Ludger’s jaw tightened. Elaine’s voice stayed steady.
“You might not want to forgive Torvares,” she said. “And maybe you don’t have to.”
Ludger’s eyes flickered, guarded.
“But you might want to understand him better,” she added. “Even if it hurts a bit.”
The twins squealed in the background, a cub rolling over with ridiculous trust. Normal life. Simple life. The kind that didn’t have room for grudges that lasted years. Elaine tapped the table lightly once.
“Don’t let a grudge hold you back,” she said. “And don’t let it make people suffer for it for too long. Every thought and action you take with that grudge in mind, you waste time and energy because of it.”
Ludger finally let the sigh out. It wasn’t dramatic, just a slow exhale that carried weeks of tension with it. Because part of him understood what she was saying. And part of him… didn’t. Or refused to.
He rubbed at his forehead with two fingers and muttered, half under his breath, “I’m a man, Mom.”
Elaine’s eyebrow lifted.
Ludger didn’t look at her as he continued, the words coming out with that blunt, stubborn honesty that only showed up when he was cornered.
“Maybe you don’t understand that,” he said. “But loyalty is a big deal for me.”
It wasn’t just emotion. It was structure. A rule that made the world make sense. A line you didn’t cross. He looked up then, eyes narrowed.
“If someone betrays you—”
Elaine’s gaze softened, but her voice didn’t.
“I understand loyalty,” she said. “Better than you think.”
Ludger’s mouth closed. Elaine held his eyes for a heartbeat, then inhaled slowly, like she was deciding whether to end the conversation gently or cut straight through the last layer of armor. She chose the cut.
“Alright,” Elaine said quietly. “Then here’s the final question.”
Ludger’s spine stiffened. He recognized that tone. The same tone she used when she wanted him to stop hiding behind intelligence.
Elaine asked, calm as stone:
“If Torvares had to choose between the Empire… and our family, who do you think he would choose?”
The room seemed to tighten around the words. Ludger didn’t answer immediately. Because the question wasn’t about politics. It was about priority . It was about the moment where a man stopped being an ally and became something else. Elaine watched him without blinking.
“The choice is obvious,” she said softly, almost gently. “And that’s the point.”
She leaned forward just a little more.
“Because if the answer is obvious,” Elaine continued, “then it makes one thing clear.”
Her voice sharpened, not cruel, just precise.
“Whether Torvares sees us as family… or not.”
Ludger sat very still. And for the first time in a long time, the weight in his chest wasn’t exhaustion. It was the discomfort of realizing that loyalty wasn’t just about what people said . It was about what they would sacrifice, when it finally cost them something real.
Ludger didn’t argue after that. Not because he agreed. Because the question Elaine had asked didn’t have a clean answer he could stab and bury. It was the kind of thing that stayed alive in your head, crawling around, chewing on the parts you didn’t want touched.
So he stood up when she finally let the silence end on its own. No dramatic exit. No slammed door. Just a boy walking away from a table that suddenly felt heavier than any battlefield.
He passed the twins on the floor. Elle was giggling as one of the direwolf cubs tried to lick her face and got a fistful of hair for its trouble. Arash was crawling in a determined line toward the other cub like he’d decided he was going to wrestle it into submission.
Ludger paused long enough to make sure neither baby was about to lose a finger. Then he kept going. Upstairs. Down the hall. Into the room that was technically his, but rarely felt like his. He shut the door behind him and the world finally got quiet.
Just silence, a bed, and the faint smell of dust and clean linen. Ludger crossed the room and dropped onto the bed like his bones had been waiting for permission to stop pretending they were made of steel. He didn’t even bother taking off his scarf.
He sprawled out on his back, hands folding behind his head, elbows wide, and stared at the ceiling as if it might offer advice. It didn’t. He let out an exasperated sigh, long and tired and honest. Because Elaine hadn’t been trying to convince him of many things lately.
She didn’t lecture him about duty. She didn’t nag him about manners. She didn’t hover over his decisions like he was still a child who needed his hand held. If she spoke, it was because it mattered. Which meant her words had weight now.
More weight than they used to. And that was the problem. Ludger stared at the ceiling and felt the question again, pressing at the back of his skull like a thumb on a bruise.
If Torvares had to choose…
He closed his eyes for a moment, still breathing, still too awake, and thought, annoyed at himself for thinking at all. Then he sighed again, quieter this time. Because even when he finally had time to rest…
His mind still refused to let him. Ludger stared at the ceiling and let his thoughts run, because fighting them only made them louder. Elaine’s words kept echoing, not perfect, but trying , and it annoyed him how accurate they were.
He had tried.
In his old life, he’d wasted time. Real time. The kind you never got back. Days that blurred together into a soft, stupid routine where “later” always existed until it didn’t. He wasted time with grudges that never helped him in the end.
This life didn’t allow that. He’d woken up with a second chance like someone had slapped him across the face and said, Here. Do it right this time.
So he did. Or he tried to.
