The Editor Is the Novel’s Extra

One question first: how was the world organized before the protagonist existed? Is it darkness, and does the manager hold its place awaiting his birth?

Again, no. From a narrative sense, there was nothing in the background before the protagonist appeared, as the pen rested due to the absence of great individuals. The tragedy of life that was repeated in order to make history was not the subject of this story. Melchior Riognan knew that. Born as Philippe’s eldest son, he had been through it eight times.

His understanding of the world through his many years of shaking, tearing, and breaking the ground is as follows: this world, which can be reduced to letters and returned to blank papers, is made up of the Word itself. Nevertheless, for those who weren’t the main characters, the tragedy is real.

Philippe Riognan initiated the royal family’s cruelty. He was raised by the eldest son Edward, who was called a genius. Originally, he was not a son destined to become king. So, he was able to love. Over nine lifetimes, his target was always the same. The name of Phillippe’s first lover was Eleanor Vitia (her surname had been Vitia until her death). Eleanor was born the daughter of a flower farmer, and at the age of twenty, she became the king’s gardener. It was a position she had never imagined.

Her love was a friendly, innocent young man with light brown hair and turquoise eyes. Eleanor, who was kind and pious, fell in love after serving a loaf of bread and a cup of tea to a young man who was lost and hungry in the rain. She was the only daughter of the Vitia family, and her father was unable to deny her daughter’s request for marriage. Eleanor, with her pale blond hair and pretty blue eyes, made a new plan every day of how she would decorate the cottage garden where she would live with her husband.

Philippe Riognan had heard enough warnings from the royal court about the cost of marriage, but he didn’t care at all. He intended to marry Eleanor, even if it made him a commoner. The child, the fruit of their love, could never be made legitimate. That dream could have come true if it weren’t for King Edward. Eleanor would’ve welcomed Philippe as her husband. She could have built her garden at the village entrance, where she could hear the church bells where she was consecrated.

Truly.

Old blood was always a problem. The madness of the Riognan royal family was rare, but it manifested. Those who remembered the origin of the madness had all passed on, with no records left. There was only one fact that had made it through the haze of time. At least once every five generations, some Riognans became either idiots or murderers. This time was the latter. On the first night of his madness, Edward slaughtered three knights, eight servants, and twelve soldiers. The storm caused by Edward wasn’t as great as the secret and cruel records left by previous kings. Had it been a time when newspapers and publishing were regulated, the crown could have shone a little longer over Edward’s head. If it was the time before the belief that science could one day clarify the reason behind the eclipse, had it emerged before, the people knew the king was mortal.

Philippe, at least, had the judgment to grasp what a united people could do. It was a time when all the royal families on the Dernier continent feared the flames of revolution. In Carolinger, Victoire Morrow had detained the royal family, and terrorists in Krater had assassinated the prince’s cousin in the palace. Philippe only had one option, and he had to persuade the knights to carry out his plan. They had to make usurping the throne seem like a normal handover, so that old tradition could be seen as continuing. Not all of the knights followed Philippe’s words, but most of the knights made a choice of the lesser evil.

The man who loved a commoner accomplished his biggest achievement. His first and last one. After that, Phillippe didn’t do anything that would be recorded in history. He was not a bad ruler, but he never showed excellence. He merely kept the throne as a tool to carry on the liturgy and rules. He didn’t even inherit the lion’s sword. Unlike King Edward, who was an excellent swordsman, he was born without etheric sensitivity. The moment Pierce Klagen cut Edward’s throat, the black lion’s sword returned to the conqueror’s tomb. Since he didn’t have the blade, he couldn’t inherit the covenant. Nevertheless, Philippe became King of Albion, and the solar eclipse occurred in December of 1863.

This is a summary of what happened ten months after Melchior Riognan was born. Just ten months before the coronation ceremony, Eleanor Vitia gave birth to the prince’s illegitimate child. Now that Phillipe became king, she was given a separate palace, which was possible because Albion was tolerant of unions outside the church. Of course, it wasn’t what she wanted. After his birth, she looked into the cold stone-like face of her son, who never cried or fussed and couldn’t even open his eyes alone. Thus, she was absent from the coronation ceremony held by the child’s father.

***

It was the leap day of the following year that Melchior opened his eyes with his strength alone without the care of the grown-ups. The child’s golden eyelashes trembled, revealing his iris and pupils in evidence that he was alive. Eyes with a strange, infinitely cold light that resembled opals were exposed. However, Eleanor surrendered herself to a frenzy of joy.

“Ah, my child. My child opened his eyes. Goddess. My child was born; he’s alive.”

Eleanor cried and laughed for two days, never returning to the former Eleanor again. Until her death, Eleanor Vitia believed that the eldest son was born on February 29, 1864. Philippe didn’t disagree with Eleanor’s claim and always held a grand party for his first child, who returned every four years.

However, even with his eyes open, Melchior was an infant who didn’t respond to any external stimuli. Even when he was a year old, he still couldn’t turn his body over. Everyone knew of Melchior’s problems except for poor Eleanor, who thought her child was only born yesterday. There was no law in Albion that would deprive him of the right to the throne even if he weren’t the child of the official spouse. However, the child, who couldn’t swallow a sip of milk alone, couldn’t become the successor to the royal family.

