Glittering dust could be seen dancing within the sunlight streaming through the lattice of a small window.  The room was excessively bright despite there not being any other light sources, most likely due to snow outside reflecting the light.

Illuminated was a long and narrow storage room.  Unlike the tidy and neatly arranged treasure vault which received maintenance every day, the wooden shelves here were in disorder.  There was a clock that didn’t move; empty glass bottles, large and small; a dirty antique lantern; piles of sun-faded books; and rolled up old maps, which were partially eaten by insects, that had been shoved into a wooden box together with a thick cloth.

“Enough already.  Please resolve yourself, Your Majesty.”

The quiet voice carried well, perhaps due to the high ceiling.

“E-even if you say that, Jill… in a place like this…”
“The reason we’re in a place like this is because Your Majesty keeps trying to escape by running around, isn’t it?!”

Jill shuffles forward, bracing both hands against the floor.  Her husband, who is only propping up his upper body, retreated backward by the same amount.

“There!  You’re running away even now!”
“I-I’m not running away.  You’re just close… ah.”

Her husband bumped the back of his head against a small sliding-door shelf made to jut out from the wall.  Having lost his escape route, his cheeks gave a stiff twitch. At once, Jill planted both hands and blocked his left and right.

The golden eyes of her husband—the Rave Empire’s Emperor, Hades Theos Rave, looked at her with fright.

“J-Jill. How about we calm down and talk this over rationally? Yeah?”
“If you want to ‘talk this over,’ didn’t we do that yesterday?  And leaving it to Your Majesty didn’t get us anywhere!”
“Th-that’s… because it was too sudden.  I wasn’t mentally prepared… and besides, right now I’m working, and the mood for this is a bit off…”
“Enough with the excuses, we’re doing this for our wedding!  Practice for our vow-kiss!”

As Jill firmly grabbed his face with both hands, a small “Hii,” escaped Hades’ throat.

“Wa-wait, wait, Jill!  In a place like this!?”
“Wouldn’t anywhere be the same!?  Please close your eyes!”
“You!?  You’re initiating it!?  Wait, that can’t be, wait!”
“I’m not listening!  You kept fidgeting the whooole time yesterday and didn’t move forward even a little!  I’m tired of closing my eyes and waiting!”
“Wai- stop!  Stop!”

With Hades showing poor grace in surrendering and flailing about, Jill was having difficulty in holding him down underneath her.  After all, even though this was her second try on life, her’s was the body of an eleven-year-old.  Simply in build alone, she was very different from her twenty-year-old husband. Still, she refused to crumble here.

Not even half a year remained until their wedding.  Preparations for the wedding were scheduled to begin in earnest around the time the snow would begin to melt.  Apparently, this would be the first wedding of the Dragon Emperor and Dragon Consort in three hundred years.  Jill, having been given a rough explanation of the procedure, felt her head spin at the excessive complexity.  It was more ritual than wedding.

Originally, the acknowledgement of the Dragon God Rave was all a Dragon Consort needed to exist.  The human world, however, disagreed.  As the Dragon Consort was special, there was a special wedding ceremony.  Probably what others call formality.  Then, as a result of adding various things on the grounds that an exchange of rings couldn’t be done, with the passing generations, it increased in a way that made it all incomprehensible.  Human memory might have been uncertain, but as this came from the Dragon God Rave, who had watched the weddings of successive Dragon Consorts, there was no mistake.

That said, while quite a lot was planned to be omitted due to many things no longer being able to be reproduced, there was no arguing that this was not something that could be finished simply by wearing wedding garments.

She already had plenty to worry about, she was still in the middle of her growth period, she still had to do fittings for her wedding outfit, and she even had to do the bride’s embroidery on the groom’s gloves.  This was simply adding another harsh demand to an already stressful situation.

Regardless, she had to do it.

Their wedding could not be allowed to fail.

