Luminar was burning.
The capital, called the heart of the Empire, had turned red before the sun had even set. Black smoke rose beyond the imperial palace, and no final toll came from the crumbling bell towers.
Instead, the people gathered in the square wailed.
"That's him!"
"The Treasurer who starved our sons to death!"
"The bastard who sold off the Empire's storehouses!"
They knew Kael's name.
But they did not know over which ledgers he had paused his hand night after night.
Which unit's rations he had delayed by a day, which estate's taxes he had deferred to the following month, which child's medicine had been buried beneath the imperial household's interest.
They did not need to know.
Rage needed someone to hold responsible, and the Empire had already chosen that name.
A stone flew in and struck Kael Riorden's shoulder. His chained body swayed, but he did not lower his head.
He had no right to.
He was not one of those large, solid men who wielded swords. He was a little taller than average and thin, with dark brown hair dusted with ash and dirt. His face was pale from long hunger and longer sleeplessness, but his grayish eyes lay in a colder calm than the crowd below the execution platform.
Kael stood atop the execution platform. Iron chains bound his wrists, while defeated soldiers at the far end of the square were being driven toward the imperial palace.
The Arken Empire would end today.
And until the very moment it ended, the Empire was settling its accounts.
"Criminal Kael Riorden."
The imperial representative unfolded the verdict.
"You emptied the imperial treasury, cut off food and medicine to the Eastern Front, and embezzled military expenditures for personal use."
The crowd shouted again.
Kael did not refute it.
The claim that he had emptied the imperial treasury was false. The treasury had already been empty for ten years, and he had merely moved the figures to keep an empty treasury from looking empty.
The claim that he had cut off food and medicine to the Eastern Front was half true. Because of the budget he had reduced, some units did not survive the winter.
The charge of embezzling military expenditures for personal use was a lie. That money had gone to the imperial household. Officially, it had been an emergency defense fund. In truth, it had been used to repay debts the imperial household had taken on long ago.
But no empire demanded a correction report from a man about to die.
"By your crimes, tens of thousands of soldiers were denied food and medicine, the frontier estates could not bear their taxes, and the imperial army was defeated on the Eastern Front."
Tens of thousands.
One convenient phrase, and every person's name vanished.
Kael was used to that way of speaking. He had written reports that way himself.
Three thousand, two hundred and forty-one dead.
Delay in food distribution.
Estimated losses.
Unavoidable sacrifices.
Ledgers required entries, not people. Someone's death had to be folded into a number before the next ledger could be closed. The ledger had to be closed before flour could be sent to the remaining units.
Thus, under the name of preventing a greater loss, he had always abandoned someone.
And today, the Empire hung all of those numbers around his neck.
"Proceed with the final procedure."
A clerk from the Treasury Office climbed onto the execution platform. He was a young clerk with a pale face. Kael recognized him. His name was probably Dion. Until yesterday, they had been passing ledgers back and forth in the same office.
Without meeting Kael's eyes, Dion held out a thick ledger.
"Your signature acknowledging responsibility."
Kael gave a faint laugh.
"The Empire needs a signature even as it collapses."
"It is an order."
"I know."
He took the pen in his bound hand. The chain made his wrist heavy.
The wording beside the signature line was brief.
I acknowledge that I bear final responsibility for the settlement above.
Attached beneath it was the final accounting ledger.
The Arken Empire Treasury Office's Final Accounting Ledger.
Even on the brink of death, habit did not release him. Kael looked at the figures before the signature line.
The first page listed the money that had come in during the war, and the second listed the money that was meant to be spent on war supplies.
Then came the third page.
Eastern Front outstanding supply payments: written off.
Kael's hand stopped.
Written off?
That entry had not been there yesterday.
His gaze swept downward. The money the imperial household had borrowed, the debts guaranteed by the Temple, the price of defensive magic tools taken by the Mage Tower, the cost of war supplies taken by the great nobles.
Something was wrong.
Figures that should have been scattered across different ledgers had been gathered in one place. Once they were gathered, it became all too easy to see.
Who had borrowed, and who had paid in their stead.
Then something like red ink spread over the letters.
At first, he thought blood had fallen onto the ledger.
But his hands were uninjured.
Red letters surfaced above the ledger.
Price: unpaid.
Kael stopped breathing.
The words soon vanished, only to reappear over another entry.
Party to be charged: mismatch.
Payer: no record.
"Please sign, Lord Riorden."
Dion's voice sounded distant.
Kael could not take his eyes off the ledger.
The party to be charged.
The one who was supposed to repay the debt.
The payer.
The one who paid in another's stead.
They ought to have been the same. At least, in a normal ledger.
But in this ledger, the money borrowed by the imperial household had been shifted to the Temple's guarantee, the Temple's guarantee to the Eastern Front's unpaid supply costs, and then again to the tax losses of the frontier estates.
At the end of that chain were the food and medicine that never reached the soldiers.
And at the very end was Kael Riorden's signature line.
Only then did Kael understand.
The Empire had not lost the war.
The Empire had been in debt for a long time.
The imperial household had borrowed.
The Temple had guaranteed.
The Mage Tower had sold.
The great nobles had added interest.
They were not the ones who had repaid those debts.
The soldiers of the East had repaid them.
The children of the frontier estates had repaid them.
The poor in the relief centers had repaid them.
And Kael had signed those invoices.
