“You were shown it?” I asked.
“Indeed. By my wife’s ability.”
His wife’s ability? I looked at Elisha despite myself, and she returned the look with a broad smile.
“Did you know that my wife is a user of dark-type magic, just like you are?” Albert asked.
“I had heard that, yes. Though even Liscia didn’t seem to know the details.”
“This is something known only to a select few, so I ask you not to speak of it to anyone else,” said Albert. “My wife’s ability is to transfer memories into the past.”
Sir Albert moved on to continue his story.
The king who was about to have everything taken from him by the nobles was gripped with a deep sense of regret.
Why had he dismissed the young man?
Why had he not valued him more?
If he had not been shaken by the nobles slanderous lies, if he had instead taken the hands of the young man and the General of the Army, if he had continued with reforming the country, at the very least, he would not be in the difficulty in which he now found himself.
Were he truly rotten, this is where he might have raged, “This is all the summoned young man’s fault” or “If not for him, it would never have been like this,” ignoring his own responsibility. However, this king might have been foolish and weak, but he was generally soft on others, so the idea never occurred to him.
What he did think was that he had needed to value the young man more.
If, at the very beginning, rather than prime minister, he had just made the young man king to begin with…
If he had, surely he would have reigned over this country far better than the king himself could.
If that had happened… then his daughter…
The king sunk into despair.
Having lost hope in that king, the queen said: “You have failed. Our fate is already sealed. However, if we use my ability, we can tell our past selves about this failure.”
The queen had a mysterious ability. It allowed her to transfer a person’s experiences to their past self.
The past self who received them would experience them as if for themselves, and it would feel as if time had been wound back for them. It was using this power that the queen had survived the bloody war of succession. (Or to be more precise, she had repeatedly sent back her memories moments before her death, then avoided the danger.)
After explaining this, the queen had apologized to the king. It turned out that she had used this power to choose her husband, too.
It seemed no matter how fierce of a warrior she had taken as her husband, no matter how wise a sage, the kingdom was destined to be destroyed. Invasions by foreign enemies, attacks by monsters, plots by the nobility, uprisings by the people— while the reasons differed, the result was always that the royal capital was engulfed in flames.
This king who people thought was mediocre had been the only one who, while he hadn’t uplifted the country, had managed to extend its life. It seems this king was the only one whose child the queen had given birth to.
“Even if I use this power, we cannot change our present,” Elisha had explained to him. “However, we can lead our past selves to a future different from this one. Dear… if our lives are to end here anyway, would you like to try creating a future like that?”
When the queen told him this, the king came to a resolution. That he would send word of this failure into the past. Then he would have his past self leave the throne to the young man.
It may only have been to satisfy himself. But it felt like it might offer him some atonement for the things that had been lost due to his failure, so the king entrusted everything to his past self.
The king and queen transferred their memories to their past selves.
Those memories had come back to him as he’d listened to the young man speak about enriching the country and strengthening the army.
“To put it simply, I am the king who inherited those memories,” Albert finished.
While I listened to Sir Albert’s story, I was in a state of confusion. Was this a time slip…? No, a time leap?
He’d said it was dark-type magic, but it could even do stuff like that? Oh, but all that was inherited were the memories, so it wasn’t as if the person’s consciousness returned to the past.
If those memories were truly being transferred into the past, that should have created a time paradox. Because the Sir Albert sending the memories had no memory of having them sent to him.
In that case, could it be that Elisha’s power was one that let her intervene in an alternate dimension that was highly similar to her own? Less like the “Life Do-Over Machine” and more like the “What-If Phone Box,” huh? To put it simply, that would mean this world wasn’t the past of the sending world, it was an alternate dimension.
Though, even if I brought this up, I doubted the two of them would understand. They probably didn’t have a concept of other dimensions to begin with, and I couldn’t exactly say I understood it that well myself.
Aw, geez, this place wasn’t just a simple world of swords and sorcery? I thought.
While I was busy being confused, Sir Albert took a sip of his tea and sighed. “Honestly… it must have been hard on the one who sent me the memories, but it’s not easy being the one to receive them. From my perspective, I feel like I’ve lived a life in which I made you my prime minister, acted like a fool, and then turned back time. If I hadn’t heard Elisha’s explanation on the other side, I would have thought time had just turned back. I, myself, haven’t done anything, but the guilt I feel toward you won’t go away. I apologize on behalf of the former me. I’m terribly sorry.” Sir Albert bowed his head deeply.
“No, apologizing to me doesn’t help… I mean, I have no recollection of any of it…”
“I know that… This is only for my own self-satisfaction. I want to apologize. Please, let me apologize.”
“…Well, if that’s how it is…”
If he said he wanted to apologize, the best thing to do was probably to let him. The situation was well beyond my understanding, so I couldn’t put myself in his shoes.
Sir Albert looked me straight in the eyes and said, “And so, to keep things from turning out the way they did in my memories, I ceded the throne to you. I believe this should answer your first and third questions.”
“…I’d have to agree with you,” I said.
The answer to my first question, “Why did you give your throne to some kid you just met?” was that, actually (though, this wasn’t correct, strictly speaking), it wasn’t the first time we had met.
The answer to the third, “Why did it take so long for you to meet with me?” was likely that he hadn’t been sure whether or not to reveal the existence of this ability. It might have been because he’d wanted to see for certain that we had reached a different future from the prior world first.
That left my second question. The issue of Georg’s loyalty…
“Don’t tell me you told Georg about all this?!” I cried.
“…I am weak,” said the former king. “I wasn’t strong enough to carry this burden alone.”
Sir Albert looked out the window. It had started to cloud over a bit. It might start snowing.
“I couldn’t believe that, with my power alone, I would be able to call forth a different future. I told everything to the one man in this country I could trust, Georg Carmine, and asked for his help. That was why he came up with a plot to exterminate the corrupt nobles who had become your enemies in that time. It was our fault that Castor grew suspicious of you. However, because the plan was already in motion, we couldn’t reveal it, and I apologize for the undue suffering that put you through.”