CH 1

I guess today will be the last day of my life. The suffocating feeling of death was weighing down my chest.

Looking back, my existence was just as a family sword. What lingering feelings did I even have for them?

However, it was sad to think that all the hard work I’d done so far was to kill the man in front of me, and that too, went to waste.

After all, I eventually failed, and of course, my father would be disappointed.

In that dark dungeon stood a man; my lifelong target, staring down at me with cold gray eyes.

At first glance, the man’s hair seemed to be golden.

No.

I shook my head lightly.

The man was the silver-haired Halias.

Grand Duke Alseid Halias, the influential figure of the Vianté continent, the puppet of the royal family.

The low voice of the Grand Duke sounded cool, over the damp stone floor.

“Last question. What about your parents?”

I cleared my mind and parted my dry lips. “I don’t have any information to give you, so if you want to kill me, kill me quickly.”

I squeezed out my voice with all my might, but there wasn’t a single change of expression on Halias’ face. Instead, the bell rang and a man wrapped in chains was thrown into the room.

I opened my eyes wide.

“Father!”

I forgot that I was going to die just a moment ago. I twisted my body with great effort. But my limbs tied to the chair didn’t budge.

“Father! Father!”

My father was strangely quiet. Although he was trapped, he didn’t seem hurt. He laid down in a curled position.

“What did you do to my father?” I asked, looking at the Grand Duke. Then, I called my father anxiously again, “Father, father! Are you okay?”

I heard a weird sound from father, who had started to wriggle on the floor. He was laughing, but also crying.

“Father…?”

My father rolled his body and turned to me. Only then, I could see my father’s face right away. He was laughing as if he’d lost his mind.

Was he tortured?

I had lived a harsh life, but I was also a part of his family, the child he raised up till this day.

Flames were seething in my heart. However, the force that restrained my limbs was so strong that I couldn’t lift a finger.

At that time, the Grand Duke, who hadn’t even made a breath until now, suddenly ordered. “Uncover his disguise.”

Then, his eldest son, who stood next to him, threw something that looked like a small glass bottle toward Father.

Crunch!

The bottle broke, and strange-colored smoke rose sharply.

“What are you doing!?”

I moved my body in a fit of fear that the smoke would poison my father, but it was useless.

The next moment, something unbelievable happened.

My father’s red hair was gradually turning black.

“Wh-what is this!?”

The fiery red hair was a symbol of the Merdy family.

My father, who lost his ability against Halias, lost his precious hair… but, my father was still laughing and giggling. He looked like a madman, stuck at a stage worse than death.

“F-Father…….”

At that time, Father had been tightly clenching something in his hand, which slowly fell to the floor. He was far from me, but I recognized what it was at a glance.

The locket pendant with a portrait of my child self, treasured by my father.

Father’s precious pendant rolled over the dirty stone floor several times. Then it finally stopped and snapped open.

Faint images filled the room.

*****

First of all, I saw a beautiful, colorful castle.

Through the window of the castle, I saw a red-haired woman reading a fairy tale to me as a child.

…Mother?

My mother didn’t have red hair… No, why would she? What just made me think she was my mother?

My head suddenly hurt. The next image was from that night, when everything was in flames.

On the night when the large castle was burning, someone rescued me and escaped from the castle.

No, that’s wrong.

That ‘someone’ set the castle on fire and took me away without my parents’ permission.

He was running with me tied to the man’s back. He didn’t seem to care if I cried or bit, as long as I was still alive.

He stayed up all night, running until dawn. Then, he got on the boat when the sun set.

When he arrived at an island looking like a corpse, a nanny, who recognized my face, clicked her tongue and accepted me.

“Merdy’s poor princess, give all the bad memories to this Bahel. This baby will grow up healthy. This selfish old woman promises you that one.”

Nanny Bahel…

It was only then that I realized that the images the pendant showed were not illusions.

It’s a memory. The memory of my first meeting with Bahel.

Bahel took the pendant I was wearing.

So…it was originally… mine?

A strange scent rose behind me.

I wasn’t afraid all of a sudden. Since Bahel used the scent of oblivion.

“Now the island of Lausanne is Merdy. Merdy is where the Princess of Merdy resides.”

What?

What on earth was that pun?

So, the high castle on that small island I’ve been thinking of all my life wasn’t Merdy?

Then, what about the real Merdy?

Don’t tell me, is that the burning castle I saw earlier?

Memories skipped time.

About two years later, a wandering sorcerer came to visit.

“She’s the little Merdy.”

“She’s of my blood.”

The black-haired man insisted.

I was blank, looking at the scene in the smoke. Then, I saw him.

This was the first time I’d met my father. My father had black hair… I had forgotten and lived without knowing it.

The sorcerer gave a gruesome smile.

“Marquis Dehan. At this rate, it won’t be long before the baby knows the truth. It’s not something that can be done by Bahel alone.”

