Watching the boy wolf down his food and still find time to nod with exaggerated "caution," the girl suddenly felt the urge to say all the things she could never bring herself to tell her family.
"These past few days, I've been thinking... about what you said before... about dreams and all that... Maybe it's true. Maybe I really am just someone inside your dream. If this dream ever wakes up, that might actually be a good thing for me."
Ariana's voice was very soft, almost like she was talking to herself.
"Honestly, it's strange. When I'm near you, that... pain inside me... it goes quiet."
That was the real reason she had come back.
Her fingers tightened unconsciously in the fabric of her skirt.
"Really, I haven't felt this peaceful in years. So I..." Ariana did not finish the sentence.
But the meaning was already clear.
"Chomp, chomp, chomp."
Iain chewed his bread and looked at the girl across from him. She did not look like she was lying.
Of course, succubi were always excellent actresses.
"I admit it. Even if my earlier guess was wrong," Iain said, swallowing the last mouthful of bread and wiping his mouth. Then he put on an expression that suggested he had seen through everything.
"I know now why you've set your sights on me."
He sounded supremely confident.
Ariana tilted her head.
"You want to sign a soul contract with me, don't you?" Iain raised one finger, his tone utterly certain. "Have you been hiding in the depths of my subconscious this whole time?"
"Though I suppose it's also possible you only discovered me recently and got lucky enough to spot a rising star in the mortal world."
Iain looked as though all truths had been laid bare before him. Even before crossing over, he had always thought highly of himself.
If he said he was aiming for the top,
he had never intended to settle for second best.
"Ah?"
Ariana blinked.
She really was trying her best to understand what Iain was saying, but the way he strung those words together made as much sense to her as some language she had never learned.
"I actually don't know why I'm able to get in here."
Ariana answered seriously, trying to gather her thoughts.
"I was just... staying at home and wanted a bit of fresh air."
"So I tried to dig a secret tunnel under my bed so I could sneak outside."
She was very honest, laying out her runaway plan in full.
One of Iain's brows twitched.
The girl continued.
"I don't think I was digging for very long. Then somehow, without meaning to, I broke into this underground tomb. Maybe it's right underneath my house?"
She did not sound entirely sure of that herself.
After all, no matter how shallow a tomb was, surely you should not be able to reach it just by digging for a few hours. And besides...
Ariana pointed toward a certain spot in the corner of the room.
Iain followed her finger.
There was a hole in the floor.
A large one, with jagged edges, obviously dug out little by little with some small tool. The dirt around the opening still looked damp, fresh enough to show it had only been dug recently. Judging by the size and shape of the opening, it ought to have been dug upward from below.
So who exactly was the one underground here?
Iain stared at the hole for about five seconds.
Then he lifted his head and looked at the ceiling.
The ceiling was intact stone. No hole.
He lowered his gaze again to the hole in the floor. It was definitely in the floor. In the floor of an underground chamber with no door and stone walls on all four sides.
Even with Iain's expansive style of thinking, he could not help falling silent for a few seconds.
"????"
He was no longer sure whether to praise his subconscious for constructing dreams without being bound by conventional logic, or condemn the succubus for grinding his intelligence into the dirt and treating him like a giant baby.
Just as Iain was wondering whether or not to slap the succubus in front of him, while also kindly worrying he might be unfairly accusing her, Ariana kept watching his silence.
After a while, she chose not to dwell on why digging downward from beneath her bed would somehow make her emerge upward from the floor of a crypt. Instead, she asked the question she was most curious about.
"Um... Mister Corpse, are you..." Ariana hesitated, fingers twisting in her skirt, her voice so soft it was as if she feared waking something.
"...some sort of sleeping king, like in the story of Barbarossa?"
Her voice interrupted Iain's attempt to settle the matter by mentally flipping an imaginary coin.
"What kind of leap is that? Why would you ask something like that?"
He turned to look at her.
Ariana raised her hand and pointed toward the open stone coffin in the center of the room. The lid leaned crookedly off to one side, and the dark velvet lining inside still gleamed faintly.
The outer walls of the coffin were covered in dense writing. Unlike the flowing runes on the walls behind her, these were ancient carved letters cut directly into the stone.
"It's because of... some things going on with me. My brother likes studying ancient languages," Ariana explained softly, with a trace of guilt in her voice, though she still tried her best to answer him carefully. "I secretly looked through his books and learned a tiny bit. That writing is Aramaic."
The girl was clearly trying to show off that she was a genius too.
At least, that was how a suspicious person might interpret it.
Iain froze for a moment.
Aramaic. Of course he knew the name. An ancient Semitic language once widely used across Mesopotamia and the old Persian regions, considered one of the earliest languages to use alphabetic writing. He had seen the term once in a history book in his previous life.
But now this underfed-looking little girl in an old dress was saying she could recognize it?
No.
This was not the knowledge of a succubus.
This was information his bloodline was trying to pass on to him.
The runes on the wall, the writing on the coffin, even the girl herself, all of it had to be part of his dormant bloodline trying to wake him up.
Once again, Iain understood everything.
"Miss Succubus, would you kindly translate it for me free of charge?" he asked in a deeply sincere tone, even carrying a faint touch of reverent thirst for knowledge.
Ariana looked at him in confusion, but did not refuse. She walked over to the coffin, crouched beside it, and pointed to the words as she read them aloud, one line at a time.
