Ignis had no taste for anything dull or repetitive.
A fine view lasted him an hour, a delicious dish three times over, an entertaining game a week... Compared to most people, the shelf life of Ignis’s interests was drastically short.
People, at least, held his eye a while longer. The living had something to them, a kind of animation.
Unlike objects, prod them and they moved, changed shape, made noise. There was a charm in all those varied reactions.
Lately, though, even people seemed to be wilting a little in his estimation.
The way you tire of playing with the same toy, it was getting hard to find any fun in faces that gave him the same reaction day after day.
There were always more than enough bodies around Ignis to fill out a game, and yet he’d gone out of his way to borrow people from his mother for precisely that reason.
When you grow bored of what you already own, you bring in a new toy. Simple logic.
Or perhaps... from the very beginning, what had been set out on that game board was never a handful of hard, weightless little wooden pieces at all.
Tap.
Ignis’s red piece came down on the starting square, and every attendant’s gaze gathered over the board.
Unlike before, when they’d been so eager to cheer and clap, this time not one of them could bring themselves to speak.
In the chilly silence, only the shapeless scent of roses drifted through the air.
Everyone present felt it on instinct: one wrong step on his temper and there would be consequences.
What began now was no cheap round of flattery, and it was no game either.
“So, shall we start with whoever came so tragically close to winning last round?”
With the second round underway, Maria was the first to be handed her turn.
He’ll help us concentrate. What on earth is that supposed to mean? Having left that sly little remark hanging, Ignis made no move at all once the game actually started.
To Maria, that silence was more unnerving than anything he could have done. It felt exactly like the hush right before a storm breaks.
She shrank into herself and drew a card slowly. The hand that had stayed so perfectly composed while she was deceiving a prince was now trembling visibly.
“...”
And when she read the words printed on the card, Maria swallowed hard without meaning to.
Unlike the last round, her hand this time was poor. A card game was pure luck, so that was only to be expected.
After dithering for a while, she picked out the least damaging card she held and carefully turned it face up on the table.
It was the very card she’d played earlier in place of ‘Fluffy Cloud.’
Some cruel joke of fate had dealt the exact same card back into her hand.
“Oh dear, looks like the cards didn’t get shuffled properly?”
Ignis said it quietly.
The attendant who had shuffled the deck went pale, guilt pricking at him before he could help it, but Ignis didn’t reproach him. He only grumbled like a child.
“I would’ve liked to see some new cards, if possible. Shame. Well, it makes no difference to having fun.”
Murmuring that under his breath, Ignis abruptly spread his fingers and stretched his hand out slowly toward Maria, as though taking aim.
“...?”
The instant she met that ominous gesture and the strange, keen interest in his face, Maria was seized by an alien sensation, the air warping faintly around her.
A fear she couldn’t name rose in her, and her mouth opened to say something.
Shhhhsplash-!
Out of a clear sky, a hard sheet of water came crashing down.
“Ngh...! Cough, cough!”
No, not a bucketful of water. A torrential downpour, perhaps, would be the better word.
The sky was still cloudless and bright, yet somehow thick ropes of water poured down over Maria’s head and nowhere else.
Maria didn’t even have room to scream; she burst into coughing and curled in on herself. Cold water soaked her hair and her clothes without end.
“...!”
“M-Maria...”
A colleague beside her called her name in horror, but there wasn’t even time to answer.
Yank.
Something unseen had suddenly hauled one of Maria’s legs out from under her.
“Agh...!”
With no chance to brace against it, Maria slipped and went down face-first into the muddy water.
Splat!
As the water sprayed out in every direction, the rose petals strewn across the ground scattered up with it, gaudy as a stage effect.
“Hah...”
Her colleagues stared, breath caught in their throats, at the woman who had been reduced to a mess of mud in the space of a second.
Her neatly pinned hair had come apart in all directions, and her clothes and her face were so blotched and streaked you couldn’t make out what either had looked like before.
Shaking all over, Maria barely managed to push her upper body upright.
Drip, drip...
