🔊 TTS Settings
Chapter 9
“Gather all of the burned bodies. I will personally bury them properly in a sunlit place of the Empire.”
Kaisertern returned to Prahenfelt immediately and shut himself in his room, spending several days crying and raging. The world that had briefly turned fresh green became pitch black in an instant.
The girl who had given him only his “explosion” and a few days of excitement, then disappeared.
The one thing a prince who possessed everything could never have.
Everything he did not want was given to him freely, yet the single thing he desperately desired was denied.
Kaisertern hated and resented the entire world. No—more than anything, he hated himself for not bringing Roabellyn back with him on the very day they parted.
He hated that he was merely the Third Prince, not the Emperor, and thus had no authority to officially protest to the Kingdom of Aventador or demand an investigation into the truth.
Burning with rage and self-loathing, Kaisertern made a decision.
‘Until now, I didn’t even care… but not anymore. Even if it’s nothing but an empty title.’
“I will take the throne. No matter what.”
With the Emperor’s authority, he would find those who had done such a thing to the ducal house and make them pay for their crimes. That was the only way he could atone, even a little, to the girl he had failed to protect.
Even after the fall of the family, Estina did not neglect to teach Roabellyn what the direct line of Huga was meant to learn.
“Roa, now the only descendants left of Huga are us. We probably won’t be able to use this knowledge as queens. But learn it well, and when we rebuild the family someday, you must pass it on to our descendants.”
“I understand, Aunt. But you already learned everything—why are you still studying more?”
“When maintaining a stable family, you don’t need to be as clever. But rebuilding a fallen family requires far greater wisdom. That’s why, Roa, you must study even harder than anyone else.”
Fortunately, Roabellyn had been accustomed from a very young age to an enormous amount of study, so she followed Estina’s instruction well.
She diligently learned everything needed to become a good queen—but in truth, what they most wanted to know was something else.
“Aunt, no matter how I think about it, what happened ‘that day’ seems entirely like the royal family’s doing.”
“There’s no concrete proof… but I think so too.”
The two of them reached their own conclusion: the ones who attacked Hertness were the royal family. They didn’t know why the royal family would do such a thing to a companion house, but there were many suspicious circumstances.
At first, they had even held onto futile hope.
‘An unknown force attacked Hertness, so the Aventador royal family will investigate, capture them, and then come looking for us.’
But the more they reconsidered that day and what followed, the stranger everything seemed.
The people Estina had seen that night were clearly elite mages and highly skilled assassins—every one of them exceptional.
How many factions in the kingdom could mobilize that many such experts?
And despite the fact that a prestigious ducal house had fallen overnight, no one was arrested, no one was punished, and the matter faded away without resolution.
They became certain when they visited their homeland after one year.
With their faces altered by magic, Roabellyn and Estina went to the site of their former ducal castle. They had seen the castle burning when they fled, but since it was made of stone, they thought perhaps the foundation had been reused for something.
What greeted them instead was a stench that assaulted their noses from afar. The two exchanged shocked, puzzled looks.
“What… is that smell?”
As soon as they climbed a low hill behind the site and looked down over the entire area, their mouths fell open in shock.
Where the buildings had once stood, there was now a massive pit. And astonishingly, inside the pit were countless unidentified corpses piled up and rotting.
The bodies on top were still barely recognizable by their ragged clothing, while those below had decayed so badly it was hard to tell what was human and what was fabric.
“Th-that… what is that?”
If hell existed, perhaps it looked like this. The two stood stunned, as if struck on the head.
Forcing themselves to move, they went down to the village and grabbed people to ask what had happened.
“Isn’t that the site where the Hertness Ducal Castle used to be? How did it become like that?”
But the villagers waved their hands and left as soon as they heard the name “Hertness,” claiming they didn’t know.
Desperate, the two asked many people, and finally an old man answered.
“Shh! Misses, have you been away from this land for a long time? Lower your voices—who knows what might happen if you speak that name openly!”
“What do you mean…?”
“There’s been no official announcement. But one thing is certain: right after the Hertness family vanished overnight, their territory immediately became royal property. And they dug out the burned castle site into a pit.”
Estina forced out a voice that barely came.
“We… just came from the mountain. That… what is all that?”
The old man shook his head as if recalling the sight.
