The chapter can still be considered "intense" from a standpoint of the feelings involved, but if you survived the previous chapters then you should be fine with this as well.

SORRY it took so long to edit this chapter, I was almost ready last Saturday, but got a fever one paragraph away from the end TT

Many thanks to Krymzim and JcFerggy for helping me polishing this chapter.

I'm not strong enough to stay away
What can I do?
I would die without you
In your presence my heart knows no shame
[..]
And it's killing me when you're away
And I wanna leave, and I wanna stay
And I'm so confused, so hard to choose
Between the pleasure and the pain
[..]
There's nothing I can do
My heart is chained to you
And I can't get free
Look what this love's done to me

Ferdinand had to fight a wave of dizziness as his surroundings suddenly seemed to change.

He was a kid, back in that place, sweating and tossing around as his mana threatened to swallow him. The pain was so great that he started wishing for death to quickly take him, so he could finally stop suffering. However, just a moment before his wish could be fulfilled, someone drained his mana, an invisible person with the voice of a woman. She told him a guard was supposed to come that night and turn him into a feystone, but that she was there to take him away from the palace.

Guilt gripped him as they went past the other children's rooms, leaving them behind. A frightening sense of vertigo accompanied his first trip down the stairs, away from the boys' floor, followed by an out of proportion sense of accomplishment when they reached the bottom. He thought nothing of it when they heard the screams of one of the princesses and her guest, but the woman was so surprised that she almost blew their cover and got them discovered by a guard.

And then, they had a close encounter with the guards' captain. Terror gripped his heart as he heard the same voice from the night that Quarta had disappeared. The older child's painful screams had plagued him with nightmares ever since, and now that man was there for him.

The captain started to move toward him, staring straight into his eyes, and he couldn't move away as he was paralyzed with fear. But the woman saved him again, moving him aside barely in time and barely far enough to avoid the captain and the sword he swung in their direction.

When they finally made their way outside, he was overwhelmed by new sensations, unknown sounds and smells. Every step was a new discovery: the grass, the uneven floor, the leaves, the magic she used to fix cut branches, the trees, the soil, the vastness of everything, the sky.

The beautiful, magnificent sky.

He was so enraptured with it that he forgot they were in the middle of their escape, leaving the woman's side without even realizing. But she went to look for him and, when she took off her Verbergen amulet, he could finally see her for the first time in all her beauty. It was then that the blue haired woman, who called herself 'Seradina', gave him a real name, a human's name.

They escaped from the woods near the palace using her highbeast, going so high in the sky that everything looked incredibly small. When he asked, she told him she came from one of the stars.

They spent two days together, waiting for his father to pick him up. It was an almost uneventful time in comparison, but he learned more in those two days than what he had learned in his whole life at the palace. Among the other things, he learned what it means to have someone near who really cares for you.

When the time came to say goodbye his heart was torn to shreds, but he forced himself to be brave because she promised they would meet again, once he became an amazing man. As a parting gift, she gave him the most magnificent blessing he had ever seen.

"Ughh.." Ferdinand groaned in pain as a gargantuan mass of memories was squeezed, compressed and pushed inside his mind. He panted heavily, leaning on the balustrade in the effort of keeping his balance. He needed a moment to reassess his surroundings, to let all the memories settle down and sort themselves.

He couldn't quite believe how much had happened in those few days, how many feelings he experienced that he had never experienced before -and would not experience again for many years to come. Just by remembering them, he was left in an emotional mess.

While all the memories were wildly bouncing around in his mind, getting in and out of focus and stepping on each other's feet, there was only one that stood in the middle of it, unmoving and impossible to ignore: the moment she removed her amulet and first appeared in front of him.

She was a vision.

Her hair was like the sky, her worried expression a testament of how much she cared. She was beautiful, perfect like a painting, her figure made ethereal by the silver moonlight shining on her, and her eyes, those eyes resembling the moon that illuminated her from behind...

