Ch. 21
The day was overcast. Everything was hazy.
That was how I knew.
A dream? All of a sudden?
That this was a dream.
I was walking down a street. My shoes and clothes felt terribly unfamiliar. Even my body did not feel like my own.
What is this? A dream where I’m possessing someone?
The moment I thought that, my reflection appeared in a puddle by the road.
Hollow cheeks, parched lips, eyes drained of life. It was an unsightly face in every possible way, but it was also painfully familiar.
Me, yet not me.
It’s the seventh from the original story.
That made no sense.
Why, all of a sudden?
“Miss, over there!”
Someone called out to me as I walked down the street like a ghost. I slowly turned my head. My mind was mine, but my body did not move according to my will.
“Take this.”
A good-natured-looking woman held out a small piece of cake to me. She had even put it in a box and wrapped it neatly.
A strawberry simmered in syrup sat on top of white cream.
Ah, I like strawberry cake! The chef said he would prepare a huge strawberry cream cake for my coming-of-age ceremony too.
“Business just isn’t good today, you see. I guess there aren’t many people with birthdays today.”
Me! It’s my birthday today!
But only my heart shouted.
My body merely stood there blankly. Then the bakery woman forced the cake into my hand.
I felt her gaze fall on my hand, and she flinched.
Then she cleared her throat and hurriedly added,
“Um, if it tastes all right, come buy something else tomorrow! The muffins are good too, and things like macarons are delicious! We happen to be starting a sale tomorrow, thirty percent off... No, fifty percent!”
I started walking again.
Without a single word of thanks.
The seventh from the original story had no manners at all.
“All right? You have to come buy something!”
The angelic owner shouted earnestly at my back. At the commotion, a man who seemed to be her husband came out and nagged her.
“What sale? What do you mean, sale? And why are you handing out perfectly good cake?”
“I don’t know. She just looked a little... precarious. She still looked so young... And...”
“And?”
“There was blood soaking into her cuffs.”
Ah, was there?
So that was why the woman had flinched when she saw my hand. I thought it was because of the mark.
I kept walking as those small voices faded behind me.
There were a lot of good people in the world.
The thought came to me, as if I had only just realized it. To give cake to a complete stranger out of worry.
Just as there was malice without reason, there were also people with kindness without reason.
Would something have changed if I had known sooner?
I kept walking, wishing that the kind owner would not build wealth steadily, but become suddenly rich tomorrow instead.
Before I knew it, I was on a deep, rugged mountain path.
Birthday...
Come to think of it.
How old am I?
I did not know.
Had I already come of age?
“Run. Far, far away.”
Leviathan Zebbert had said that before he died.
Right beside his daughter’s black stele.
I...
When I came to my senses, I was running.
Behind my fleeing back, I thought I heard the Duchess’s blood-choked scream.
How many days had passed since then?
I have to go back to Father.
I had repeated those words hundreds, thousands of times, but for some reason, my body would not move the way I thought.
My breath came in gasps. It was because I was pouring all my magic into stopping the mark from growing.
Leviathan Zebbert had been right.
“Aim for the heart. Don’t miss. Everything you want will be in this center.”
A time magic circle unknown even in the Magic Kingdom had existed in the Academy in the capital of Babilon.
Though it was almost completely ruined.
The Academy’s security, where I had fled after escaping from the North, was lax.
Because the professor in charge of the Rare Books Archive had died just then. I disguised myself as his student and slipped into the mourning procession. They said that after his colleagues died and something went wrong in the Rare Books Archive, he could not overcome the grief of loss and took his own life.
I could not know.
At any rate, that was where I found books that had turned blank, a single nearly withered tree, and a half-destroyed stele.
Everything in the Rare Books Archive seemed far too late to repair. There appeared to be nothing I could do.
All I could do was steal the magic circle from the stele and run away again.
A magic circle that moves time.
It was so old that it no longer functioned properly in the Rare Books Archive, but I used that magic circle to stop the time of my mark. It was possible because the Rare Books Archive was filled with an unknown magic.
I had stopped the mark’s erosion that way, but.
I knew. This was nothing more than a stopgap.
Father’s power was endlessly strong, and my mark had already grown enough to cover my entire body.
How long could I possibly last in this state?
That’s why I have to go back.
To the Magic Kingdom.
But contrary to my thoughts, I strangely kept climbing the mountain.
The forest was black.
Now I did not even know the way back. I seemed to have gotten lost, yet for some reason, wandering through the maze did not feel unpleasant.
The slope grew steeper and steeper, and a metallic taste rose in my throat. The cake box in one hand felt impossibly heavy.
My head spun. Memories tangled together at random.
“But the world is so wide. Surely there has to be one place that can protect you.”
Unable to endure it any longer, I clung to a tree and retched.
“Hah. Haah.”
Why had Leviathan Zebbert stabbed a sword into his own heart?
Why had he looked at me, the one who came to kill him, with such tender eyes?
“To the Magic Kingdom... I have to... go back...”
If I went back?
With no age, and no name.
Would I become Father’s puppet without knowing anything, wander from battlefield to battlefield, and hurt someone else again?
“Who forces something like that on his own daughter? He should be treasuring her so dearly it still wouldn’t be enough.”
Stop remembering.
Please. Please!
Wiping away the drool running from my mouth, I moved my feet by inertia. Deeper, deeper into the forest. So no one could find me.
I had heard Leviathan Zebbert had lost his daughter. Perhaps that was why he seemed to pity me.
It would have been very nice to be the daughter of such a man.
He would have treated her as precious, poured love over her, and been endlessly kind.
Ah...
I stopped walking.
At some point, a barren cliff had appeared before my eyes.
Below my blood-soaked cuffs, the pink cake box dangled carelessly from my hand. The inside must have been a complete mess by now.
I’m tired.
Thud. I let the strength leave my hand. The cake fell and shattered completely.
I was too exhausted to stand back up on the strength of one stranger’s kindness alone.
I did not look forward to the days ahead. I was not curious about the morning that would come again. Rather, it was horrifying.
Let’s stop.
Wasn’t this much enough?
Yes. Perhaps running away like this was one way too.
If I had been able to run away earlier than this...
Would something have changed?
If I had, Leviathan might have lived.
But that was truly a meaningless assumption.
I took out the dagger I had been carrying inside my clothes. The one stained with Leviathan Zebbert’s blood.
There had been so much blood from the man’s chest. I had tried desperately to stop it with both hands, but it was no use.
I’m sorry. Suddenly, I wanted to say those words.
To whom? To Leviathan, who had died? Or... to the Duchess, who must have been the first to find her dead husband? To his sons? To the old Duke?
What would be the point?
They were only people I had never even met.
I tightened both hands as hard as I could.
The blade flashed, reflecting the cold moonlight.
“Hey.”
A low, hoarse man’s voice came from somewhere.
Somewhere along the steep cliff behind me.
When I looked closely, there was a black, dark cave nearby.
“If you’re going to die, why don’t you go farther away and do it?”
Only then did I feel the blue magic I had failed to detect before. Creak, screech. The sound of old chains dragging as well.
But what was even more intense than that ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) was—
Revealed beneath the thin shaft of moonlight...
“The smell of rotting corpses is fucking disgusting.”
The eyes of a beast.
