Chapter 168
At that moment, the woman's eyes flashed with an eerie light.
The fingers gripping the back of his hand suddenly tightened with unbelievable strength. It felt as though his hand had been caught in a steel vise.
Then the ancient language of the East flowed from between her cracked lips.
“This oath will become a powerful curse that binds you. Until your very last breath, you will be compelled to uphold the words you have spoken. Even so, can you still say that your oath remains valid?”
Sharp gasps echoed throughout the room. It seemed everyone believed the Empress was using an ancient Khan ritual.
In truth, he thought they might not be entirely wrong. He could clearly feel some incomprehensible force wrapping itself around him.
A question arose in his mind.
Why was she going this far?
Someday he would command immense military power, but that day still lay far in the future.
At present, the influence he could wield was insignificant. And yet the Empress behaved as though the fate of her children depended entirely on his answer.
Suddenly, a rumor surfaced in his mind—that she possessed the gift of foresight.
Had she perhaps glimpsed a future in which she believed he had to be bound this tightly?
As he silently looked at her with suspicion in his eyes, the stern expression on the Empress's face instantly crumbled.
He realized she was struggling with something.
Her pale face was drenched in cold sweat. She looked as though she might burn away the last of her life at any moment and vanish without a trace.
He carefully wrapped his hand around hers, where every tendon stood out beneath the skin.
The Empress's eyes widened.
Even at the moment she had resolved to steel herself, she could not bring herself to become completely ruthless.
He knew this woman had shown him affection in her own way.
But in the end, he could never repay what he had received.
If nothing else, he wanted this woman standing at the edge of her life to close her eyes in peace.
After hesitating briefly, he answered in the language engraved into the depths of his soul.
“Until my final breath, my oath shall remain valid.”
Relief and guilt crossed the woman's eyes at the same time.
Tears welled beneath her thin eyelids and streamed down her pale cheeks.
“I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry to you. I won't ask you to forgive me.”
“Please don't say that. I......”
“You don't understand what you've sacrificed.”
She cut him off.
“You're only thirteen years old. I know I should never have done something like this to someone your age......”
The Empress's hollow gaze shifted toward her children.
The pupils, which had expanded until they seemed as black as spilled ink, slowly regained their natural color.
She looked at her young children with an expression mingled with regret and sorrow before turning back to him.
“Varkas Laedgo Siorcan, you may believe that life holds no meaning... but one day you will find something that makes you want to keep living. When that day comes, you will regret this very moment.”
Her clouded eyes slowly closed.
Drawing ragged, dry breaths, she murmured in a cracked voice,
“When that day comes... resent me as much as you wish.”
The moment he was about to tell her that such a day would never come, a fit of dry coughing burst from her lips.
The High Priest hurried over and poured divine power into her, yet the Empress's complexion only continued to darken.
Seeing their mother's condition worsen as though she might stop breathing at any moment, the twins burst into loud sobs. They clung to the bedside, desperately grasping their mother's frail hands.
He had stepped back to watch the scene when Marquis Oristein placed a hand on his shoulder and led him into the corridor.
“Pay no mind to Her Majesty's final words. Ever since her illness suddenly worsened, she has been seeing things that aren't there.”
Once they had reached a deserted part of the corridor, the man spoke with a heavy sigh.
“Lately her mind hasn't seemed entirely sound either. I'm afraid she won't survive this month.”
The Marquis appeared to have aged dramatically in just a few months.
Looking out the window with a face filled with grief and anger, he continued in a somber voice.
“I truly appreciate what you did today. Thanks to you, Her Majesty was at least able to ease her heart a little.”
A large hand bearing the signet ring of his house rested upon Varkas's shoulder.
The Marquis seemed to regard the ceremony that had just taken place as nothing more than a dying woman's final wish, a performance meant to soothe her heart before death.
Varkas made no attempt to correct that misunderstanding.
The Empress had fastened another shackle around his neck.
He understood that perfectly, yet it hardly bothered him.
From the moment he had been born into House Siorcan, he had already been bound by the chains of duty.
What difference could one more set of shackles possibly make?
The grand ducal house would support the legitimate Crown Prince, and he would merely carry out its will.
He quietly continued down the corridor.
How long he walked through that pitch-black darkness, like the inside of some gigantic serpent's intestines, he could not tell.
Before he realized it, rain was falling upon him.
Before him stretched a garden overflowing with black roses.
The plants beloved by Empress Bernadette had all been uprooted. In their place bloomed grotesquely oversized flowers, their blossoms slowly opening like the exposed entrails of animals.
He crossed the damp garden thick with a cloying scent and headed toward the rear grounds. Beyond the black sky pouring down rain, the roof of the Grand Sanctuary appeared in the distance as a faint silhouette.
After Empress Bernadette passed away, he had left the chambers she had given him in the Empress's Palace and returned to the priests' residence within the Grand Sanctuary.
It had been seven years since she had led him out of the punishment chamber.
The young priests who now found themselves living alongside the heir to the Grand Duke were unable to hide their bewilderment, but the High Priest and the senior clergy welcomed him with calm warmth, as though the unfortunate incident of years past had never happened.
Varkas, too, accepted their rules without complaint.
Although he had returned to the strict life where every desire was tightly controlled, he felt no resistance.
If anything, that dull, monotonous routine brought him a peace unlike any other.
Only then did he realize that the guilt of disappointing the expectations Bernadette had placed upon him had been weighing him down all along.
He felt sorry toward Bernadette, who had wished for nothing more than for him to regain his emotions...
But he did not want to feel anything.
His present state of complete stillness was simply too convenient.
He now found himself agreeing, to some extent, with the priests' teachings.
Emotion was a deadly poison that corrupted the soul.
The Emperor, bewitched by beauty, abandoned his honor and descended into ruin.
The Empress, consumed by blind love, destroyed herself despite holding absolute power in her hands.
Rather than becoming ensnared by emotions capable of such destruction, a colorless life was preferable.
Staring up at the ink-dark sky with eyes as cold as ice, he resumed walking.
That was when he saw her.
A tiny little girl standing in the rain that fell like mist.
He never understood why he had stopped before that pit.
Perhaps even at the very end of his life, he would never know what had caused him to meet her in that place on that day...
Or what had compelled him to speak first.
The only thing that was certain was that, on that day, in that place, he found something he had never wanted to find.
He would not realize it, even vaguely, until much later.
The thirteen-year-old Varkas, knowing nothing of the future awaiting him, extended his hand toward the little girl standing in the mud.
“Take it.”
The enormous eyes that dominated her tiny face widened in astonishment.
After hesitating for a long time, the little girl slowly approached him.
Then she suddenly looked down at the hands she had clasped tightly against her chest and shook her head.
“I can't. I'm holding something.”
His narrowed eyes settled on her tiny hand, pale as snow.
“Is it important?”
“It's not important.”
“Then throw it away.”
“Just because it isn't important doesn't mean I can throw it away.”
The girl snapped at him with an irritated expression.
Something about those words grated on his nerves.
He had organized his world by cutting away everything in life that wasn't important.
Whatever that child held in her hands, it could not possibly be worth standing in a rain-soaked mud pit to protect.
He was about to tell her exactly that, but decided against arguing with a child who barely reached his shoulder.
Instead, he bent down and lightly lifted her small body, drenched from head to toe by the rain.
Startled, the little girl jumped violently.
Holding her firmly despite her surprise, he climbed the muddy slope, soft as a swamp, in a single stride.