TPLA 31🖤

Chapter 31

“Your Majesty. The fourth princess must be killed. The princess—no, the power she possesses—will lead Titen to destruction!”

On that night when a cold rain fell steadily, when the priests secretly came to Hieros, the young king—who had lost the woman he loved—was drowning in grief.

“…That’s nonsense! I cannot do such a thing.”

Though he barked back at them, he could not hide his wavering heart.

The child who was born after killing the woman he loved. He knew the child bore no guilt, yet every time he looked into those innocent eyes, guilt for failing to protect her and resentment toward the child crept in and gnawed at him.

If only this child—if only this child did not exist… then she would still be alive, wouldn’t she?

If he could turn back time, he would not hesitate to abandon the child.

“It is the prophecy of the god Argos. That which is ominous must be eradicated.”

The priests, their voices firm, were forcing him to choose.

A child who deserved to die for the sake of all. A child born after killing her own mother. A child whose very existence was ill-omened.

And yet, he could not kill her. He must not kill her.

The woman’s face—worrying about the child even as her breath faded—was still vividly before his eyes. He simply could not do it.

“I will make it so she can do nothing. I will erase her existence as much as possible, let her see and hear only the bare minimum. So please—please, at least let her live.”

“Your Majesty…”

The priests’ faces were hidden beneath their deep hoods, but their low sighs were painfully clear.

After a long time kneeling and begging—whether they could not ignore his desperate plea, or whether they had already foreseen this outcome—they eventually turned away in silence.

Thud. The moment he let his trembling hand drop from his face, he saw pale soldiers rushing down the corridor in utter panic. It sounded as though they were shouting something, but a sharp ringing in his ears drowned their words. He shook his head violently, trying to regain his senses.

“Your Majesty! Troops are encamped beyond the city walls!”

Troops—whose army could they be? An invasion at a time like this? Overwhelmed by chaos beyond what he could bear, the world spun around him. Before the ashen-faced Hieros, a kneeling soldier shouted in agitation.

“B-Beyond the walls, in the s-sea… hundreds of ships!”

“…Hundreds?”

As he asked weakly, the spear in the soldier’s hands trembled.

“Y-You must flee! You must leave this place immediately!”

“Don’t be absurd!”

Raising his voice higher than ever, the king’s face hardened. The soldiers shrank back under his glare. If I abandon the kingdom and flee, what happens then? He could not run away, leaving his kingdom and people behind. He would not.

“War! It’s war!”

The palace soldiers gathering around announced it in one voice. Ah… perhaps he had known, faintly, that this would happen. In that moment, Hieros felt the walls around his heart collapse.

As the ground shook once more, he slowly turned his head to look out into the distance—at the black soldiers pouring in, using the rubble of the fallen walls as footholds.

A calamity that blotted out the sun turned day into night.

Ezra, staring blankly at the darkness, rubbed her tear-filled eyes hard and pushed herself up. He hadn’t kept his promise. He said he would wait until she came out. He really abandoned her and left.

She had vaguely known it would be so, yet the pain tore her heart to shreds. Love—she hadn’t wanted to regret even love.

“Ah!”

She screamed, then sobbed, but even her own crying soon felt disgusting. With trembling hands, Ezra slapped her own cheeks again and again.

The walls had fallen, and beneath them innocent people were crushed like ants underfoot. How much of the slaughter she had caused had she been ignoring? As if on cue, rain clouds gathered overhead.

The raindrops grew heavier, until they poured down. Rain soaked her hair, streamed down her face, and lashed her shoulders and body.

After standing in the rain for a long time, Ezra forced her shaking legs to move. She trudged forward—then ran. She scrambled down what had once been an uphill path, now sloping downward.

“Ugh!”

Her old sandals had long since come off. Sharp stones tore into the soles of her feet. The rain-soaked ground was slippery. Though she fell and rolled several times in her reckless sprint, Ezra did not stop. She sprang up and ran again and again.

“Why did you… leave me behind?”

Don’t… abandon me.

Murmuring only those words, Ezra tripped again and tumbled to the ground. Her body, drenched in blood from head to toe, was covered in countless wounds, but her mind was already gone—she felt no pain as she ran into the royal fortress.

What a despicable human being she was. Because of someone like her, the lives of innocent people were being mercilessly trampled. Someone like her had no right to feel pain. It was all hypocrisy.

If only everyone would point at her in disgust. If only they would pelt her with stones and tell her to die. No—no, even that was just to erase her guilt.

If she was a monster who should never have been born…

Couldn’t she at least remain a monster to the end, if it meant saving him?

“Father!”

The sob she had been holding back burst forth as she cried his name. Weeping like a child, Ezra passed the stone tower where she had stayed and crossed the bridge leading to the main palace. At that moment—

A blast of hot wind rushed at her. She flinched and raised her arm to shield her face. Hesitantly looking down, she saw the villages below the royal castle engulfed in flames.