Marquis Dehan?

Did you mean Dehan at the southeast of the continent?

The sorcerer mocked my father. He grabbed my hand, and put it on his chest.

“Descendant of Merdy. Open your eyes and light up the world.”

Probably from then on, whenever I closed and opened my eyes, I could see fireworks.

In the next memory, Marquis Dehan’s hair turned red.

The words I heard from someone I knew as my father were always the same.

“Liana, do you know how our Merdy family, the greatest noble on the continent, was evicted to such a rural island? It was all because of the cunning Halias’s scheme. Near the capital, a whole large, prosperous castle was burned.”

I saw a room of meditation in the smoke.

It was an underground solitary room where I was confined for betraying his faith and having doubts if I accidentally asked about his words in detail.

Each time, Bahel borrowed my father’s locket pendant and comforted me by showing me a portrait of my childhood.

“Your father was naturally a warm person. Just that deep resentment changed your father. You have to build up your strength and avenge him. Then your father will smile again. Like the young days in this happy portrait.”

As Bahel said, my eyes fell on his eyes painted in the portrait, full of joy.

My nanny, who was saying so, shed tears as if she felt sorry for me. When I met her eyes, my heart was weakened, and at some point, my worries and anger melted away. In the end, nothing remained.

I saw a lot of training and practice in the scattering memories. I practiced over and over again, and on the day I made a mistake, I was confined in the mediation room.

I saw the night when I was 15.

On the day I received my first mission, I finally got on a boat and went out to land.

When I first stepped on the continental land, the thrill of the first time came to my mind again.

Compared to the training and my ability, the mission was easy. It was only to burn a small castle on a deep winter night. It didn’t take much effort to burn the small country castle, but after returning, I somehow suffered from a nightmare. I felt like I had done something bad.

Bahel comforted me as if she had read my heart back then.

“My kind miss, there was no one in that castle. It was a castle where the plague returned and everyone disappeared. Miss did a good job. If the disease remains, the animals on the land also become sick.”

I believed everything. After talking with Bahel, I was always at peace.

If I smelled the scent that revolved around her, all my fears disappeared, and all I had was my will to avenge my parents. All the rest of my emotions were taken away and sealed inside my little locket pendant

I remembered. The only one who was sweet to me in the past, nanny Bahel, was an oblivionist.

*****

All of the images had disappeared. And yet, I couldn’t take my gaze out toward the air. Hot tears ran down my cheeks.

Father, no, the man who I thought was my father, giggled. I had no choice but turned to him and asked. “Are you… really?”

He laughed his head off, then stared at me with the eyes of a madman.

“Why do you look like this is unfair? The one who had to suffer is rather my side! I’ve lived in that rural island for decades because of you alone… and you are a failure! Merdy’s blood, my foot, they just pretend to be noble, and all it’s worth is a penny.”

“Penny… That much.’

I rattled my arms tied to the chair, but I couldn’t let out any power because of the magical armor that wrapped my hands.

Really.

At this moment, it was not as useful as wintry. Thousands of questions came to my mind, but I asked only one of them.

“My real family… Where are they?”

He burst into laughter even more.

“Haha, hahaha… Dignified Grand Duke Halias, will you please answer that? Here she asks, where are all the remaining Merdy?”

The only thing that rang in the somber underground was the man’s laughter, and the Grand Duke didn’t say anything.

My heart jumped and my throat was dry. I looked up at Alseid Halias. “Answer me.”

But there was no answer from him.

Another drop of tear fell from the glands that I thought had been dry for a long time.

What kind of delicate girl I am? Crying doesn’t make me look more pitiful.

The Grand Duke’s gaze seemed to shake for a moment in her blurred vision.

No, it couldn’t be… But, it was easier to beg the Grand Duke than to a fake father who had been deceiving me for a lifetime.

“Please be generous…”

My life didn’t matter. I just wanted to know the truth.

I said earnestly, curling my head.

Halias looked down at me and was silent for a moment. Then he replied as if spitting out. “All the rest of the Merdy’s… are dead.”

At that moment, something shattered in my burning heart.

The man shouted as if he had been waiting. “He killed them! He killed them! Your family’s enemy is Halias!  I’ve been telling you your whole life!”

So, there was no such thing as family in this world. Maybe I lost them on that burning night.

What a waste of life. I had devoted my whole life to them because I thought it was for them, who didn’t have it from the beginning.

The heat of my anger turned into flames. At last, flames began to spread from the heart. I took a big breath.

『Prabash, come to me and burn them. The only one remaining of your descendants, Merdy, will become a sword here. Burn generously and devour them all.』

“Ahahahaha!  Ahahahaha!”

I heard the sound of a madman’s laughter mixed with the old castle infested with fire.

Everything was burned to the ground.

As the last Merdy wished, they all became a handful of ashes.