—Within the neighboring country, the Kingdom of Kratos, Jill’s homeland, a queen without parallel in history would soon be ascending the throne.  More than one thousand years had passed since the goddess Kratos, guardian of love and the earth, parted ways with the Dragon God Rave, guardian of reason and the sky.  There is no way that the goddess and her manifestation, who stalked and desired the Dragon Emperor, an avatar of the Dragon God, that is, Jill’s husband, would do nothing.

Jill wanted to crush even the smallest factors of anxiety and deal with them in advance.  Right, the power of the Dragon God dwelling within Hades being too enormous, for example.  His mind and body were too weak as a result, so when she proposed, “Let’s practice the vow-kiss,” her husband collapsed with steam coming out of his head which meant something like training for his heart and respiratory organs was needed.

“Seriously, please don’t resist, Your Majesty!  Don’t tell me you intend to do it without any practice!?  Can you do it!?  You can’t, can you, Your Majesty!”
“Ru-rude… I- I can do it!  With the right mood, or something like that…”

Even though the force of his resistance from underneath was strong, his tone was feeble.  With red cheeks, his gaze wandered about.  It is just like the bashfulness of a maiden who had been pushed down by the one she loves.

Seeing such a sorry state, she couldn’t picture success. If things went badly, she would end up becoming a bride who, before an altar and in front of her fidgeting groom, would spend her entire life waiting with her eyes closed.

“That’s not what you call ‘being able to do it!’  Come on, close your eyes!  I’ll start from my side, and once it starts to feel like a greeting kiss, you’ll be fine, probably…!”
“Ca-calm down, can we at least not do it here right now?  It needs to be in a more romantic place, I want to cherish you.”
“Haa!?  After stealing my lips twice like it were some sort of accidental collision, don’t start acting pure hearted now!  On the contrary, it ticks me off!”
“Th-that was because I was feeling flustered about my relationship with you back then, there was also this ‘maybe I can get away with it,’ sorta impulse, and I didn’t have the leeway to be considerate of you… So-sorry, it was me!  I messed up!”
“What do you mean, ‘I messed up!?’  Don’t mess with me!  Just, close, your, eyes…!”
“Wait, this is strange, because something is strange, help me, Rave! —Don’t ignore me!”

At that moment, while the space between Jill who was pressing down from above and Hades who was refusing from below was slowly shrinking as she crept closer, something fell from above.  Upon reflexively raising her head, her grip loosened and Hades took advantage of that to nimbly slip out from underneath her.  An “Ah,” escaped her, but it was already too late.

“We-well then, I… because of work… it looks like there will be a meeting with the Three Dukes and such, so I might be late.  I properly prepared a bento for your lunch, see you later tonight then!”

He hurried out the door and was gone in an instant.  Quick to run away like always.

Jill frowned with a “muu” and sighed.  She had thought it would work out somehow if she pushed with momentum, but he was quite the tough opponent.

“His Majesty is an i-di-ot… ah.”

Upon planting her hand on the floor to stand up, it touched something.  An envelope— looks like a letter.  What hit her head earlier seemed to be that.  Jill tilted her head as she picked it up.  She had lifted her head to look up, but there was no shelf, only a small window from where sunlight was entering.  It was a small window, but she still couldn’t reach it with her height.

She looked behind herself, but the high shelf was far.  It didn’t seem like it would reach where she was.  Also, if that had fallen down, other things would have likely fallen as well.

More than anything, that sealed letter was an item that, at a glance, could be recognized as new.  It was neither faded by sun exposure nor covered in dust, and it was even properly sealed with wax.

Was it deliberately thrown in?  For a lost item, it’s quite strange.

However, when she casually flipped the front over, a cry escaped her.

“Eh?”

—To Her Highness the beloved Dragon Consort.

Her causes of anxiety leading up to the wedding ceremony, without any doubt, increased by one.

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T/N:  Hades actually says “stop!” in English.

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