COTP 15

Chapter 15

#D-118

The sky, darkened by an early spring monsoon, rumbled and wept sorrowfully.

Mixed with the mournful sound of rain was the scent of spring.

The last fragrance I would ever smell in my life.

This would be my final season; I would remain forever standing at the threshold of a bright summer.

I wouldn’t live to greet autumn, when all things bear fruit in abundance. I would remain trapped in early summer.

When everyone else rejoiced, harvesting the fruits they had carefully nurtured, I—unable to bear even a single small fruit—would return to winter.

It was tea time, just after lunch.

Savoring the drowsy aftertaste of fragrant black tea, I quietly watched the transparent raindrops strike the window.

The sound of rain remained the same, yet the luxury I couldn’t enjoy in those longed-for days now soaked into my being.

I let out a soft, involuntary laugh.

Strangely, a deep nostalgia for the most pitiful days of my life bloomed within me.

Back when I wandered through slums, clutching my hungry belly with no food for the day—but with no inner torment.

It was laughable.

One of the hardest things for a human to endure was hunger.

And yet here I was, longing for those times.

Perhaps because, when I look back, everything becomes a fond memory. A kind of happiness.

Back then, I had abandoned beautiful things, one by one, to walk toward an uncertain future.

And now, that uncertain future had solidified into a grim reality.

On that inevitable, irreversible final day of my life that would soon arrive…

Perhaps I would even miss this very moment.

At least, right now, I had the luxury of being intoxicated by the warmth of black tea.

Drunk on passing emotions, I rose from my chair.

My longing feet led me to the garden.

Stepping into a puddle, splashing—its sound echoing everywhere.

In the low temperatures, cold drops struck me from the top of my head.

Even the maids’ dissuading voices sounded like distant echoes.

Standing in the front yard of the Queen’s Hall, soaked by the humble rain, I retraced the footprints of my life.

I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I last stood in the rain.

At least since I entered the palace at fifteen, I had never once wandered in the rain without an umbrella.

Having spent my childhood in a filthy, shabby slum, I had been used to getting drenched.

Sharpening my senses, I embraced every sensation that wrapped around me and accepted the world.

Every life in the world was circulating.

The rumbling sky. The pouring rain.

The sound of rain-soaked grass bowing its head. The small noises of leaves brushing against each other.

The whoosh of the wind. The rough ripple of the water’s surface.

The rustling of the grass beneath my feet. The moist air filling my lungs.

Every sound of the world, which I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise, now felt like a god whispering to me.

If there had been a piano nearby, I felt like I could sit down and translate all these sounds into music—into your language.

I was abandoned amidst all the sounds echoing in this drenched, darkened world.

I flipped my hand over. Droplets fell onto my palm—each holding a fleeting fragment of spring before shattering.

The breaking droplets reflected everything in the world, like tiny mirrors.

Ah… Largo.

So this was the color of spring rain.

What about summer showers? Autumn frost? Winter snowflakes?

Lost in a flood of self-directed, endless questions, I suddenly realized:

Nothing had really changed. Not a thing.

I had simply grown into an adult, who once knew nothing of the world and had merely walked through my mother’s happy dream.

My heart was still living those old days, but my body had grown—and now I was waiting for the day I could return to my mother’s side.

How long had I wandered through the rain like that?

Through the tightly gathered droplets on my eyelashes, I saw the shadow of a person approaching.

“You’re behaving more and more strangely, Your Majesty.”

You stood there in the darkness, tilting an umbrella toward me.

At the scolding tone of your voice, I drifted back to another time.

I faintly remembered being scolded like this when I first entered the palace.

That incredulous gaze staring at me.

Someone else had once looked at me with that exact same gaze.

The one who always spoke harshly to me was the Queen, who had treated me like a thorn in her side.

Even that memory now felt so dear it almost made me sob.

“Strange? Hardly.”

“Then how would you describe Your Majesty’s current behavior?”

“If I may speak frankly… I believe Your Highness has forgotten my origins.”

“Origins?”

His voice, as he repeated the word, was low, as if holding something back.

“I used to live in the slums of the capital city. Umbrellas were a forbidden luxury there. Getting wet in the rain was part of daily life.”

Even so, now… just one drop falling on the crown of my head felt crushing.

It must have been the weight of my own hand, pulling away the curtain of night draped over my life.

“Perhaps so, back then. But…”

For a moment, I thought I saw contempt in his gaze.

“That’s not your reality now.”

A warm gesture, but cold eyes.

“Nor will it be in the future.”

His gaze, as he adjusted my shoulders, sank heavily.

“Maintain your dignity.”

“…Did you say dignity just now?”

I lifted my head high and examined him, shrouded by rain and dark clouds.

Even enveloped in stormy clouds, he exuded natural nobility.

Something incomparably high and beautiful, unreachable for someone like me.

Realizing that, I let out a bitter smile.

I felt a deep inferiority. But what could I do?

This was the fundamental, insurmountable difference between him—a born royal—and me, a mere illegitimate child.

Between you and me, there was a limit I could never cross.

Just as my so-called father had mercilessly driven my mother and me from his home.

Bitter laughter bubbled up.

“I… it seems I can’t abandon my true nature.”

“What?”

“His Majesty the King always… used to tell me this. Only now, today, do I finally understand.”

That I was living proof of the past he wanted to erase.

Ironically, now I understood why the King had so desperately wanted to erase the past.

Emotionally, I might never accept it—but intellectually, I understood it vividly.

The words that escaped my throat were resolute.

“His Majesty was never wrong.”

“Your Majesty!”

Throwing aside the umbrella, he grabbed my shoulders.

The relentless, pitiful rain finally began to soak him too.

Spitting the words out as though chewing them bitterly:

“Don’t drive people insane.”

I knew.

I knew that my current attitude was slowly driving everyone around me mad.

“Why… why are you acting like this? I can’t guess what’s wrong or where it all went wrong.”

Droplets rolled down his cheeks—drip, drip.

Was it rain? Or tears?

Unable to tell what that transparent shadow was, I simply looked up at him, moving my lips.

There was something I had repeated and resolved in my heart countless times, but could never bring myself to say.

“Did something happen to the kingdom?”

“Absolutely not.”

I wonder… do you know?

That even saying, “I’m going to die soon,” takes enormous courage.

My heart flipped dozens of times each day.

“Even if something had happened, His Majesty the King would inform Your Highness before me.”

I wasn’t dying from some disease.

Nor was I a criminal sentenced to death, awaiting execution day.

But in the sense that I was awaiting my last day, I was no different from them.

“Then surely, Your Highness already knows everything I know.”

Simply because the one who gave me life—whether willingly or unwillingly—had now declared he would take it back.

In the end, the conclusion remained the same.

For me to say with my own mouth that my life had little time left… it was like delivering my own death sentence.

It would mean I was accepting my death without resistance.

I was too much of a coward to end my life with such a final full stop and speak as though it meant nothing.

No matter how much I told myself to accept and organize my feelings, there was something ferociously alive inside my chest that refused to be acknowledged.

Even if the day came when I drowned in my own tears.

“I don’t like this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your attitude. Your thoughts. All of it.”

At this point, I had no reason to act in a way that pleased you.

I simply stood, drenched in the eternal spring rain, looking at you—someone trapped in the same time as me.

This might be the only day I could walk through time alongside you.

In this time that I could never return to.