“Ugh, you could call it a corpse dump. It’s where the bodies of people executed for serious crimes or of wandering sick are disposed of. And about ten months ago, when a plague spread here, all the bodies that were hard to deal with were thrown in there too.”
Roabellyn, who had been listening blankly, barely managed to speak.
“Th-then why…?”
The old man glanced around and lowered his voice further.
“There’s a rumor that Hertness plotted treason. Otherwise, how could a perfectly fine house be wiped out overnight and treated like that?”
“W-what? Treason? That’s impossible—”
I told you to keep your voice down. Ah, right. They say the very first things thrown into the bottom of that pit were the burned corpses left in the garden that day. A whole pile of them, apparently. Tsk, tsk.”
Every word was shocking, but at that final sentence, the two could no longer pretend to be calm. They bowed stiffly to the old man and turned away.
The image of their family’s bodies burning in the garden that day came back vividly, as if it had just happened.
‘Mother, Father, Itan, Emil… their remains are at the very bottom of that hellish pit…’
Roabellyn felt dizzy and staggered. No matter how one looked at it, this could only have been the royal family’s doing.
Not only their immediate family, but even close collateral relatives were all killed within days after the annihilation of the direct line—like an attempt to erase the entire house from history.
“…Now I know for sure. I can never become queen, Aunt.”
At Roabellyn’s murmured words, Estina closed her eyes and nodded weakly.
“That’s right. And if someone hunts us down to assassinate us… it will be the Aventador royal family.”
After that, they never again set foot in Aventador. They could only listen unwillingly to news from their homeland.
Two years later, new news arrived from home. Prince Skark had taken the eldest daughter of the prestigious Ingelheim family as his princess consort.
Roabellyn had never wanted to marry Skark, yet her heart felt strangely unsettled.
‘Was I never truly destined to become queen from the beginning?’
From birth, she had been told and taught that she would become queen. And even while living in hiding, she had continued to study the knowledge and refinement required of a daughter of Huga, just in case…
Objectively speaking, she was now merely the vanished criminal of a family accused of treason. Suddenly, she felt like she was nothing. It was as if her entire world was collapsing from the ground up.
‘Could all this unexplained tragedy and misfortune be because of me? Because a daughter without the destiny of queenship was born into Huga like a mutation… and the whole family was cursed?’
Sinking deeper day by day into such absurd thoughts, the one who pulled her back up was Estina.
“Roa, it’s hard… but you can’t stay like this forever. Think about it. What would your parents want from you? What do you think is the true way to mourn them?”
Roabellyn lifted her tear-soaked, empty eyes and looked at Estina.
“……”
“We have to show the world that Hertness, though trampled, has not disappeared. That even after such suffering, it can rise again—a truly noble house with a strong spirit.”
“But Aunt, it’s certain now that I don’t have the destiny of a queen. Yet I’m still called the direct line of Huga. So Domindor punished Hertness because…!”
“Roa.”
Estina cut her off firmly.
“It makes no sense that you, the direct daughter of Hertness, would lack the destiny of queenship. But even if you’re right—would Domindor, who gave you that fate, really punish you and our family for it?”
Estina took Roabellyn’s hand.
“Roa, whether you become queen or not doesn’t matter anymore. No matter what happens, we are proud Hertness. The family? We can rebuild it ourselves.”
As if telling her to come to her senses, she tightened her grip.
“Roa. Let the world remember that there were people called your parents, Itan, and Emil. Let their deaths not be meaningless… let us rise.”
“Us… us…”
Roabellyn repeated the words blankly. Slowly, light returned to her once-dulled eyes. Tears that had pooled in her large violet eyes finally spilled down her cheeks.
That day, after crying aloud until she was exhausted and emptying the bruised pain in her heart, Roabellyn took Estina’s hand and climbed out of the deep mire.
Several months later, Roabellyn celebrated her fifteenth birthday.
Receiving an oracle at the age of fifteen was a tradition in Aventador. Normally, as the daughter of the exalted Hertness ducal house, Roabellyn would have gone to the Central Temple in her homeland’s royal palace to receive the oracle from the High Priest.
But now, returning to their homeland was impossible even in dreams. So Estina, who possessed divine power, prayed and blessed Roabellyn in place of a priest—and fortunately, an oracle descended.
They expected it to be an ordinary blessing or advice about future dangers. But the oracle’s message was completely unexpected.
“If you bear the Emperor’s child, you will be able to rebuild the family.”
