🔊 TTS Settings
Chapter 42
In this space where everything was jumbled together, the calmer my heart grew as I lost myself, the more it began to falter and speed up.
I gripped my sword tighter.
The trembling that made me want to clutch my chest and collapse on the spot.
Sweat filled my body and fell in heavy drops to the floor.
Why now, of all times…?
Only then did I realize—the trembling in my body wasn’t just because of the fear of having to stand before Ashidwa.
An attack—!
The ground dropped beneath my feet, and everything around me turned threatening, closing in.
“Haaahk!”
Clutching my sword, I staggered and barely managed to regain my balance.
The m-medicine…
Frantically, I fumbled inside my robe.
The instant my fingers closed around the familiar vial—
—a sensation came rushing at me. My body reacted first.
Whoosh!
I barely dodged, but the sword went flying, clattering far away across the ground.
Like a marionette with its strings cut, my body collapsed to the floor.
“Khk…”
A groan escaped my lips on its own.
The most important thing—the medicine vial—had slipped from my grasp.
Cold snowflakes brushed my body.
But there was no pure white snow here.
The flakes that fell from the sky lost their light the moment they touched the ground, staining the white with impurity.
“……”
My eyes followed the rolling vial. Forcing open my half-closed lids, I saw Ashidwa, collapsed and leaning silently against the base of a tree.
There was no room for useless thoughts.
Only one.
As if anyone’s going to die for me now.
That single thought moved my broken body.
I grabbed a sword from the ground.
Facing the assassins hurling themselves toward me, I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again—
When I came to my senses, everything was over.
The dagger clenched in my hand slipped free and fell.
“……”
Only the sound of ragged breathing filled the air.
A chill spread from my fingertips and toes, wrapping my whole body.
Stay conscious. I need the medicine…
Where was the vial I dropped earlier?
The pain gnawed at me until I thought I’d black out.
Muscles long unused tore apart, begging for mercy.
Even moving a single finger was hard.
Turning my creaking, broken-feeling neck, I spotted the vial rolling across the stained snow.
I staggered to my feet.
My joints moved out of sync, as though they weren’t mine.
With that grotesque body, I rubbed my blurry eyes and bit my lips again and again.
“Hhhkk…”
I collapsed like a fool midway, but I still dragged myself, clawing toward the vial with stubborn desperation.
It was the only means that could free me from this endless thirst and agony.
The moment I stretched my hand out toward it—
Crunch.
A spotless loafer stepped down, shattering the vial. A few drops of blood spattered across the leather.
The liquid seeped into the snow, melting it softly.
“Aah… ah!”
Clutching my heart, I tilted my head back.
How pathetic, how miserable I must have looked—yet that didn’t matter.
What mattered was the shock of seeing a man standing in the moonlight, like a snow-white angel, his icy eyes looking down at me.
Those frigid eyes curved, folding into a half-moon smile.
“Inerua Mertiel.”
My half-raised body collapsed helplessly again.
A large shadow fell over me, slowly extending an arm.
Would he know how terrifying that touch felt in the midst of my burning heartache?
The wounds on his back were already clean, as if they had never been.
“…Your injuries…”
That unfamiliar touch, that chilled voice, that cynical smile, that icy gaze, that aura—
“Don’t look at me like that. Injuries don’t matter right now, do they?”
The snowflakes falling from the sky told me—
It wasn’t over yet.
The worst reality still awaited.
Craack—
A great fissure split open.
The world I thought was running smoothly, the perfect world I had crafted, had cracked.
And at its center—
“Ash…”
Through wrenching pain, with belated realization, I barely, barely spoke the words.
“You undid the magic.”
As my consciousness blurred, he stroked my head and answered, his voice as gentle and tender as ever.
“How belated of you.”
And then—
“Close your eyes. You look about to collapse. Sleep a little, Inerua. Wake when you’re steadier.”
That was my last memory there.
✦ ✦ ✦
From the moment I was born, babbling and taking my first steps, the only one by my side was my nursemaid.
When morning came and I opened my eyes, I would hastily finish breakfast while sipping tea.
Then out to the training grounds, where I held a sword all morning.
After lunch, I studied in the library, then returned to the training grounds, blade in hand.
Evenings, the same routine repeated.
Library and training ground. Library and training ground. Over and over.
Until late at night, until there wasn’t even a mouse stirring, I devoted myself to swordsmanship and study. That was how I lived, to wring every bit of usefulness from my time.
Perhaps pitying me, my nursemaid once took my battered, calloused hands in her tearful ones and whispered so softly:
“My lady, everything I tell you today must be a secret, all right?”
What she told me could well be called the secret of my birth.
Had it been something dramatic—like my mother not being my real mother, or my father being infertile so they adopted me from elsewhere—would that have been better?
Inerua Mertiel.
I was born of a Forbidden Book.
The very thing called a sin, where just holding it could condemn someone as a criminal—yes, that forbidden book.
Created in an age where every moment was like magic and every day like a dream, I was nothing but a heavy relic of a past too weighty to bear now.
“My lady, my darling child. No matter what you are, I love you.”
That’s what the nursemaid said—but in that moment, I finally understood.
Why she was the only one who stayed at my side from the very beginning.
Why everyone in the castle looked at me like a monstrous abomination and avoided me.
Why I had to wield a sword and cram arcane grimoires into my head alone, day after day.
I once went to see my mother.
“I loathe you. That you are my daughter… that you carry his blood. It isn’t your fault, yet I cannot help but blame you for my weakness. Forgive me.”
I was the byproduct of my father’s attempt to create an exceptional magic swordsman using the Forbidden Book.
That was me.
“I suppose I will never forgive myself, nor forgive you.”
Leaving behind the nursemaid’s tender words, I sought my mother—but her words pierced me with pain.
“Ah! Please! O God, do not test me so!”
Twisting in anguish, spewing words of both resentment and forgiveness—that was how I remember her. Pitiful. Wretched.
I can’t forget that day when her tears spilled down upon my face.
What fell on me wasn’t just her tears.
Her touch burned with agony.
That day, I felt it clearly—that her touch was not love, nor affection, but pure resentment.
“If only you had never been born…”
After that, I never went to see her again.
Or rather, even when I did, she never again opened her door.
I knew all too well why she wouldn’t take a single step outside her room.
This family, my father…
And me, the byproduct—were horrors to her.
And I too, was horrid.
I no longer remember what I felt that day. I wasn’t afraid of her.
Not because she was my mother. Not because the painful touch had not been sincere. Not because raising her voice might have brought someone to intervene.
But because—I was only just learning to walk, and even then…
That force was nothing to me.
Even as a child, I already felt the power within me, power that could so easily push it aside.
That was how the world had been for me, from the very start.
—Place the corpse of a child in a pregnant woman’s body for a hundred days. Then the child born will become a great magic swordsman.
Because of that short sentence, I was born.
From the moment I learned this truth, I knew I had no choice but to stand on my own.
And that began to consume me.
Why is everything so difficult for me?
Instead of pulling small, pink stories of love from fairy tales to place in my heart, it was easier to drown this pitch-black castle with my tears. That was my life.
“How long will I be alone?”
A small question I began to hold at some point.
But as time passed, that question grew larger. Eventually, it swelled like a snowball, covering me whole.
The more I came to know myself, the deeper I sank into an endless mire.
That was who I was.