"Conqueror beneath the Blood Moon, Supreme Lord of the Silent Dead, Sole Master of the Throne of Divine Bones, Lord of Iron and Fire, Eternal Wrath, God-Hunter, Everlasting Sovereign of Ten Thousand Arts, Bane of Magic, Arcane Emperor... willingly sleeps here."
She seemed genuinely amazed that one person could have this many titles.
Iain stood behind her, listening to the string of honors, his face showing a trace of astonishment. He had not expected his subconscious to be so shameless in its self-flattery.
Still.
As expected of me.
"I don't recognize this last part."
Ariana's voice pulled him out of his self-admiration. Her finger had stopped on the final line at the bottom of the coffin.
She tilted her head and stared at it for quite a while, her brows drawing slightly together.
"These symbols are too old. The book I looked through didn't include them. I can go back and check again. Maybe I'll find them, and I can tell you next time."
Her tone was full of apology.
"Next time, hm? Fine."
Iain nodded magnanimously. He did not care about the succubus's delicate, fragile disguise so long as he could extract knowledge from her.
"Um... I probably need to go back now."
Ariana stood up and dusted off her skirt, her gaze pausing on Iain's face for a moment.
She looked hesitant. Her lips moved slightly, as though she were working up to something.
"Mother may come looking for me."
Her voice dropped even lower as she extended an invitation to her only friend.
"Would you like to... come up above with me and have a look?"
It was obvious the girl had worked up real courage to ask.
"It's getting late, is it?"
Iain lowered his head and glanced at his wrist.
There was nothing there. No watch, no bracelet, no ornament of any kind. But that did not stop him from maintaining the good habit of checking his wrist.
Originally, this was simply part of the self-training Iain had begun in preparation for the day he would one day wear a Rolex, so the gesture came out perfectly smooth and completely natural. More than once, Ariana had been left wondering whether there might really be some kind of invisible magical pocket-watch device strapped there that only she could not see.
In the magical world,
anything was possible.
"So you're trying to lure me outside? Miss Succubus, you really are a beginner. Your professional skills are not especially refined."
Iain lowered his wrist, folded his arms, and set his expression into one of firm conviction.
"Next time. Definitely next time. Today I still need to keep studying and memorizing things here."
He jerked his chin toward the runes on the wall, his voice full of a sense of unshakable purpose.
"You may not know this, but I'm about to start attending a magical school called Hogwarts."
"And if I want to walk into a place like that and give off the impression that I can effortlessly outshine everyone without studying, then I need to work hard in secret where no one can see me."
Iain's honesty was always this direct.
Ariana tilted her head, pale blond hair slipping over her shoulder.
"Hogwarts?" she repeated the name, and something flickered in her eyes. "I know that place. My brothers go there."
At those words, Iain's eyes lit up instantly.
"I knew it!"
The words practically flew out of his mouth, full of triumphant excitement.
"There's no way I'm the only wizard in the world with a warlock bloodline and a succubus living in his head! Right, the films just never mentioned it. Obviously because if wizards brought succubi around, it would never make it past the censors!"
"Some of those crossover fanfics totally have plots like this. Chance encounter with a succubus, veela ancestry, that sort of thing!"
Iain looked as though he had made a world-shaking discovery.
Ariana blinked, clearly not understanding a single term in that sentence.
But Iain had no interest in explaining further. He was not interested in male succubi, so if the girl's brothers were not succubi, then this topic could end here.
A proud British gentleman's ancient talents, passed down from the age of empire, might have been able to shine all the way to the farthest corners of the world.
But they would certainly not be shining on Iain.
"Then... I'll go."
Ariana stepped back toward the hole in the floor, hesitated, then gave him a little wave.
"Mister Corpse, until next time."
Hogwarts really was an inclusive school, she thought. It was apparently willing to accept even people like Iain, who lay in coffins. The thought left her strangely moved.
Then she climbed into the hole.
Her body was small, and she wriggled easily through the jagged opening before vanishing into the darkness, crawling back into her own little black room.
The air was cold.
When Ariana climbed out from under her bed, the light in her room had already grown dim. For her, the whole experience still felt like something out of Alice in Wonderland, and the strangeness of it lingered pleasantly in her mind.
But the pain inside her began to stir again.
It was as though something lay buried in the deepest part of her body. Down in the tomb she could not feel it, but the moment she left, it began rising little by little.
Like mud disturbed at the bottom of a pond, slowly clouding the whole water.
Making everything harder to bear.
"If even Mister Corpse can go to Hogwarts... maybe someone as sick as me could too?"
The girl knelt on the floorboards and pulled the rug back over the hole she had pushed aside.
She did it with practiced ease, as though she had already done it many times before.
"Oh, right. I need to ask about those old symbols for Mister Corpse."
Remembering suddenly, the girl murmured the reminder to herself. She hesitated, then reached out and took hold of the doorknob. The cold metal against her palm helped steady her thoughts a little.
The corridor was very quiet.
The girl walked to a door and stopped in front of it.
"Brother."
She called softly.
The moment the word left her lips, the door was opened almost at once by a young man with strikingly bright blue eyes, extraordinary bearing, and all the brilliance of youth.
"Ariana, why are you still awake this late? You know it's bad for your health."
The young man's face was stern.
His tone was serious.
"Brother Albus... I wanted to ask you something."
The girl spoke hesitantly.
A little timidly.
"Hm? Coming to ask me something at this hour?"
The young man frowned, clearly displeased. He glanced toward the corridor clock, which displayed not only the time but the date as well.
At this moment,
it was the year 1899.
Spring was in bloom.