Chapter 168
At that moment, the light in the woman’s eyes flashed eerily.
Unbelievably strong grip strength entered the fingers clutching the back of his hand.
It was pressure as if his hand had been caught in a steel clamp.
Soon after, an ancient language of the East flowed from between her cracked lips.
“That oath will become a powerful binding spell that shackles you. Until your final breath, you will have to keep the words you have spoken. Even so, can you say that your oath remains valid?”
He heard rough gasps around them.
They seemed to think the Empress was using some ancient sorcery of the Khan people.
He thought perhaps it might not be so different in reality.
He could clearly feel some mysterious power binding him.
A strong question arose in his mind.
Why is this person going this far?
He would one day hold powerful military strength in his hands, but it would take a long time until then.
At present, the influence he could exert was insignificant.
And yet, the Empress was acting as if the fate of her children depended on his answer.
Suddenly, the rumor that she possessed foresight crossed his mind.
Had she perhaps glimpsed a future that made her feel she had to bind him firmly?
When he looked up at her silently with suspicion in his eyes, the Empress’s sternly hardened face instantly collapsed.
He realized that she was struggling with something.
Her pale face was drenched in cold sweat.
She looked as if she would burn away the last of her life at any moment and fade in vain.
He carefully wrapped his hand around the back of the woman’s hand, where tendons stood out tautly.
The Empress’s eyes widened.
She was a person who could not become thoroughly cruel even in the moment she resolved to be harsh.
He knew that this person had given him affection in her own way.
But in the end, he could never return what he had received.
Then at the very least, he wanted to let this woman standing at the end of her life close her eyes with even a little peace.
After hesitating briefly, he answered in the language engraved deep within his soul.
“Until the moment this breath ends, my oath will remain valid.”
At that, relief and guilt crossed in the woman’s eyes.
Tears pushed by her thin eyelids flowed down her pallid cheeks.
“I am sorry. I am truly sorry to you. I will not ask you to forgive me.”
“Please do not say that. I...”
“You do not know what you have sacrificed.”
She cut off his words.
“You have only just turned thirteen. Even though I know I should not do this to you...”
The Empress’s empty eyes turned toward her children.
Her pupils, expanded to the limit and looking as black as ink, gradually regained their original light.
After looking for a long while at her young children with an expression mixed with regret and sorrow, she turned her eyes back to him.
“Varkas Raedgo Siarkan, you may think life has no meaning... but someday, the day will come when you discover something that keeps you alive. When that time comes, you will regret this moment.”
Her clouded eyes slowly closed.
The woman, breathing dryly, murmured in a cracked voice.
“When that time comes, resent me as much as you wish.”
Just as he was about to answer that there would never be such a day, a dry cough burst from her mouth.
Even though the high priest hurriedly stepped forward and poured holy power into her, the Empress’s complexion only grew darker.
Seeing their mother on the verge of drawing her last breath, the twins burst into loud sobs.
They clung beside the bed and desperately held their bony mother’s hands.
As he stepped back and watched that scene, Marquis Oristein wrapped a hand around his shoulder and took him into the corridor.
“Do not mind Her Majesty the Empress’s final words. Since her chronic illness worsened rapidly, she seems to have been seeing things often.”
The man moved to a deserted place and spoke with a heavy sigh.
“Recently, her mind also does not seem fully sound. She likely will not live past this month.”
The Marquis seemed to have aged greatly in just a few months.
The man, whose neat face was filled with anger and sorrow as he looked out the window, continued in a gloomy tone.
“I am truly grateful for what you did today. Thanks to you, Her Majesty will also be able to set down some of her worries.”
A large hand wearing the family’s signet ring settled on his shoulder.
The Marquis seemed to regard the ritual just performed as nothing more than a play meant to comfort the heart of a woman whose death was near.
He did not bother correcting that thought.
The Empress had placed a shackle around his neck.
He clearly recognized that fact, but he did not particularly care.
From the moment he was born into House Siarkan, he had been bound tightly by chains called duty.
What would change by adding one more yoke?
The grand ducal house would support the legitimate Crown Prince, and he would follow the will of the family.
As he listened to the sound of sobbing from one side of the corridor, he soon moved along the hallway.
A dark, gloomy tunnel stretched on endlessly.
How long had he walked and walked through that pitch-black darkness like the entrails of a giant snake?
Before he knew it, he was standing in the rain.
Before his eyes, a flower garden filled with black roses spread out.
In the garden, where all the plants Empress Bernadette had loved had been torn out, splendidly shaped flowers were slowly opening huge buds like the organs of an animal.
He crossed that damp garden where sticky air swirled and headed toward the rear garden.
Beyond the black sky pouring down rainwater, the roof of the Great Temple could be faintly seen.
After Empress Bernadette passed away, he left the quarters in the Empress’s Palace that she had provided and entered the priests’ residence of the Great Temple.
It was his return after seven years since the Empress had led him out of the punishment room.
Some priests were flustered by having to live with the heir of the Grand Duke, but the high-ranking clergy, including the high priest, welcomed him with gentle attitudes.
It was as if the unpleasant incidents of the past had never existed.
They led him into strict discipline as if welcoming a returned child.
And so, he had to begin once again a life in which every desire was thoroughly restricted.
However, he did not feel the same discomfort as when he was young.
Rather, he even felt a kind of comfort in a controlled life.
Only then did he realize that he had felt a small amount of guilt for not meeting the Empress’s expectations.
He was sorry to her, as she had wished for him to recover his senses, but he did not want to feel anything.
Because this endlessly quiet state was convenient.
He now sympathized with the teachings of the priests to some extent.
Sensation was a poison that disturbed the mind.
The Emperor, drunk on beauty, cast aside honor and stepped onto the path of sin.
The Empress, fallen into blind love, held power over the world yet drove herself into misery.
There was no need for such destructive emotions.
He looked up at the inky sky with frozen eyes, then soon began walking again.
That was when he found the small girl in the rain pouring down like mist.
He did not know why he stopped before that pit.
Perhaps even at the end of his life, he would never know what made him encounter her there of all places that day, or what made him speak to her first.
What was certain was that on that day, in that place, he had found something he had not wanted.
It was much later that he came to vaguely realize that fact.
The thirteen-year-old him, knowing nothing, held out his hand to the young girl in the mud.
“Take it.”
The large eyes that exerted an overwhelming presence on that tiny face widened like lanterns.
After hesitating for a long while, the girl slowly approached him.
Then, suddenly, she looked down at the hands gathered at her chest and shook her head.
“No. I’m holding something in my hands right now.”
He narrowed his eyes and stared at her small, pale hands.
“Is it important?”
“It isn’t important.”
“Then throw it away.”
“Even if it isn’t important, I can’t throw it away.”
The girl snapped with a displeased expression.
Something in those words scraped across his nerves.
He had thrown away everything that was not important.
When he did, the world became clearer.
Whatever she was holding, it could not be worth keeping while standing in the mud and rain.
He was about to tell her that, but stopped because he did not want to argue with a child who was a head shorter than him.
Instead, he bent his knees and lightly lifted the small body drenched in rainwater.
The girl jumped up as if startled.
Holding her down, he climbed the slope made of mud as soft as a swamp in one breath.
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