Tales of Leo Attiel ~Portrait of the Headless Prince~

Volume 3, Prologue

Recently, both just before falling asleep and just after waking up, Leo Attiel had been having two different kinds of hallucinations.

First, just before falling asleep, when he threw himself down on the bed, stretched out with his back against the mattress. If he did that with enough force, he felt as though he could catch a glimpse of his own back, left behind in just that split second before he flung himself backwards.

Yo, Leo Attiel.

Leo spoke to his own back.

How was today? Did you take matters into your own hands? Did you handle things well as ‘Lord Leo’?

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His back then answered,

Well, nothing got out of hand. But I couldn’t do everything I’d set my mind to doing this morning. Issues keep piling up. There were all sorts of things I wanted to get further along with too, but it’s already over for today’s me. I’ll leave the rest to tomorrow’s me.

Is that right? As Leo smiled, the shadowy back before him went blurry and disappeared. Well then, let’s be ‘Lord Leo’ tomorrow, too.

He closed his eyes while thinking that.

What Leo meant by ‘Lord Leo’ was his vision of a future Leo, clothed in hopes and ideals.

Leo truly wanted to become that kind of person. Considering that previously, he had even disliked his family name, ‘Attiel’, there had clearly been a change within him, psychologically speaking.

For example, while he had always loved reading books, he now sometimes noticed that there was a difference in how he chased the words over a page. Before, he had simply admired these worlds that were unknown to him and in which he would likely never set foot. It was different now. When he read historical tales that depicted heroes from times past and near, he felt that he would one day be like them, that had to one day be like them.

That’s the way it has to be.

That conviction did not only bring hope with it, however, and sometimes, it was despair, its exact opposite, which it beckoned into the young man’s heart.

He was painfully aware that when he acquired one piece of knowledge, he needed a hundred or two hundred more items of knowledge before being able to fully understand it. If he yearned to be like one hero, he also dreaded the thousands of steps he would need to climb to be like him.

There were tens of thousand of future Leo Attiels stretched out before him. Because of that, he sometimes forgot who he was.

During the day, he was fully engrossed in all those things, and it was only in the short time before going to sleep in his bed that he was brought back to his original self. His back was the lingering remains of ‘the me from the daytime who isn’t me’.

Then he would sleep.

Leo had not been dreaming recently. He simply slept deeply.

But in place of dreams, when the morning sun washed over his bed and awoke him, he saw a different illusion.

From when he had been eleven, he had spent more than six years in the land of Allion. It was a long time; from childhood to puberty. And so, whether the bed he lay in was actually in Tiwana, the capital city, or in Guinbar Castle, or even in a room in Conscon Temple, Leo sometimes had the impression that he was still in Claude Anglatt’s manor.

If he opened the door and went downstairs, he would smell the breakfast that Claude’s wife, Ellen, had gotten ready. The brothers, Walter and Jack, would already be at table, chattering away, and Florrie, who would be helping lay out the food, would greet him with, “Good morning, Leo-niisama,” while giving him a smile as lovely as the seasonal flowers which sometimes decorated the table.

That illusion was as vivid as reality, but it disappeared entirely once his body and mind were fully awake.

One-by-one, he mentally went over all the things he needed to do today, and all those he would need to start tomorrow, as well as all the things that had been moving along yesterday and that he needed to check the progress of.

There were too many things that he had to chase up after. Or maybe he was the one who was being chased after? – Either way, another new day had begun.

Whether or not it would bring Leo Attiel closer to his longed-for image of ‘Lord Leo’, whatever its fights, its challenges or its trials, it was a new day.