Randel took one more step, closing the already minuscule distance between them to something utterly indecent. The moonlight now fully illuminated her face, leaving not a single shadow for refuge.
“I am seeing your face for the first time,” he whispered, his voice carrying a new, deep intonation filled with reverent awe. “It… you… are beautiful.”
His words hung in the air, and for a moment Amanda simply stared at him, uncomprehending. Then her mind finally processed the information.
Her face. He can see her face.
“AAAAAH!”
It was not a scream of terror, but rather a stifled, panicked squeal that escaped her lips. She instinctively recoiled, her hands flying to her face, searching for the familiar contours of the mask—only to encounter bare skin, damp with tears.
“The mask… Where is the mask? I… I forgot it!” Her voice trembled, laced with echoes of raw, animal panic. She spun in place like a frightened creature seeking shelter, her gaze darting through the dark alleys as if the mask might be lying somewhere beneath a bush.
“My lady… please calm yourself, I beg you,” Randel did not grab her, but his hands gently yet firmly caught her frantically gesturing wrists. His fingers were warm and steady.
“Please. Look at me.”
“No! You weren’t supposed to see!” She tried to pull away, but his grip was unyielding, though tender. “This… this is against the rules! Against…”
“Against whose rules?” His voice remained remarkably calm—an anchor in the storm of her shame and fear. “Yours? The forest’s? Or the ones you invented for yourself?”
She fell silent, breathing heavily, still trying to turn away.
“Please,” he said again, and there was such sincere, profound pleading in the word that she involuntarily froze. “Look at me.”
Slowly, overcoming every inch of resistance, she lifted her gaze to him. Her eyes—red from tears and from nature—were filled with horror.
“I do not know what vows you keep, what secrets you guard,” he continued, without releasing her hands, his thumbs gently stroking her knuckles. “And I do not need to know. But what I see now… it is not a threat. It is not danger. It is the face of a woman who has just endured a nightmare. A woman who weeps. A woman who… is afraid.”
Each word struck true, shattering her defenses.
“And you know what?” He leaned a little closer, his gray eyes gleaming almost silver in the moonlight. “There is nothing shameful in that. To see you like this… it is an honor for me. Because it means you trust me enough to reveal your vulnerability. Even if it was unintentional.”
“I… I am not supposed to be vulnerable,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “I am the Guardian. I must be strong.”
“Strength is not the absence of fear or sorrow,” his voice grew firm. “Strength is the ability to keep going even when it is frightening. To weep when it hurts. You are the strongest woman I have ever met. And the fact that you can feel pain… it does not make you weak. It makes you alive. Real.”
He released one of her hands and slowly—giving her time to pull away—raised his own toward her face. He did not touch her; his fingers hovered a mere centimeter from her cheek.
“Allow me to see you,” he asked again, his request carrying no demand, only hope. “Not the symbol. Not the legend. But you. The one who saved me in the forest. The one who flinched from me like a startled kitten. The one who stands before me now, tear-streaked and beautiful as moonlight on autumn leaves.”
Amanda looked at him, and her panic began to ebb slowly, giving way to something warm and aching. No one had ever spoken to her like this. Not in this life, nor in the one before.
He saw through the mask, through the armor, through all her lies—and he had not turned away.
“I…” her voice was hoarse. “I am afraid.”
“I know,” he smiled softly. “And that is all right. But you are not alone. While you are here, under this roof, you are not alone. Remember that.”
And then, at last, he touched her. Only with his fingertips, tracing her cheek and smearing away the trail of a dried tear. The touch was so light, so careful, that goosebumps raced across her skin.
“Your face,” he whispered, “is far more beautiful than any mask. Please… do not hide it anymore. At least, not from me.”
In that moment, Amanda realized that her greatest secret was no longer her power or her origins. Her greatest secret, her greatest danger, and her greatest joy stood right in front of her—gazing at her with silver eyes and wiping away her tears.
And she was no longer able to resist it.
They wandered the garden for a long while longer, their conversation flowing easily and without constraint. Randel pointed out rare varieties of autumn roses, shared legends tied to the fountains, and recounted amusing stories from his childhood spent within these very walls. Amanda listened, and her heart gradually thawed. In his company, she felt not like the Guardian, but simply… herself.