An indescribable warmth had spread through his chest as he felt all the love they held. At the time he couldn't have possibly realized what he was seeing, the feeling being so completely extraneous to him, nor he could have understood what was happening to him. Now, more than twenty years later, after having experienced the exact same warmth when she appeared at the Royal Academy and in the Ahrensbach supply room to snatch him away from the towering staircase, he could finally put a name on that feeling.

He had fallen in love.

At the age of six, after never experiencing even a shred of simple affection, he had gazed upon a goddess and had dared to fall in love with her.

He realized then why he had always been so fascinated with the night sky. Somewhere deep within, past the wall that kept his memories sealed, that single moment had deeply engraved in his mind that gazing at the sky had become one of the few things that made him feel at ease.

He realized, too, why he had never really been attracted to women. ...at least, other women. He had always been distrustful of them due to Veronica, but he was still a man, he could appreciate the beauty of luscious hair, full lips, generous breasts. But to him it was a sort of cold, detached appreciation, like gazing at a piece of masterful craftmanship: no one would feel attracted to it, no matter how beautifully done.

Now that lack of reaction finally made sense. The memories of that night might have been sealed, but his heart had been utterly and irreversibly dyed by his all goddess. Whenever, as a man, he had looked at a woman, she had been his term of comparison.

And women, simply, couldn't hope to compare to a goddess.

He belonged to her, at a level much deeper than simply being namesworn. He was still alive only thanks to her, owed her his love for research, his taste in food, his fascination for the sky, he had become the overachieving man everybody considered him to be only because of that promise they made, even though he didn't remember it. She had dyed and shaped him like one would do with a highbeast stone.

He took a deep breath, feeling all the other memories fall in place now that he had been able to give a name to the most important one.

His mind drifted back to his childhood. Until now, his memories of his time at the Adalgisa palace were all blurred and vague: the only things he remembered were his mother's name, Seradina, and her telling him he could live the way he wanted. That name had always been the source of conflicting emotions, on one hand it was the only memento of his true mother, on the other hand it was a reminder that he was never wanted and nothing more than the son of a whore -though he didn't understand that until later. Now his feelings were even more complicated. Why did Rozemyne pretend to be his mother? Where could she have learned her name?

Could the captain or the guard have said it? Last thing he recalled was the captain saying he was there to 'harvest'... Just hearing his voice had been enough for his brain to stop functioning, fear overpowering his ability to listen and understand a single word of what they said afterward. ...Good thing he had no clue, at the time, of what 'harvest' meant.

The guard had also said that all the princesses had guests... could it be that the captain went to pick their flowers if they were not entertaining anyone? So... there was a chance that the captain, the one who was there to kill him, was his real father?

'No. It's no use thinking like that. My father was the one who baptized me, former Aub Ehrenfest.' Ferdinand massaged his temple, forcing himself not to think about the possibilities and take his thoughts to their original path.

Most likely, the captain had said something about 'Seradina' or her guest, giving Rozemyne a chance to guess the name of his mother. Plus, considering how startled Rozemyne had been just by hearing one of the princesses scream, if the captain had told the guard of an appointment he had for another day, that would explain why she had been so upset after the captain swung his sword at them, why she had called him a 'revolting pig' and a 'perverted sicko bastard'.

However, that opened another question. Rozemyne seemed to have an extremely negative opinion of that place and of the princesses' activities. He understood her, he was of the same mind, but...

'...But I am a product of that place, of those activities.'

Now that she had seen where he was born, realized that his mother conceived him offering her flower to someone that, for all he knew, could have been the same one that came to turn him into a feystone... Would she consider him dirty, unworthy of her?

If... that was the reason why she had rejected him earlier, he really had no chance of eventually winning her over, had he?

He pinched the bridge of his nose. For what reason did the gods show him those memories? He knew already that he was not worthy of her, they didn't need to remind him how dirty he was... Or were they just trying to harass him? To torture him with the forgotten memory of the three days of pure happiness he had shared with her, knowing that he could no longer have it?

No, rather... What was the point of sealing that memory in the first place? Had he known that, somewhere in the world, there was someone who cared for him, that one day they'd meet again, he could have faced life with a better purpose than just surviving the poisoning and the abuse. He wouldn't have wished to die as many times as he had.

