The water of the central basin remained dark and still, broken only by small ripples whenever the night wind brushed across the surface.
Hayjin didn't say a single word.
As soon as the knight's imposing figure emerged from the shadows of the rose garden, the boy merely stared at him. His right hand remained glued to the hilt of the plain iron sword at his belt, knuckles white from tension, his back rigid like a violin string ready to snap. His hazel eyes, dark and ringed with deep circles, scrutinized Wilder without granting the slightest leeway for courtesy or reconciliation. No greeting, no nod, no insult. Only a frozen, heavy silence, weighed down by all the poison and frustration that had accumulated throughout the day.
Wilder understood. He didn't take a single step toward him, not even hinting at the idea of closing the distance by force. He simply stood still on the white gravel path, his hands loosely clasped in front of his dark linen tunic, letting the full moon illuminate the sharp features of his face and his blond hair streaked with fiery red.
The silence between the two stretched on for minutes. A suffocating silence, broken only by the rustling of holm oak leaves and the gentle whisper of the wind brushing against the royal garden's marble walls.
After what felt like an infinity, Wilder broke the stalemate. He took two steps toward a stone bench positioned beside a minor fountain, sat down calmly, and let out a long sigh that turned into a dense plume of vapor in the cold night air.
"This moon reminds me of the night I first faced one of the Demon Kings," Wilder began, his voice low and deep, almost as if talking to himself rather than Hayjin.
At those words, Hayjin's stiffness cracked imperceptibly. The boy didn't remove his hand from the sword's hilt, but his brow furrowed in bewilderment.
"One of the... Demon Kings?" Hayjin rasped out, finally breaking his silence. "Plural? Why... was there more than one?"
Wilder looked up at the starry sky, nodding slowly.
"There were several, Hayjin," the knight replied. "What common folk call 'The Great War' wasn't a mere battle against a single monster or a disciplined army. Our continent was devastated by multiple Demon Kings, each possessing destructive power capable of wiping out an entire province in a matter of hours. But the most terrifying thing wasn't their individual strength."
Wilder paused briefly, turning to look Hayjin in the eyes.
"All those Demon Kings... stemmed from a single, original entity: the Demon God."
Hayjin held his breath. The anxiety and anger that had burned in his chest until moments ago seemed to freeze before the gravity of that name.
"The Demon God was the source of all corruption, the original core giving rise to the blights that nearly reduced Exilia to ash," Wilder continued gravely. "Yet when the united kingdoms finally managed to defeat the last of his Kings... that God was not slain. He simply vanished into thin air. No one knows where he went, whether he sleeps in the depths of the earth or waits for the right moment to return. He remains nothing but a ghost casting his shadow over our world."
Hayjin remained silent, absorbing the revelation with a strange, unsettling hollow sensation. That tale of cosmic wars and dark deities felt so distant from his own petty personal struggles, yet the echo of that looming threat served as another stark reminder of how much of a massive minefield the world he had landed in truly was.
Wilder leaned back against the stone bench, crossing his arms over his chest. His expression turned melancholic, veiled by memories of a past that still weighed heavily on his shoulders.
"I was only thirteen years old when I found myself facing all of this," Wilder resumed, his voice softening into an almost nostalgic cadence, stripped of any military bluster. "Thirteen years old. At that age, you should only be thinking about running through fields, studying, or fooling around with kids your own age. Instead, I was dragged directly onto the battlefield, right alongside my father."
Hayjin tilted his head, without budging from the edge of the basin. "Your father brought you to war at thirteen?"
"I had no choice," Wilder replied with a bitter smile. "And to be completely honest, I didn't want to go. I didn't want to fight. I didn't want to wield a sword. But my father... my father was a man of an older era. A high-ranking noble of House Wilder, a knight who lived and breathed by the sword's code of honor. He loved me, in his own way. He wasn't a ruthless or unloving man, but his mind was as rigid as iron. Because of his noble blood, he drilled me to exhaustion from the time I was five years old. He utterly refused to let his son become anything other than a knight. To him, any other path would have been an insult to our bloodline."
Wilder flicked his hand slightly, as if waving away a ghost.
"The problem," the knight continued, "was that at first, I completely rejected that world. I knew I wasn't worthy. During my training years, I constantly lost spars against the other cadets. I was humiliated repeatedly by the senior knights, who looked at me with scoffing disdain because I was the son of the great Lord Wilder, yet couldn't hold a broadsword without getting blisters. I wasn't the strongest. I wasn't even the smartest. I was just a frightened, clumsy kid, crushed under the weight of a name far too big for his small shoulders."
Hayjin listened without interrupting. For the first time since meeting Redvers Wilder, the image of the "perfect silver knight" began to shatter, revealing beneath the armor plates a fragile, insecure human being scarred by his own weaknesses.
"Then came the day war knocked on the gates of our capital," Wilder said, his voice dropping an octave, turning dark as the night around them. "The demon army advanced, led directly by one of the Kings. When I found myself on the front lines, stationed beside my father amid the mud, blood, and the screams of men being torn limb from limb... I felt a genuine, visceral, devastating terror. Not simple jitters. Pure, unadulterated fear. Fear of dying."
Wilder tightened his grip around his arms, as if still feeling the chill of that distant battle.
"I didn't want to fight," he admitted with ruthless honesty. "All the code of honor my father had beaten into me vanished in a second. I just wanted to run away. I wanted to bolt, hide under a bed, disappear from that hellhole. And in the end... that's exactly what I did."
Hayjin's eyes widened slightly. "You... you ran?"
