“The king abducted the imperial prince, and since the Holy Empire is currently thrown into chaos with a struggle for succession… he said that the disappearance of one prince isn’t such a great matter, nor is there room for negotiations, and so he told us to take care of it ourselves.”
What kind of nonsense is that?
Unbelievable. No matter how turbulent the political situation may be, no matter how many princes and princesses the emperor has under him, there is no way the Empire would simply ignore a sound and healthy prince going missing.
Mother, too, looked at the Marquis with an incredulous expression, as if to ask whether he really believed what he was saying. Even the Marquis himself, though the one delivering the message, seemed visibly unsettled despite his loyalty to the royal family.
“What’s the reason? Why are we supposed to handle it, and… what exactly are we meant to do with him here?”
Mother had already half-guessed, but her face was set in a look of incredulous denial as she turned to the Marquis. If the king had ignored all the other houses and entrusted this to House Serpentine specifically, the intention was all too clear.
Our family is infamous for strange sorcery, but we are not known for killing.
Instead, we kill the mind.
So if the king has placed a prince in Serpentine’s hands, then obviously his intention was not to have the boy killed.
“…If the prince of the Holy Empire were to live out his life as Serpentine’s dog, well, that would be amusing in its own right—so His Majesty personally ‘bestowed’ him upon us.”
“Bestowed”? Could that word even apply here?
The king may have used that term, but I, for one, could never bring myself to call such a thing a bestowal, not even in empty courtesy. The Marquis’s loyalty must truly be immense. What could be more dangerous than entrusting us with a figure who might one day bring catastrophic consequences?
Is it really permissible to lay hands on a prince of the Empire?
Even if the Holy Empire’s power isn’t what it once was, it still has more than enough strength to crush a mere kingdom’s noble house. And in the longer view—though for now the Empire may be too distracted by the sudden illness of the emperor and the ensuing succession war to care for a missing prince—one day this could give them the perfect pretext to invade our kingdom.
“My dear brother, driven mad with lust for a woman, has finally gone this far.”
As a woman of royal blood herself, how could Mother possibly remain silent at this lunacy? She could not hide her appalled expression as she pressed a hand to her forehead. And from her words about “a woman,” could it be—was that rumor true after all?
That the king once desired the Holy Empire’s empress…
There had long been a rumor: before she became empress, the present empress of the Holy Empire had caught the eye of Solaris’s king. They supposedly met by chance, after which he pursued her, only to fail—and in the end, the woman he pined for became the consort of the emperor. He was said to have taken it very hard…
But it was an old, musty story, with not a shred of evidence, no more than a baseless rumor. Eventually people stopped repeating it altogether, fearing punishment from the king.
“To act out of petty spite, this… this is madness! Are you in your right mind? You know what this means. If we abduct an imperial prince and keep him here, even if we all swear silence—”
Yet seeing Mother’s dumbfounded face now, it seemed that the rumor must have been true.
“I’ll have to go myself and say something to him.”
“Adele.”
The Marquis looked at her in alarm. He shook his head, as if to forbid her from confronting the king, and Mother twisted her expression in fury before turning her head away sharply.
“He is your brother.”
“As if that bond still meant anything.”
Living in this house, it’s easy to forget many things—but indeed, the current king was Mother’s elder brother. Their relationship soured long ago, since the moment he all but forced her into this marriage… or rather, from the moment he began treating me as a rival to be suppressed.
Watching the Marquis fret anxiously and Mother seethe with rage, I couldn’t help but feel that I did not belong in this place at all.
Why would he even tell us this?
The Marquis may have grown close to us over these nine years together, but even so—this was knowledge I never wanted.
For the rest of my life, how terrifying, how oppressive it would be to think of the Empire.
“Ugh…”
Just then, the prince groaned faintly, as though regaining consciousness. Mother flinched, then turned her gaze to him, and both the Marquis and I followed her eyes.
“Where… am I?”
The young prince was in such a state of ruin that one could hardly imagine what he had endured on the way here. His face was caked with filth like some beggar from the streets, but when at last his eyelids, black with grime, lifted… beneath them shone a pair of vivid navy-blue eyes.
“…!”
And staring into those eyes, I was struck utterly dumb.