Not that it mattered. The gods didn't care at all about the wishes and the needs of the humans. Whether they were happy, safe, or treated like slaves, as long as they could serve as convenient mana suppliers -even in the form of a stone- it was all the same for the gods.

He looked down, wishing he could just shut down his brain and stop worrying about every single thing. He didn't even bother to focus his eyes on the garden, he just hung his head. As he did, his hand entered his field of vision and he stared at his palm, closing and opening it a few times.

'I did touch her chest with this hand...'

That knowledge left a strange aftertaste in his mouth. Until a couple of bells ago, the memory of that unparalleled softness would have been enough to make his sword stand, but now... now that he knew he would never be able to properly touch her so intimately, it only served to make him more acutely aware of how much he had lost.

Once again, he found himself wondering if the gods just enjoyed torturing him. Everything that happened since his disappearance was fixed had been a repeating cycle of tasting happiness and being denied it a moment later. It was then that it occurred to him: the gods didn't simply know he was planning to die, they were actively trying to make him kill himself.

He wasn't naive enough to think the gods had sent Rozemyne back to save him out of the goodness of their hearts. He knew they needed him to protect and educate the commoner child so that she could later obtain Grutrissheit. Now that she had it, the gods probably saw his presence as nothing more than a nuisance, as he held part of her book and had backed her so strongly in the creation of Alexandria. By making him kill himself, the gods were probably trying to force Rozemyne to take control of Yurgenschmidt's foundation. Most conveniently, her thread could be returned to her so she could live -and serve as Zent- for a very long time.

He could see, now, that committing suicide was a much worse idea than he had first thought. It had to be, if his death was also part of the gods' plans.

For instance, she was still a student and she still had some exams to take, meaning she would have to go and leave Alexandria in his hands. The gods may not care about their duchy, but both him and Rozemyne did: leaving it without even a single member of the archducal family was not an option.

The same went for the Archduke conference. If it came to negotiation skills he was pretty sure she could wrap each and every one of the other Aubs around her pinky finger, but most of said Aubs were still trying to find fault in her rule as the first underage Archduchess in Yurgenschmidt's history, and there were still times when she was dangerously naive. Her retainers could accompany her and guide her to a certain extent, but he was the only one with high enough status to stand beside her, protect her, stave off any possible unreasonable request from the other duchies.

All things considered, he would be more useful to her if he stayed alive, at least until he could take the proper countermeasures against the gods' plan.

He paused for a while, forcing himself to fully form the thought that just crossed his mind. He might... yes, he might even have to find her another husband, someone with enough status and skills to support her and keep her in Alexandria even if... even once he was gone.

A hopeless sigh escaped his throat, the simple thought of another man getting close to her painful like a stab in the chest. But supporting her was his duty, and with his resolve to live stretched so thin, he needed to find someone he could entrust her to, and push himself to live until his replacement was ready for the task.

Dejectedly, he remembered a similar internal debate he had after his father passed away. That time it had been his promise to protect Ehrenfest that kept him from heeding the sweet call of death, but that was no different from now, in the end it was always to absolve his duty that he forced himself a little harder, that he held his breath a little longer. Duty was his prison, his curse, the shackles that kept him chained to a life he didn't want to live anymore, but that he didn't even have the freedom to forfeit.

He shuddered, suddenly feeling the crisp air of the night all the way to his bones. He wasn't sure how long he had been outside, but considering how cold his body was, it had been probably much longer than it would have been wise. He glanced at the sky one last time, looking for the moon he knew wasn't there, then started to slowly make his way inside.

As he closed the window behind himself, Ferdinand glanced at the bed. Considering the hour he should probably try to rest some more, but sleep was out of the question: Schlaftraum would surely harass him with another nightmare, and he really wasn't ready to be rejected again, even if just in his dreams.

He walked to his wardrobe and took the extra blanket, wrapping it around his shoulders to warm himself.

