with the ‘curse’ that ran in Belzert blood and had wanted to record what had been passed down through his father and brother.

[The heads of Belzert learned to wield limitless magical power from it. Thanks to that, Belzert achieved the greatest merits in all naval wars, and thus the name grew great.]

Having been able to command magic freely and, if he willed it, single-handedly face hundreds of humans, the head of Belzert notably contributed to naval warfare and was rewarded by the Emperor with a wife and vast lands including ports.

[It likely did not take long to discover that two curses were inherited as the price of power. It is a well-known fact that the head who led the naval war to victory soon retreated into seclusion in the duchy.]

After that there were no more important details.

How painful the curse was, what it brought. The diary, which went on at length about the price of such strong power, ended with an unbelievable passage.

[This curse will continue until the last Belzert inherits the title.]

Back when he was not yet Belzert.

Pages filled with legend-like tales saying that the curse had been handed down from the beginning of the long family line.

Ananta felt that only after reading those pages did he begin to understand his particularly cold and distant father.

[When a child with silver hair and blue eyes is born, name him ‘Ananta.’]

[That child shall be the last Belzert.]

Where his name began.

At the same time, he learned that he — born with silver hair and blue eyes — would be the ‘last Belzert.’

He was to be the one to end this long, vicious curse that had eaten away at countless heads of the family.

There was no one left to ask why he should be the last, or why his name was Ananta.

“If I die, it will end.”

He didn’t know what his father thought, but Ananta looked at the page written in a distinctly different hand and thought that.

Now what he had to find out was the being that had bestowed the curse — the thing that was called ‘it.’

It might be strange and vicious.

Or perhaps it was just a formless curse without shape.

No—maybe the way to end the curse wasn’t by destroying the curse itself….

One thought after another filled his mind and drifted away. Worrying wouldn’t make the pain go away, and as the young head he had much to do.

But before long he learned what ‘it’ was and what the curse wanted.

—Finally, I can find that traitor.

Because it had come to find Ananta by itself.

Not long after, Ananta Belzert led a group of about a dozen people he had brought from somewhere and set off to sea.