It was that very feeling that gave her the courage to ask the question that had been burning inside her since that fateful dinner. She stopped beside a stone bench entwhed with ivy and, gazing at the dark water of the pond, quietly asked:
“Randel… Why? Why were you so… cold with Lady Yui? As if you were seeking a reason to break it off. And with me…” She faltered, lowering her gaze in embarrassment. “…so tender. Is it… hypocrisy?”
Randel froze beside her. The mirth in his eyes faded, replaced by a deep, old weariness. He sat on the bench and gestured for her to join him.
“It is not hypocrisy,” he began softly. “It is… a long story. And not a pleasant one.”
He fell silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts as he stared into the night.
“I have known Yui since childhood. We were raised with the expectation that we would be together. And from the very beginning, I saw her true nature.” He gave a bitter smile. “I remember one winter, when we were about seven, my mother gave warm boots to her maid—an old woman named Marta who had served their family since birth. Marta was poor; her own family was starving. And what do you think Yui did? Upon seeing the boots, she flew into a rage that something had been given to ‘her’ maid without her permission. She snatched them and threw them into the blazing fireplace. With the words: ‘If I cannot decide what my maid wears, then let her have nothing at all.’”
Taken from NovelFire, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Amanda stared at him in horror.
“That was only the beginning,” Randel continued, his voice growing firmer. “At ten, she locked the kitchen cat in a pantry because it had frightened her favorite parrot. The cat was found three days later, half-dead. At twelve, dissatisfied with a hairstyle a new maid had given her, she crept in during the night and cut the girl’s hair off while she slept. Just took scissors and sheared it away. At fifteen…” He clenched his fist tightly. “…she beat a servant for ‘staring too long’ at me while pouring wine. The girl’s nose was broken. My parents and the Duke de Linne dismissed it all as a ‘fiery temperament’ and ‘youthful jealousy.’ It was easier for her father to pay off the victims than to raise his daughter properly.”
With each story, Amanda felt a cold hatred toward the girl growing in her soul.
“She has not changed over the years,” Randel shook his head. “She has merely learned to wear her mask better. In public—sweet, smiling, charming. But in her eyes, there has always been emptiness. A complete lack of empathy. She believes the entire world exists for her pleasure. People, to her, are tools. I was… her most prized trophy. A title, a status, a beautiful plaything she was meant to possess. She did not love me. She did not even know who I truly was. What mattered to her was the image—‘the fiancée of the Eichenwald heir.’”
He turned to Amanda, his gaze piercing.
“What you saw at the table was not me being cold. It was me finally stopping the pretense. For years, I wore my own mask, trying to fulfill my duty to my family. But every time she touched me, I wanted to recoil. Her touch was false, just like everything about her. And her words… sweet poison.”
He took Amanda’s hand, and his touch was so warm, so alive—so utterly different from everything he had just described.
“With you…” His voice softened to a whisper. “…everything is different. From the moment I saw you in the forest, standing before death without a trace of fear… something shifted. You are real. In every gesture, every glance—even in your fear and your tears—there is a sincerity that Yui never had and never will. You do not play a role. You live. And I…” He paused, as if afraid to shatter the fragile moment. “…I feel alive beside you. For the first time in many, many years.”
Amanda looked at him, her heart pounding wildly. He did not see her lies, her performance. He saw
her
. The one who was afraid, who wept, who was terrified to death by this entire madness. And he preferred this real, imperfect her to the flawless but hollow doll.
“She is nothing like you,” he concluded, squeezing her fingers. “She does not possess even a hundredth of the strength, kindness, and light that you do. Breaking with her is not a tragedy. It is liberation.”
In that moment, the last remnants of her fear dissolved. He hated in Yui precisely what Amanda herself was not—falseness, cruelty, and emptiness. And his tenderness toward her was not hypocrisy, but… genuine. Perhaps the only thing that was truly real in this entire insane story.
Amanda’s question hung in the night air, ringing and awkward. “Have you truly fallen in love with me?”—and in the next instant, her own panic overtook her. “Don’t say it!”
Randel did not answer at once. He gazed at her, and a whole storm swirled in his eyes—tenderness, confusion, raw sincerity.
“I… am not certain,” he admitted at last, his voice unusually quiet, stripped of all the confidence of an heir. “I do not know what this feeling is called. But I do know that I have never felt anything like it before. Not for any woman. Not for Yui, not for anyone else. When you are near, the world bursts into color. When you are gone, everything turns gray. I think of you when you leave. I seek your gaze in a crowd. I… care. And that frightens me more than any battle.”