He had not been the chief culprit who ruined the Empire.
But neither had he been uninvolved.
"Sign it!"
The imperial representative's voice sharpened.
Kael slowly raised his head.
"I did not ruin the Empire."
The square fell quiet for a moment.
"A criminal's excuses will not be recorded."
"There is no need."
Kael stared directly at the ledger.
"I was only settling someone else's debts."
The imperial representative's face hardened.
For only a moment.
But Kael saw it. That expression was not anger. It was closer to fear.
So they knew.
At least the imperial household knew.
The executioner approached. Kael went to his knees without resistance. The stones of the square were cold.
Red letters surfaced across the ledger again.
Settlement error.
The blade rose.
For an instant, several faces passed through his mind. His father, lying sick in bed. His mother, who spoke of survival instead of dignity. Ria, who had left as though she had been sold away. Ian, who had become a single line in the list of those who died from supply shortages in the East.
Back then, he had processed them all as numbers.
Family loss.
Reduction in dependents' expenses.
Eastern conscription death.
The blade fell.
The last thing he saw was the ledger.
One more line of red letters appeared.
Retrial granted.
***
Kael drew in a breath.
His head was still attached.
He reflexively clutched his throat. There was flesh there. No blood. There was no stone floor of the execution platform, no roar of the crowd, no smell of burning Luminar.
Instead, an old wooden ceiling lay above him.
Rain stains. A creaking window frame. The smell of old ink.
Kael slowly sat up. There were no chain marks on his wrists. His hands were young. They were not the emaciated hands he had possessed at the end of the war, but the hands of a nineteen-year-old.
"This is impossible."
His voice was young too.
He walked to the desk. Beyond the window lay the small courtyard of the Riorden Barony. A broken carriage wheel, an old stable roof, two overturned water buckets.
It was too ordinary a scene.
That was why it was all the more cruel.
This house had not yet fallen.
It was merely falling apart.
There was a difference between having fallen and falling apart. The former was a final accounting; the latter was a ledger that could still be touched.
The letter on the desk bore a date.
Imperial Year 472, Frost Month 3rd.
Nineteen.
It was the year the Riorden Barony was driven to the brink of bankruptcy, and the year he treated his house like an old burden.
His father was bedridden, his mother was dealing with creditors, and the house was about to be seized.
In his previous life, he had excluded all of it from his calculations.
Things that had to be discarded if he wanted to rise.
He had written it that way and left.
Then he received the consequences of that choice far too late.
Aldren Riorden had trusted the Empire's contracts until the very end. The price of that trust was hearing his house come apart while he lay sick in bed.
Selena went from creditor to creditor, choosing survival over dignity. Kael had considered that practical advice shabby.
Ria left as though she had been sold off, like collateral for the family debt.
Ian remained a number in the list of those who died from supply shortages in the East.
Kael learned of all of it only later in his previous life.
Even then, he did not cry.
It was not because he had no time to cry.
It was because he thought he had no right to.
But now that he had returned, whether he had that right was a problem for later.
First, he had to repay what he owed.
To his family.
And to the names he had folded into figures.
This time, he would not run away. He would repay it all, to the end.
If he had returned, there had to be a reason.
And if there was a ledger, he had to read it.
The family ledger lay open on the desk.
Riorden Barony Debt Summary.
Their cash was nearly gone, their land had been put up as collateral, and their creditors awaited only seizure. In his previous life, he had looked at this ledger and decided that recovery was impossible.
This time, he turned the pages one by one.
Most of it was unchanged.
Debts that were difficult to repay.
Guarantee payments never received.
Worthless claims for supplies.
Dead claims.
Then, red letters appeared over an old document.
Kael's hand stopped.
They were the same letters he had seen on the execution platform.
The document was a detailed list of the supplies the Riorden Barony had provided in advance to the imperial army during the Eastern War.
Food, medicine, wagons, iron tools.
The imperial army had taken them.
But it had not paid for them.
In his previous life, Kael had classified that document as a dead claim.
But now, different letters floated above it.
Claimable.
Unpaid supply payment.
Target: Grayden Military Supply Depot.
The room was quiet.
Beyond the corridor, someone was walking carefully. Everyone in this house moved while holding their breath. They did so both to avoid waking the sick head of the house and to avoid being heard by creditors.
In his previous life, Kael had hated those footsteps.
The muted steps of people whose lives were falling apart.
They had felt like shackles binding him.
Now, it was different.
One set of footsteps stopped outside his door, then moved away again. It was probably Ian. His younger brother had often hesitated outside Kael's room in the past. The boy was weighing whether he was allowed to enter, whether he could ask a question, whether his brother would be annoyed.
In his previous life, Kael had found that hesitation irritating.
Now, even those brief footsteps sounded like a debt absent from the ledger.
This quiet house still held debts that had not been repaid.
And there were dues that had not been collected.
In his previous life, he had not known how to distinguish between the two.
He had dismissed both the debt he owed his family and the due he should have claimed from the Empire as troublesome remaining balances.
The result had been nothing but the final signature line on the execution platform.
Kael quietly folded the document.
The imperial army had taken Riorden's food and medicine.
It had not paid for them.
In his previous life, he had written it off as a dead debt.
Not this time.
Grayden Military Supply Depot.
The name he had treated as a loss in his previous life.
It was where he would send the first bill.
This time, those who had borrowed would pay.