He worked until his mana ran dry. Until his hands shook. Until a town that should’ve collapsed under pressure instead expanded. He protected people because he knew what it looked like when no one did. He built it because it was better than watching things rot.
Because anything else felt like waste.
It would be a waste to live half-asleep with a second chance.
That thought had been a quiet anchor in his chest for years now. A rule he didn’t have to write down because it sat inside him like bone. But Elaine’s question had dragged a different rule out of the shadows.
Did trying to be better mean he had to accept everything? Forgive everything? Ludger’s eyes narrowed. No. Absolutely not. If someone backstabbed him, he’d treat it like what it was. He wasn’t going to smile and pretend betrayal was a misunderstanding. He wasn’t going to let “family” become a word people used to excuse poison.
He wasn’t soft. He wasn’t stupid. But… He exhaled through his nose, annoyed at the direction his mind was going. Torvares hadn’t backstabbed him. That was the irritating part.
Torvares had done something annoying . Something political . Something that shoved responsibility and risk into Ludger’s lap without asking. Eclaire. An imperial problem stuffed into Lionsguard’s pockets with a polite smile. It was the kind of move Ludger hated, because it wasn’t a straight punch. It was a maneuver. A “necessary” choice made in advance, justified by long-term survival and stability.
Ludger didn’t like being used as part of someone else’s plan. But if he stripped away the anger and looked at the shape of the situation honestly… What had actually changed? Eclaire was around, yes. Hidden. Protected. Another fragile piece on the board that could turn into a disaster if handled wrong.
But if Eclaire wasn’t around, if Torvares had never hidden her, would Ludger’s situation be much different?
Would the Empire suddenly stop probing the frontier? Would Orleandul suddenly respect border towns? Would the labyrinths stop producing horrors? Would the capital stop burying truth under “stability”? No.
Those problems existed with or without an illegitimate imperial child sitting quietly in Lionfang’s shadow. Eclaire was a complication. A dangerous one. But it wasn’t the core of Ludger’s life. It wasn’t the reason he had to build walls. It wasn’t the reason refugees had arrived. It wasn’t the reason the Empire played games with information.
He lay there, hands still behind his head, and felt something uncomfortable settle into place.
Holding a grudge about it… It was costing him. Not coin. Not blood. Time. Energy. Mental space.
Every time he thought about Torvares, his mind slid into that same bitter groove. Every time Viola came up, there was a shadow behind it. Every time a Torvares messenger arrived, he felt that reflexive irritation like a knife being drawn. And all of it, every tight breath, every simmering thought, was just… wasted. Because the anger didn’t change reality.
It didn’t make Eclaire disappear. It didn’t rewrite the past. It didn’t undo Torvares’ decision.
It just sat in his chest and ate him a little at a time. Ludger frowned at the ceiling.
He couldn’t help but think that the grudge was making him smaller. Making his world narrower. Pulling his focus away from things that actually mattered, training, preparation, the guild’s long-term strength, the next crisis that was guaranteed to arrive.
He hated wasting things. He hated wasting effort. And he hated wasting his own mind on something that didn’t pay back the cost. A slow breath in. A slow breath out.
Maybe forgiveness wasn’t the word. Maybe he didn’t have to forgive . But he could understand. He could adjust. He could stop bleeding time into an issue that wasn’t actively stabbing him. At least this once, he should give him a chance, but there wouldn’t be another, the next time. All ties would be cut.
Ludger’s eyes half-lidded, expression still stubborn, still dissatisfied, but less tangled.
“Annoying,” he muttered to the ceiling. “Not betrayal.”
The words felt like admitting a weakness. But they also felt like clearing clutter off a workbench. And for Ludger, that was almost the same as peace. Ludger stared at the ceiling and let the next layer of truth settle, heavier than the first. He couldn’t just… forget it.
He couldn’t snap his fingers and decide the irritation didn’t exist. He wasn’t built like that. Loyalty, trust, the feeling of being used, those weren’t stains you wiped off with a smile. They sat there until you either dealt with them properly or let them rot into something worse. And he wasn’t ready to forgive Torvares either.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. But… Elaine had made another point without saying it outright. His decisions didn’t just affect him anymore. They affected them . His family. His guild. His town.
And right now, the way he’d handled this mess, quietly, stubbornly, with concealment and clipped answers, had done exactly what he hated: it had created extra problems. Because when you didn’t give people information, they didn’t become calm. They became creative .
Viola had come to Lionfang because she didn’t understand why he’d been at odds with Torvares for months. She’d felt the tension, the sudden coldness, the way he avoided certain conversations and treated certain decisions like they were poison.
So she asked. And because she couldn’t get the full picture from him, she pushed elsewhere. She involved Luna.
And then, because Viola was Viola and didn’t know how to leave a wound alone, she involved Elaine. Now his mother knew.
And once his mother knew, it wasn’t just a personal irritation anymore. It became a family problem, a protective-instinct problem, a Elaine’s-wrath-is-now-aware-of-an-imperial-secret problem.
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