His words were so pure, so unguarded, that Amanda’s breath caught in her throat. She felt her cheeks burning. She needed to defuse the moment somehow, to reclaim even the illusion of control. And into her desperately searching mind came an absurd thought.
“And… does it not bother you that, by your standards, I am probably a thousand years old, boy?” she blurted out, trying to sound haughty, though it came out more pitiful than anything.
Randel froze for a second—and then he laughed. It was not the polite laughter that echoed in throne rooms, but a real, deep sound that rose straight from his heart.
“Age?” He shook his head, mischievous sparks dancing in his eyes. “For the power that slumbers in the Eternal Forests, a thousand years is but a single breath. And for the heart… the heart knows no age at all. It loves or it does not, without consulting any calendar. And if you have lived a thousand years and never once looked at someone the way you are looking at me right now… then perhaps that is the greatest miracle of all.”
“And you?” he asked softly. “In all your long life… have you ever… loved someone?”
The question caught her off guard. To parry it—to create distance, or simply to test his reaction by touching the very foundation of his house’s history—a name surfaced in her mind. Not an enemy, but the bedrock upon which everything he knew was built. The founder whose name she had read in the book.
She turned her gaze away, lending her face an expression of distant, bittersweet sorrow, and spoke in a voice steeped in nostalgia for centuries long lost:
“There was one heart… as proud and untamed as these forests themselves. A warrior in whose veins ran the blood of ancient spirits, and in whose eyes burned a fire that could melt the ice on the highest peaks. Kaelen Eichenwald…” She paused dramatically, watching him from the corner of her eye. “Yes. The one whose name graces your house. The one who raised these walls from wild stone. There was a time when my heart belonged to him.”
She expected reverent awe. Perhaps a flicker of jealousy toward a great ancestor.
But Randel’s reaction was entirely unexpected.
He froze. Still as one of the garden statues. His moonlit face became utterly unreadable. Then, very slowly, he turned his head toward her. In his eyes there was no admiration, no anger. Only a strange, piercing sadness… and understanding?
“Kaelen,” he said, and the name on his lips sounded not like legend, but something deeply personal. “Kaelen the Lonely. That is what they called him in the end.” His voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “Do you know how his story ended? Your story with him?”
A faint prick of unease stung Amanda. The book had offered no such details. “Founder, mighty warrior, began the dynasty”—that was all.
“Everything has its end,” she replied evasively, striving to maintain the mask of an eternally grieving woman.
“His end was… solitary,” Randel continued, never breaking his gaze. “The legends say he lost his great love. The one who was his light and his strength. They say he searched for her for decades, scouring forests and mountains, seeking traces of her magic, her presence. But he never found her. And until the day he died, every evening he climbed that very tower—” Randell raised a hand toward the palace’s tallest spire, its pinnacle lost in the night—“and gazed north, toward the Eternal Forests. In the hope that one day she would return.”
A lump rose in Amanda’s throat. Her foolish, improvised lie had suddenly taken on flesh and blood, transforming into a tragic, beautiful, and terrifying truth of this world.
Randell stepped closer. His gaze now brimmed with tenderness and something else she could not name.
“And now… now you have returned. After centuries. Into his house. To his descendant.” He slowly lifted his hand and, without touching her, traced his palm through the air an inch from her cheek. “Is this… fate? Or a cruel jest of the gods? Have you come to finish his story? Or… to begin ours?”
Amanda could not move. She was trapped. Trapped in her own lie, which had proved more dreadful and more magnificent than she could ever have imagined. She had not merely lied about a love. She had inscribed herself into the very heart of the Eichenwald myth. She had become the ghost from the past, the returned legend.
And looking into his eyes—full of hope and unspoken questions—she realized there was no retreat. Only one path remained: to accept this new, mad role and see where it led.
“I… do not know,” she whispered. And that, at least, was the purest truth.
“Nor do I,” he answered quietly. “But I do know that beside you, I feel what he must have felt. That I have found something I have sought all my life, without even knowing I was seeking it.”
This time, his touch was not a question, but a declaration. His fingers settled gently on her cheek, and the gesture carried not only tenderness, but the weight of an entire dynasty’s legacy stretching across the centuries.