He might as well use this time doing something useful. Come day, he will be busy catching up with a lot of accumulated work, so now it was the only time to assess less-than official matters. He had to choose Rozemyne's second husband... he had intelligence on the archduke candidates around her age, gathered by Justus when he attended Traugott at the Royal Academy, but as he was not up-to-date with who was heir apparent and who was already engaged, it would be a pointless thing to do right now. It wasn't like he didn't want to find her another man... he just wanted to optimize the use of his time.

As he moved to his hidden room to take a potion to stay awake, he thought about the immediate future. Be it winter socializing or the Archduke conference, he will have to escort her during many official events, so he needed her to be at least comfortable enough to withstand his close presence in public.

To safely and confidently show themselves side by side in front of all the nobility, the best way would be for her to just give him the order to suppress any lustful thoughts, but until now she had been adamant about not using his namestone. He wondered briefly if that would change after what happened, but then told himself he'd better not get his hopes up.

He had thought earlier about removing the part of his body that made her uncomfortable, soon discarding the idea as it would only scare her even more. However, if he somehow managed to render that part harmless, would then Rozemyne be comfortable enough to get through all the social events with him as escort? Would she be able, in due time, to see him as family again?

He sat down on the chaise lounge and opened his copy of Grutrissheit, searching for something to incapacitate his sword. Much to his luck, the book opened on a mostly empty page, where the only useful word was 'accident'. He briefly thought about it, imagining a training accident. He'd have to stage it perfectly, to avoid or at least limit damage to other parts, but he couldn't let the knights he usually trained with know about his plan. He put the idea aside for the moment, resolving to only consider it again if he could find no other solution.

He started searching for any information on how the sword functioned. If he knew how a normally limp piece of meat could suddenly become as hard as wood, maybe he'd be able to prevent the change. There were many entries on the subject, but most of them were focused on which parts of the sword were more sensitive and how to better stimulate them. He found himself staring intently at a diagram of a sword, wondering what it was that was touching it from under the tip. He hastily slammed the book shut when he realized that thing was a tongue.

'That's gross... Why would anyone want to lick something as dirty as the sword?'

That was what he thought, but at the same time, an image of Rozemyne licking his manhood while looking up at him formed in the less than rational part of his mind, making his heartbeat increase and said part begin to stand.

Almost panicking, he opened his book again and started looking for prayers to stop the flames of Brennwarme, to lower the sword of Ewigeliebe, to soften Beischmacht's stiffness, but no matter which euphemism he used, the only prayers he could find all had the opposite effect of what he wanted to achieve. The frustration at being unable to find what he wanted somehow managed to subdue his excitement, but he still lacked a sure method to do it.

He thought about earlier, when his throbbing and harder-than-steel sword went limp the moment Justus told him Rozemyne was going away. Maybe a similar shock would be an effective means to extinguish Brennwarme's flames. Replaying his words with a magic tool would be relatively easy, but how to make it so that only he could hear it? Maybe combining it with the magic circle of the anti-eavesdropping magic tool? Then, how to make sure it would only block that message and not also his own voice?

As there were a lot of aspects to take care of and a lot of magic circles to incorporate, it looked like it would be quite a demanding tool to create, so the first thing to do was confirming that the method was reliable. He stood up to retrieve a recording magic tool -a prototype of the one that was developed when he was being held captive in Ahrensbach.

"Lady Rozemyne chose to relocate to her quarters." he spoke onto the tool, trying to make his best impression of Justus.

Just saying the words made him cringe, but to make sure the record would be effective in lowering a raised sword, he needed... to make his sword stand once again. That was a pretty easy task, all he needed to do was to think back to her straddling his lap, wildly moving her legs, pressing her chest against his. Not so easy was to get rid of the feeling of guilt that doing it caused. He felt like he would sully Rozemyne if he thought about her like that. But he needed data, and this research was ultimately for her sake.

Taking a deep breath, he murmured 'sorry' before letting his imagination run wild and the scholar in him trying to fix the inappropriateness it caused.

The quoted song and the title inspiration come are from
"Not strong enough", Apocalyptica ft Brent Smith, 7th symphony (2010)