“W-Why…?”

Who had started the fire—and when? Despite the heavy rain, the flames showed no sign of dying. Titen, filled with dust and choking smoke, looked like hell itself.

Ezra covered her mouth, stunned, and looked down again. The few surviving citizens struggled desperately at the castle gate, trying to get inside, only to be cut down like fallen leaves by warriors in black armor who followed close behind.

The number of soldiers guarding the castle exterior was dwindling rapidly. Before long, the imperial army would break into the castle itself.

Leaving everything else behind, Ezra ran once more toward a single person. At last she reached the entrance of the main palace and headed toward where Hieros should be.

But before long, she collapsed to the ground.

“…Zenon?”

A man stood blankly, spear in hand. At his feet lay a large pool of blood. Heat shimmered behind his familiar black hair.

“Princess Ezra.”

Tilting his head, he called her name. As Ezra’s eyes widened at the sight of palace soldiers approaching from behind him, Zenon swung his spear in a half-circle. In a single stroke, he cut down three men, blood spraying over him once again. Blood ran down his clothes.

After staring at Ezra briefly, Zenon left without hesitation when he heard more soldiers approaching from another direction. Should she let him go like that? No—what was she even trying to do right now?

Ezra walked slowly, looking around the blood-splattered castle.

What was the point of running on? She was the one who had caused all of this. Everything—it was all her doing!

“Ha… ha ha!”

She laughed madly at the empty air, then slipped in the blood and crashed horribly to the floor. Even with shattered knees, she did not stop, running toward the heart of the palace. She felt no pain at all.

Searching for Hippolytus, Ezra came to a halt somewhere. Covered in blood and flesh, she staggered forward.

“I swore…”

She murmured before the door where she and Hippolytus had once sworn their love. As she spoke, the metallic taste of blood filled her mouth. Before the golden doors lay mangled corpses of soldiers and pools of blood.

Standing at the threshold, she first saw the great hall packed with soldiers in pitch-black armor, all their blades pointed in one direction—toward the end of the path where she stood, up five steps, to the golden throne, where her father sat with his eyes closed.

“F-Fa…”

“Father.” She had shouted it dozens of times on the way here, yet now, standing right before him, she could not bring herself to call him. At Ezra’s moan-like voice, Hieros slowly opened his eyes. As he filled his gaze with his distant daughter, he smiled with great effort.

“Funny, isn’t it? After coming all this way, all I want is to hold that child just once.”

Hieros murmured softly, only loud enough for Hippolytus to hear. He lifted his eyes to look at the man above him, whose face was cold and expressionless. His reddened eyes did not hide his tears.

“I couldn’t even hold her when she was born.”

“Well, that’s fortunate,” Hippolytus replied. “At least you can see her one last time.”

Ezra stared blankly at the familiar back holding a blade to her father’s throat. Her heart felt torn apart and gone somewhere far away; she could not even call his name.

“You vile bitch! It was you! You did this!”

Hatred sharp enough to tear her ears apart rang out. Pulled from her despair, Ezra turned her gaze. Skene, pinned to the floor by soldiers, had her head slammed down. As she twisted her head with all her strength and spat curses, a soldier barked at her.

“Shut up!”

“Ah! Let me go! Dad—Dad!”

As the pain crushing her back intensified, Skene began to wail, calling for Hieros. Ezra finally collapsed beside the cooling corpse of Mines, lying like a lump of meat at the foot of the stairs.

In the heavy silence, a faint voice pierced through Skene’s cries.

“You said you’d wait.”

At Ezra’s unexpected words, Hippolytus turned around and stared straight at her, frozen in place. His frost-sharp red eyes fixed on her. Looking at Ezra like a doll with its strings cut, he wore a gentle smile.

She could not help but smile along. Under that star-filled night sky, he had smiled like that too. When he dried her wet hair for her, he had smiled the same way.

The tears burning down her face seemed to melt her heart. At last, Ezra cried out.

“Why did you leave first?”

“So that’s why you came all this way on your own? How convenient. No need for me to come find you—and I can show you something interesting.”

Hippolytus answered in an eerily calm tone. He sighed briefly, then shook his head as if it couldn’t be helped.

“Then watch closely. It’s not something you see every day.”

Swish. Turning his back on Ezra without hesitation, he leveled his blade at Hieros’s neck. That thick blade could tear his throat apart in an instant.

At the very moment Hippolytus’s blade—never meant to miss—moved, his tear-filled brown eyes looked only at Ezra.

“Ezra. Please… don’t come.”

Perhaps because the hall was so quiet, those cruel words were heard all too clearly.

“Run.”