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Princess Mia Shines Brightly in the Dark Night
In an instant, the area was filled with smoke, but Bel was watching at the time, so she saw everything. It all happened right in front of her in the blink of an eye.
While Barbara was doing something else, Citrina walked over to the fire and picked up the water she had boiled for tea and put something in it. The next thing that happened was an explosion of white smoke. Soon, no one dared move because they couldn’t see anything.
At least, that’s what Bel thought until she felt the rope around her arms loose.
“…Huh?”
She was shocked by how quickly she was free, and she was about to turn around when someone pushed her back. This made her stumble forward.
In the fog, she could hear a faint voice behind her.
“…Goodbye, Bel. Be well.”
“Huh? Rina?! Ri— Ow!”
She fell forward into someone else as she stumbled through the thick smoke.
“Yeeow!”
The person screamed in an embarrassing way. It was, of course, the person who was supposed to help her.
“…Huh? Mia-neesama!”
“Wha— Bel?! How?”
Mia was shocked for a second, but then she quickly realised something else.
Don’t miss this chance! Time to hurry up!
One of her strengths was being able to change her mind quickly, so she moved quickly.
“Kuolan!”
She quickly called out her horse’s name because she didn’t have time to give it more instructions. Kuolan didn’t need any. He ran into the smoke and stopped next to her.
Mia skillfully turned over on his back and lifted Bel up in front of her. Well, that’s how she thought it would be, at least.
In reality, she did her usual routine of pumping her legs and chanting to get Bel ready to ride. After that, she had to work very hard and in a very ungainly way to pull Bel up onto the saddle.
Still, the sheer urgency of the situation made Mia’s physical strength even stronger, and she was able to get them both seated pretty quickly.
Bel yelled, “B-but Rina!” as she looked desperately into the smoke. “She hasn’t—”
“We cannot help her. Not at the moment. But…”
Mia also stopped to look into the fog. Then she went on.
“We will. We’ll find a way to get back and save her. But right now, we’re going!”
Then she told her steed what to do.
“Go, Kuolan! Get us out of here!”
So began Mia’s most dramatic escape, which would end in an epic race between hero and villain.
When Mia told Kuolan to go, he almost exploded into action and broke into a full-speed gallop right away. She wrapped her arms around Bel and pushed their bodies forward to keep from being thrown off by the strong change in momentum.
All around them was smoke, which made it hard for Mia to find her way. Which wasn’t too much of a problem, since she had learned a powerful trick during her riding practise in the fall. Jellyfish Princess Mia had learned the Flotsam, a secret way to ride without reins in which the rider moves with the horse. In other words, she didn’t get in Kuolan’s way and just let him do whatever he wanted. They would be fine as long as the horse knew how to get back. She just had to sit there and stare into the distance for a while.
They got through the smoke quickly. A quick look back showed that a big, brilliant white cloud had swallowed the whole village. Brilliant, as in glowing.
“I think those are the same bath herbs Chloe gave me.”
She thought back to the time when she and Tiona went to the bathhouse and Citrina showed up soon after.
Does that mean she asked Chloe for some? If that’s the case, it would mean Rina saw this coming and planned to help us from the start…
The thought almost made her start to think too much. She tried to forget about it.
“There’s no reason to think about it right now. What matters most is that we were able to get away. We can figure out how to save her once we’re all back safe again. Oh, but to get back to the island, we’ll need a boat… Almost certainly, that business person has left by now. So, I guess we’ll have to find a place to hide and wait until morning. Even though the moon is out tonight, it’s still pretty dark out. It can’t be hard to find a place to hide, right? Hmm…”
At that moment, Mia noticed something strange.
For some reason, everything around her seemed… brighter than it should have been. She looked up to see if the moon was getting brighter. It doesn’t seem to have changed.
She looked down once more. And that’s when she realised that the brighter light was coming from…them! In particular, she and Bel were both glowing. Kuolan hadn’t turned radiant.
The pale light made their shapes stand out against the dark night, which made it look like they were floating. From far away, they looked like two fairies flying through the air.
If a certain author of so-called nonfiction had seen it, she would have written a few more passages of spectacular nonsense for the Princess Chronicles.
“How—What on the moons is this?”
A moment of confusion, but then things became clear. To go off on a tangent for a moment, Mia’s brain cells were pretty much always dormant, but there were a few words that could wake them up. For one, “sweets.” “Shrooms” as well. But there was something else…
Whenever the word “bath” was said, her mind would go crazy. And what did the bath have to do with recent events? Of course, the bath herbs and their pleasant smell. Lucioluna grass smells like…
“Lucioluna grass… Lucioluna… Wait, lucioluna? That sounds like it glows!”
Mia hadn’t thought of it until then, but the name’s meaning made it clear. Lucioluna grass is a type of grass that shines when the moon is up. So, it makes sense that bath herbs made from it would also have the same effect.
This fact had slipped her mind because its pale light was hard to see when it was bright outside. Too bad, because it wasn’t very bright out right now, and its light wasn’t hard to see.
“Okay, this might come in handy when I’m walking around at night, but how am I going to hide?” she whispered as her fear grew.
Only for her fear to get three times worse when three glowing shapes came flying out of the white smoke behind her. All of them had the same light, so it was easy to tell who they were: a masked man on a horse and two huge wolves.
“Eeeeek! They’re heading our way! Kuolan, they’re coming for us!”
Even though she screamed, it didn’t help because Kuolan had already sped up when he saw the people coming after them.
She almost bit her tongue off when the violent acceleration hit her like an invisible wall. She hunkered down and grunted as her horse went from a fast gallop to a furious gallop.
So, she turned into the wind again…. But it didn’t blow fast enough!
A scared shriek came after a quick glance backward.
“Eeeeeek! They’re getting closer! They’re catching up, Kuolan!”
Even though she knew how fast Kuolan was, she could hardly believe what she was seeing. But it was clear that the man’s horse was catching up to them.
His glowing silhouette got closer and closer, like a ghostly knight of death. It was scary. He was so quick!
Mia thought for a moment that the weight of both her and Bel might be slowing Kuolan down, but she quickly dismissed the idea.
“No, I can’t be that heavy. Kuolan should have no trouble carrying both of us.”
She was right, as the two wolves soon started to fall behind. Kuolan was not slow. The enemy’s horse was just too fast!
“F-F-Faster, Kuolan! Come on, please hurry up!”
She tried hard, but all she got was a short huff.
It sounded a little annoyed, as if to say, “Oh, shaddap, I’m galloping here!”
She didn’t know it yet, but her desperate flight under the moonlight had just begun.
Author’s Note:
Thank you all for another year! Happy New Year!