The royal advisors, the courts, and Duke Cruel all urged Philippe to meet the queen for their own reasons. She was a pale-skinned virgin with an unremarkable bloodline and a long and complex name. They had sent him a bunch of portraits that didn’t resemble the real thing at all. But, as with Edward’s murder, Philippe had no choice. If Philippe and Edward’s mother, Queen Carmela, had been alive, she would’ve cried out. She had been at the head of a fierce battle with the former Emperor of Brunnen in her lifetime.

In the unified Brunnen monarchy, the principality of Raetika, who produced the emperor, took the lead. Emperor Ferdinand’s court had been the source of the war, and a move was made to reclaim the territory taken by Albion during the time of Absalom II. As a result, several battles took place across the Klotto River and ended without fail due to the sudden death of Emperor Ferdinand. Both sides had nothing to gain and plenty to lose.

Juleika Charlotte Castillen, the cousin of the young emperor of Brunnen and cousin of Joseph Cruel, formed a marriage alliance that couldn’t have been imagined a generation ago, allying the oldest rivals on the continent. It was at the time when the revolutionary government was raising its momentum in the Carolinger Kingdom, south of Brunnen and southeast of Albion.

In doing so, Philippe got a queen who couldn’t speak Albion. The couple was politely cold, as was often the case with an arranged marriage, but it wasn’t a year later that the second prince was born. His name was Aslan Riognan, born in 1865, near the end of winter.

***

Words were sounds, and thoughts were texts. This life had been like that from the start. For Melchior, the words and ideas of all humans were uttered simultaneously. In this case, his natural ability became a curse. Melchior had to read and see that the congratulations the midwife spoke were false, and she thought it was a terrible hardship.

Everything poured in excessively. Before he knew the meaning, he realized there was a gap between words and thoughts, and maliciousness often hid behind a charming smile. The court wasn’t a suitable place for a child with a stigma of reading the thoughts of others to grow up. What might’ve been different had he been born in a quite cottage-like in the Angellium estate, or a place where a warm ocean breeze blew in like Eleanor’s hometown?

For Melchior, time began abruptly, and the text was disorderly. The author filled his pen with ink and put it on the paper, repeatedly taking notes and pondering the time and space appropriate for the main character to appear. Melchior was thrown away in the chaotic area of ‘before that,’ where mangers, straw, and myrrh were randomly gathered together. He was torn by a violent storm of too much knowledge, without any kind of guidance.

Melchior couldn’t even open his eyes. He was the crown prince who carried a bloody sin. He was the one who tried to resist the Goddess and was her beloved little child. Sometimes he was the media’s favorite, a dictator with secret police or a mass-murderer. Unfamiliar knowledge interrupted him between the repeated deaths and resurrections, entangling the past and present. Melchior couldn’t afford to react to external stimuli as life in this immature body continued. Wearing the body of a child who couldn’t eat or sleep properly, he took his time.

Years. Melchior of this life was able to understand the fact that the original person couldn’t read the insides of others only after nine years had passed since he gained life again. He learned that humanity was a race that proudly displayed their resentment behind a polite façade and a mouth that spoke of loyalty. Those golden letters, the ugly texts that dissected the abyss of the human mind, only emerged from Melchior’s vision. Understanding brought intelligence. Only then did Melchior establish the self, which was a laborious task. He even remembered how many unsuccessful suicide attempts he had made, his breath unending even if his carotid artery was torn.

His mind was quickly worn out. Repetition made everything familiar, and it made the distinction of each episode fuzzy. Because he remembered everything, paradoxically, he couldn’t fully remember individual events. Some names became unfamiliar as their roles changed, while others were always cliché. So, his enlightenment was delayed. In his previous life, his ability to sense was nothing but a faint whisper. However, it had manifested in the ninth iteration in a completely different way from before with bright golden letters.

It was something he had never seen before. Of course, Eleanor might’ve gone crazy faster than before because of that. She had a bandage always wrapped around Melchior’s right hand due to the bright light of his unique skill. Eleanor had seizures, often screaming, and sometimes injured herself when she saw the child’s bare hands shining in the dark. Whether it was masked or not, the unique skill functioned strongly.

At first, he could only know what the maids and servants were thinking of at the moment. As he grew up, he came to know their past, what they knew, saw, and heard. Melchior didn’t want to open his eyes as the skill forced him to see too much. The scarlet color of his irises widened with the growth of his talent. Eleanor prayed every night to the Goddess for her child, who had pale turquoise eyes that resembled Philippe, to return.

Of course, that prayer wasn’t answered. Because of Melchior’s skill, he went back and forth many times from the overload he suffered. It was at the age of six that he encountered his first restrictions. He became aware of how enormous this skill’s power was and the pain those constraints brought him if he went against them. It was an awful type of suffering that wore out one’s emotions. There was nothing he could do in this body of a poorly developed child. With the punishment of the unique skill, he only was able to wait helplessly for it to reload.

Even though so many conditions had changed, one premise remained the same. As always, the inflection point of history, which was the criterion for reloading the skill, wasn’t created from his will.