Teron Meyer had traveled back into the past.
Why? He had no idea. He'd simply gone to sleep and woken up to a familiar ceiling above him.
The gray wallpaper of the Royal Academy dormitory, the place that had shared his school days, the glittering chandelier, all of it poured in through his pupils. Teron scrambled upright as if seized by a fit.
This wasn't his luxurious estate but a single, cramped dormitory room. And inside it there was only one boy, clutching a pounding chest atop a bunk bed and glancing frantically around.
Teron climbed down the creaking bed steps. Forcing strength into his legs, he faced the bathroom mirror. A height shorter by a hand's span, the worn pajamas he wore, a haggard face, hair grown out and unruly...
There was no doubt. He was now inside the body of the teenage Teron Meyer.
Wondering if it was a dream, he slapped his own cheek hard, but there was nothing except pain. He took up a sword and cut his arm, yet all that came was red blood and the pain of steel biting into flesh. Nothing about it differed from reality in the slightest.
He despaired. This was a vicious nightmare.
Teron Meyer. Loathsome Teron Meyer. That Teron Meyer.
The name Teron Meyer had always been closer to a proper noun of its own. As a child he was the neighborhood pauper; a little older, he was loathsome Teron; older still, he became known as that Teron Meyer.
When people heard the name of Teron Meyer, "the madwoman's son," they all sneered. When "the loathsome loser" Teron Meyer caught their eye, they all scowled. But in the last of the three, when Teron was that Teron Meyer, people froze in terror at the sight of him.
That was because the last Teron was a murderer, a rebel, a black magician... a criminal who had, in short, borne every disgrace a name could carry.
Not yet a murderer, not yet a rebel, not yet a black magician, just Teron the loser and outsider, he sat blankly on the bunk bed for about an hour, staring at empty air. The calendar he checked flaunted the words "Year 200 of the Founding."
Year 200 of the Founding. The time when he was sixteen.
"Sixteen..."
Teron muttered. Before returning to the past, he had been twenty-six. He had regressed exactly ten years. His own hands, there in his sight, felt unfamiliar. Small, soft, without a single scar.
Only then did it sink in, and he let out a hollow laugh. The empty laughter turned into a sound tinged with madness. Teron Meyer slammed his head against the wall and choked out ragged sobs.
Why?
Why on earth?
Why me?!
Family, classmates, teachers, even the king of the kingdom. The unrivaled devil and black magician Teron Meyer, who had led every one of them to death and killed about half of them with his own hands, had suddenly returned ten years into the past. Did that make any sense at all? And of all places, back inside this hellish Royal Academy!
Teron wished, rather, that this were a dream. He wanted to believe that his god had turned him into a wraith drifting through the past, that this was the punishment handed down to him.
The twenty-six-year-old Teron Meyer had been going to die soon anyway, and he'd been hoping to fall into an eternal sleep, forget all his sins, and return to the earth. Not to be dropped back into being sixteen, the most horrific age in the world.
"Damn it-"
He slammed his head against the wall beside the bed once more. A loud thud rang out, and at the same moment there came quick footsteps, and the door flew open. Teron pulled his head away and stared blankly at the spot.
A brown-haired boy stood scowling at Teron.
"Teron Meyer. Have you lost your mind? Shut up. You're being loud."
A face gentle even at rest. But a boy who crumpled his expression the moment he saw Teron Meyer.
"...Lloyd?"
"So you've finally gone mad. It's your business if you want to rot here in the middle of a weekend afternoon, but don't take a single step near my bed."
Lloyd van Acker, the vice president of the Royal Academy student body, glared at Teron with a look full of contempt, then shut the door and left. Teron gazed after the afterimage as if dazed.
Lloyd van Acker.
He had been the roommate of the sixteen-year-old Teron Meyer, and a sacrifice of the war who died at nineteen.
Nineteen, when the rebellion began.
With the rebellion, Teron had seized control of the Academy. A battle broke out between the black magicians and the students. Teron too moved busily, subduing and killing his opponents. It was then that he ran into Lloyd.
The black magician beside Teron fired off a spell at once, and in less than five seconds Lloyd was dead.
Yes, Lloyd van Acker, a brilliant prodigy and one of the kingdom's futures, died to a single spell of black magic, without so much as a chance to resist. He died as his whole body rotted away under the black magic.
And yet.
Lloyd was, right now... plainly alive here.
The face that scrunched up strangely as he spoke. The swaying brown hair. The eyes laced with contempt. The calm, cold way of speaking.
He was alive.
He was no longer a corpse rolling on the ground, corrupted by black magic, and there was, as yet, no one murmuring at the sight of Teron, "So you're the one who killed Lloyd." Nor had anything happened, not Lloyd's death, not the death of that damned bastard who'd muttered those words, not his mother's death. By the time the sights of that day began to flash through his mind, Teron was already breaking out in a cold sweat.
Lloyd...! Please, please... Lloyd, I'm sorry. I was wrong. Get up. Get up, please...
Teron gasped for breath. Unable to suppress his shock at a mind that rationalized itself even in this moment, he staggered down from the bed again. After rifling hurriedly through some paper, he snatched up a quill and frantically wrote down the information he needed to remember.
At sixteen, he set foot into black magic.
At seventeen, he began to kill people ceaselessly.
At eighteen, he prepared the rebellion.
At nineteen. The moment he raised the rebellion, he killed the reigning king and seated his lord upon the throne.
At twenty, everyone was dead.
The rebellion succeeded, the kingdom became a nation of black magicians, and Teron began to oversee state affairs under the new king. The high officials who handled administration alongside Teron were all black magicians, murderers who had slaughtered people indiscriminately. He had lived six more years in the fallen kingdom.
"Why am I... here..."
Could he declare with certainty that he'd felt no bitter regret? Had there been nothing wrong with a life he'd dragged out day by day, drugged senseless because he couldn't bear the pain?
He had thought every day of the people he'd killed, the people who had died. The teenage Teron Meyer, who had believed they were all humans who deserved to die, had, absurdly, spent his entire twenties in their company.
The versions of them in his imagination were crueler at some times, and a little kinder at others. Then on some days they would weep and cling to the legs of his trousers, begging his forgiveness: "Teron, I'm sorry. It was all my fault."
Ah, had I truly felt no regret?
Teron Meyer's foolish choices had taken the life of his one and only mother, had taken too the lives of the people he'd hated a little less, and had even flung Teron into a terrible solitude.
There was only one reason the unrivaled villain, the trash who deserved to die, Teron Meyer, had come back to this place.
Atonement toward every last sacrifice.
Wash away your sins and close your eyes in peace, Teron Meyer. For you do not, as yet, even have the right to die.
It was as if a voice were coming down from the heavens.