The rain still falling on her washed a little of the muck away, but she couldn’t even register the state she was in.
Driven to the edge by a terror and a humiliation beyond words, she had nothing to spare for how she looked.
When everyone turned, stricken, toward the author of all this, what met their eyes at the end of their gaze was Ignis, smiling in deep satisfaction.
“Well? How was it?”
He was calmly brushing the biscuit crumbs off his hands, a picture utterly divorced from the scene in front of him.
Watching how little it troubled him, the attendants felt such disorientation that for a moment they wondered whether they were seeing an illusion.
But what he said next was far too clear to dismiss.
“All I did was make what’s written on the card come true. Much more fun now, isn’t it?”
Ignis tapped the card Maria had laid on the table. The description printed on it, to be precise.
‘While running from a sudden downpour, you stepped in a puddle on the ground and went down.’
The moment she drew the card, the prophecy had come to pass: drenched by a wall of water, Maria had fallen into the mud...
It didn’t take long for them to grasp what had happened.
What this prince had just exercised was a miracle that only the imperial bloodline could wield. An impossible phenomenon brought into being by nothing more than the wish for it.
Some people called it magic. Others called it the blessing of the imperial house.
But not one person standing in that garden could have felt what had just happened was any sort of blessing.
Ignis had done something cruel and didn’t carry so much as a speck of guilt for it, and the sight of him was enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck.
An act that filled everyone around him with terror was, to him, nothing more than a bit of fun. A game.
No more and no less than idly flipping over a bug toiling across the ground, just to see what it would do. Even if, to the one being flipped, it felt like a clear and present threat.
“What are you waiting for? It’s your turn next.”
Ignis’s gaze slid over to the attendant sitting beside Maria.
The moment those glistening golden eyes fixed on him, the chosen attendant was seized with fright.
“Aren’t you going to play?”
“N-no, Your Highness. I’ll draw, I’ll draw right now...!”
Driven by the sheer force of him, the attendant snatched a card in a hurry.
But the instant he saw what he’d drawn, his face filled with despair, as though he knew on instinct that his luck had just run out.
Stamped across the face of the card, plain enough that nobody could miss it, were the words ‘Penalty Card.’
Up to now the game had run on adding cards to your hand and choosing which one from your deck to play, but a penalty card followed an entirely different track.
The rule was that it never joined your deck. It had to be played at once. You couldn’t tuck it away in your hand, and you couldn’t put off your turn.
Without meaning to, the attendant darted a glance at Ignis. For a split second the thought flashed through him, Couldn’t I pretend I never drew a penalty card? But it was impossible.
“What a shame. No luck for you either.”
Because from the very moment the card was drawn, Ignis had been sharply aware of the suspicious air coming off the man.
“Try drawing a better card next time.”
Snap.
The words were barely out of his mouth before a crackle sounded and sparks leapt into the air.
A small flame wavered into being, as if a candle had just been lit, then caught the attendant’s bangs and spread along them like a fuse.
“Ngh... aaaagh!”
Whoosh!
The artificial flame devoured his eyebrows and forehead without mercy. Through the flower scent flooding the garden came the sickening smell of burning flesh and hair.
The attendant fought to put out the fire on his head.
He thrashed his head about, he knocked over a drink, he even slammed his forehead against the table.
His desperation was enough to leave his terrified colleagues holding their breath, and still the fire wouldn’t die down easily, as though it had a purpose to finish before it would let itself go out.
At last, flailing his hands in a blind panic, the attendant lost his grip on the card and sent it flying off into the air.
Fwish.
Tap.
...A single card, riding the breeze in a long arc.
That little square of paper, the one that had caused all that horror a moment ago, came to rest right at my feet.
Crouched behind the rose bushes with my breath held, having watched the whole thing, I let my eyes drop to the fallen card without thinking. The paper was marked with black soot, but the words on it were still perfectly clear.
‘Your bangs caught fire. Ow, hot!’
I couldn’t help letting out a weak little laugh.
And how exactly am I supposed to win that over...?