"I ran," Wilder confirmed, offering no excuses. "While my father screamed at me to hold the line and draw my blade, I threw my shield to the ground, turned around, and bolted headlong into the forest. I saw the look on my father's face as I left. A disappointment so profound, so terrifying... it hurt worse than any demonic blade. He watched me flee like a rat in his moment of greatest need."
Wilder fell silent for a few seconds. The sound of water from the fountain filled the void between them before the knight spoke again.
"I ran for miles into the woods, crying, shaking, throwing up out of pure terror. But then, as the panic and adrenaline of fleeing began to wear off, I stopped among the bushes. And right there... I realized the harsh truth."
Wilder turned toward Hayjin, gazing at him with an intensity that was almost painful.
"I realized that even if I ran... I would probably die anyway. What could a thirteen-year-old kid, with zero survival experience outside the kingdom of Opes, do all alone in a demon-infested forest? I would have been mauled by the first beast to cross my path, or died of cold and starvation in a ditch. I would be forgotten, alone, with no one left to remember me... or worse, people would only remember me as a pathetic, whining coward who abandoned his father and ran off to die like a dog."
Hayjin felt a chill run down his spine. Those words echoed with a frightening similarity to the dark thoughts he himself had entertained only an hour ago in the darkness of his room.
"So what did you do?" Hayjin asked, his tone losing every trace of hostility, turning quiet and tense.
Wilder offered a faint, sad smile.
"I decided something very simple," the knight answered. "I decided that... if I really had to be a crying kid scared out of his mind... at least I'd do it fighting. I told myself that if my fate was to die that day, I would at least die with dignity, sword in hand, trying to do my part instead of crawling in the dark like a worm. So I wiped my tears, gripped my steel once more, turned around, and ran right back into the hell I had just fled."
Hayjin held his breath. The image of that thirteen-year-old kid heading back into the carnage painted itself in his mind with terrifying clarity.
"And... how did it end?" Hayjin asked, taking a step toward the bench, driven by visceral curiosity.
Wilder lowered his gaze to the gravel floor. His face contorted into a grimace of ancient pain, a wound that clearly had never fully healed.
"My father... my father fought with everything he had," Wilder recounted, his voice quavering slightly for the first time. "He held off waves of demons, protected his men, and faced the vanguard of the Demon King until his very last breath. He fell with immense honor... like a true knight of the crown."
Wilder paused at length. A deep sigh escaped his chest.
"Only... sadly, he never knew that his son had returned to fight by his side."
Hayjin froze.
"By the time I managed to emerge from the forest and reach the front lines," Wilder explained bitterly, "the battle was nearly over. The kingdom's reinforcements had arrived, the Demon King had been repelled, but my father had already fallen. He lay on the ground, pierced by a dozen demonic spears. He died believing his son had fled like a coward. He died thinking of me as a craven who had turned his back on his family and his duty, never knowing that in the final minutes of his life, I was right there, a few hundred meters away, slaying demons with tears in my eyes just to reach him."
A silence as heavy as a tombstone descended upon the royal garden.
Hayjin felt a lump form in his throat. He pictured the unspeakable burden that knight carried every single day: the knowledge that the person he loved most in the world had died believing him to be a failure.
"Unfortunately, there was nothing more I could do," Wilder said, raising his open hands toward the dark sky. "I couldn't bring my father back to life. And I could never again prove my true worth to him. I was never able to look him in the eye and hear him say he was proud of me."
Wilder paused, then slowly rose to his feet. His imposing stature stood tall against the moonlight, yet in his crimson eyes lay no despair only an unyielding determination, tempered by grief.
"So... I decided that the only way not to lose my mind was to honor him by striving to grow stronger every single day. Not out of vanity, not for titles, not to earn the applause of the capital's nobility... but so his death wouldn't be in vain. I wanted to ensure that wherever his soul rests now, he can look down and see that the son he believed a coward has become an unwavering shield for the weak."
Wilder took a couple of steps along the gravel path, drawing closer to Hayjin. He stopped a meter away. There was no longer any trace of the morning's misunderstanding, nor the frustration over the ruined spar. There was only a profound respect between two people who had tasted hell, albeit in different forms.
Wilder placed a warm, heavy hand on Hayjin's shoulder, giving it a gentle, friendly squeeze.
"Hayjin," the knight said in a firm, clear, fatherly voice. "Remember that the past... unfortunately can never be undone. You cannot erase the mistakes you've made, the humiliations you've suffered, or the wounds that tore your soul apart. What was done is done, and it will remain carved in stone forever."
The knight looked the boy straight in his hazel eyes.
"Yet you must still strive to live your life by constantly learning from past mistakes, so they don't consume you from the inside in the future. If you keep looking back with anger and resentment, your weaknesses will become the very prison you lock yourself into. Learn from what happened to you, accept your frailties, and use every single day to take a small step forward. Only then can you truly protect those you love and silence those who doubt you."
Wilder removed his hand from Hayjin's shoulder. He gave him one last subtle nod and a genuine smile, unmarred by any shadow.
"Now go back and get some rest, kid. The night is still long, and tomorrow there will be other challenges awaiting you."
Without adding another word, Wilder turned and walked away, pacing slowly and deliberately down the white gravel pathway until he disappeared into the dim light of the royal palace's inner corridor.
Hayjin said nothing.
He stood motionless beside the marble basin, hands at his sides, watching him leave until the final echo of his footsteps dissolved completely into the silence of the night.
The wind resumed blowing through the wisteria hedges, carrying with it the crisp fragrance of blossoms, while Hayjin kept staring at the spot where the knight had vanished encircled by the solitude of the full moon and by thoughts that, for the first time in a very long while, seemed to hurt just a little bit less.