My face froze in horrified shock, my eyes wide.
It wasn’t simply the navy-blue color that startled me. I had read that the closer the imperial bloodline of Thaddeus to the gods, the deeper their innate sacred power, and their eye color could darken into navy. I knew that much in theory. But the reason I was reeling now was different.
Navy eyes. Thaddeus Empire. Imperial prince. Sacred power.
“I am Zachary Thaddeus, prince of Thaddeus. If you release me now…”
Navy eyes. Thaddeus Empire. Prince. Sacred power.
Zachary.
How had I failed to realize?
How had I missed something this simple, despite knowing it?
I knew this author. I knew these very words describing navy eyes. Eyes that gleamed an endless blue in the light, that paled as if evaporating when sacred power was invoked, only to return to their deep shade.
I even knew the next words he would say. That meant his very next line would be—
“I will spare your life.”
“I will spare your life.”
In that instant, chills ran the full length of my body, and I could not look away from the bound boy.
Staring blankly, I noticed the long banner behind him, bearing our family crest. My gaze fixed on the coiling serpent pattern, and I whispered.
“Serpentine…”
Yes, that name.
It had felt oddly familiar from the start, but I had let it pass.
And like pages flipping rapidly, all the flashes of déjà vu I’d felt since arriving here—this strange world that sometimes seemed so familiar—came rushing back like flowing water.
The royal family of Solaris inherited brick-red hair the purer their blood, and most had amber eyes. In past generations, marriages between close kin were not uncommon. They glorified their amber eyes as if they were gold, making it a symbol of authority.
So familiar, those details.
House Serpentine, with its coiling serpent emblem, famed for sinister sorcery. Many saw their practices as blasphemy against the gods, and thus, from olden times, they were enemies above all to the Holy Empire.
How had I not seen it until now?
If I stood here any longer, I’d scream. I pressed a hand over my mouth, face drained of blood, staggering backward.
“What madness this is. This place is unbearable. You must be shaken, Oscar. Shall we go outside together?”
Seeing me pale, Mother wore a worried face and gently urged me to leave.
Ordinarily I would have obeyed her at once. But now, I couldn’t react at all. I could only mutter in a daze.
“No Salvation…”
The title of a novel.
The name of the book that contained all of these settings!
This world… was inside that book?
I had thought myself merely reborn. I never once compared my life now with the stories I had once read. Who would suspect their second chance at life to be inside a novel’s world?
I had truly, unshakably believed… that this was a new life in a new world. Perhaps that belief itself had suppressed any suspicion that it might be otherwise.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Even if I were inside a book, these past fourteen years had been happy. To me, this was no longer just a story—it was my second life.
So simply learning this was a novel’s setting was not enough to make me despair. The reason for my despair was something else.
House Serpentine.
The book’s few lines describing this family told me all I needed to know.
Sinister, damp, a house steeped in sorcery and curses.
And they had dared to lay hands on an imperial prince.
“…Zachary.”
Zachary Thaddeus. Because House Serpentine kidnapped him and shattered him mentally—
They all die.
When he awakens, he annihilates the entire house.
I remembered every detail of the slaughter as if etched into my mind. Mother, her beautiful scalp torn away, flayed to death. The Marquis, shredded alive until not a trace of his body remained. The heir, Erhan, devoured by swarms of insects. And me…
“…Chopped to pieces with a kitchen knife.”
The nameless, unmentioned second son of House Serpentine—slain in the kitchens by a dull butcher’s knife that could barely cut bone, hacked apart alive.
“Urgh—”
“My god, Oscar?!”
I was going to vomit. I was about to faint right then and there.
I heard Mother’s panicked footsteps rushing toward me, the Marquis calling my name in alarm. But I could no longer hold myself up—I toppled backward.
And even as I fell, my eyes were fixed only on one thing. The boy kneeling in the center, staring at me with navy eyes so dark they seemed almost black.
That child would one day tear House Serpentine limb from limb, razing it to extinction for the sorcery and torture inflicted upon him. And in the end, he would set Solaris itself aflame, destroying everyone who had ever wronged him.
Zachary Thaddeus.
The future of this protagonist was nothing less than a death sentence—a calamity with a timer counting down upon me.