YATED 02

~Chapter 2~

Lusenford was bitterly cold, as most of its vast territory consisted of rugged mountain ranges occupying the empire’s northern region. By the end of October, snow already poured down relentlessly.

That day was no exception. Even a sturdy horse was useless for reaching the northern tower far from Lusenford Castle, and the Grand Duke had to climb the tower himself amid fierce winds that blew snow away instead of letting it accumulate. It was a brutal snowstorm.

She must still be alive. Even though he had imprisoned her himself, he wanted to believe she was still alive. Since he had never ordered her death, she simply had to be alive.

That woman—his wife, forcibly imposed by the Emperor. Princess Ostein, Grand Duchess Lusenford, or perhaps the Emperor’s spy.

‘She wasn’t a spy. She never was.’

The conviction—or brainwashing—that had clouded his mind for over twenty years had shattered. It was a curse so powerful it could only be broken after utter ruin. The belated shock made his whole body tremble.

He had confirmed multiple times, with overwhelming evidence, that his wife was indeed a spy, and he himself had passed judgment. But only now, far too late, with the Emperor’s army already advancing right before his eyes, did he finally uncover the truth.

The real traitors had sold every piece of information and pinned all the blame onto her. The truth had to be this horrifying for the brainwashing to break and the curse-like seal to shatter.

Thus, leaving the burning Lusenford Castle behind, he rushed to save her—his only remaining hope. He had nothing left. He shoved hard against the door that had been firmly locked from the outside. It should have been locked, yet now it opened easily, as if mocking him.

The moment the door swung open, the Grand Duke felt again that something was terribly wrong.

“……Vi, ……Caell, Caella!”

It was a name he had never properly uttered throughout their entire marriage, now belatedly spilling out like ashen dust. It was hard to say, yet once he started, the name felt brazenly familiar—he had whispered it to himself countless times.

“Caella!”

The Grand Duke rushed into the open doorway. Blood dripped steadily behind his footsteps. The old door was practically useless. Even a frail woman, no matter how chronically ill, could have escaped through such a gap. She should have already left.

A stench overwhelmed him.

“Caella….”

He wanted to tell the figure lying on what barely passed for a bed to get up. Or, if she couldn’t rise, he would carry her himself.

After all, Caella—his wife, whom he had ignored and scorned throughout their marriage, believing her to be the Emperor’s informant—was so terribly small.

“Caell…!”

Yet the tiny woman lying there, unmoved despite the towering man’s clanking armored entrance, stared wide-eyed. Her arms, fully exposed in this freezing weather, were frozen blue.

Her once-lustrous platinum hair had thinned drastically from malnutrition, and her emaciated face was utterly ruined. Caella, barely twenty-five, lay curled on her side, nothing but bones left.

It was a corpse he himself had created—a body that died curled up from starvation, gazing toward the door, her only escape route.

Princess Ostein, whose veins carried noble imperial blood, was dead. Pheon, who had seen countless corpses, instantly recognized the cause of death.

She had starved to death—her frail body broken by cold and hunger. Though he had never ordered her food cut off, Lusenford had already collapsed completely, ignoring even the Grand Duke’s commands.

No—it was that they had wanted her dead enough to defy his orders.

“Oh dear. She’s dead.”

Pheon turned to look behind him, his bloodshot eyes meeting those of Beatrice Lavalle, whose silver hair was disheveled and whose own eyes were equally bloodshot as she huffed indignantly.

She had been his first and only love, his childhood friend with whom he shared dreams and hopes—and the main reason Caella had been spurned. That’s what she had been.

“She starved to death. Poor thing. She was completely innocent.”

Yet Beatrice Lavalle was the vanguard sent by the Emperor to arrest a high traitor—or perhaps merely a pawn the Emperor had exploited to restrain and suppress Pheon, only to discard once she became useless.

“So the noble and righteous Grand Duke has starved his completely innocent Grand Duchess to death? Is this your justice, Pheon? Is this what you call justice? You always said the innocent must never die. What crime did our Caella commit?”

Sometimes words cut deeper than swords or magic. Under this barrage, Pheon couldn’t utter a reply. He stared blankly at his wife, whose eyes wouldn’t even close in death. She was so young and delicate, yet not a single part of her remained unbroken in death.

“You’re a hypocrite. A stupid, witless fool. If you were truly so noble and perfect, you shouldn’t have kept telling me you loved me after marrying her.”

The woman who had once whispered love to him now vanished entirely, condemning him before her eyes widened in sudden realization.

“Oh—was it me who made this happen?”

Why would a noble young lady, seemingly unconnected to the war, serve as the vanguard? In her hand gleamed a dagger, its edge stained blue from soaking in blood. Crimson smoke swirled thickly around the blade.

It was bizarre—bizarre meaning she was a sorceress wielding strange powers. From her lips dripped the jet-black poison that had filled Pheon’s mind.

“What a waste. You were my first test subject and the spell I poured the most effort into—a simple, foolish seal built to last a lifetime without breaking.”

Now that it was shattered, calling it foolish was indeed accurate. He had to protect Beatrice.

Why? Because he loved her. But why? She was already the belle of high society, they rarely met, and whenever they did, she’d only ever say those three lines: “Pheon, you must never betray me. You must protect me. I love you.” Why?

In the end, those three lines had been the incantation reinforcing the seal in his mind.

“Pheon, you can’t betray me! Back in Kline, I acted all coy with Vincent just to protect you!”

With those words, jet-black poisonous vapor spilled from her crimson lips toward Pheon. It had always been like this.

Pheon swept the smoke away with his sword, conjuring a gust of wind. The spell, now powerless and exposed as a lie, vanished helplessly. Its loss of power meant it was fully broken—meaning Beatrice was now utterly powerless against Pheon.

Why else would the Emperor have sent her as the vanguard? Since she’d become useless, he clearly intended for Pheon to kill her. Her face twisted in horror.

“What went wrong? I carefully fabricated and sent you believable proof that she was a spy! And so you locked her up here, didn’t you? That should’ve been enough! She should’ve stayed quiet and bowed her head—why did she arrogantly prepare for war?”

Beatrice ranted at him with crazed eyes, but Pheon no longer paid her any mind. With the mental fog and noise cleared, the desolate, chilling surroundings became starkly visible.

He removed his tattered cloak. His seven-year-old wife, dead with eyes unshut, was heartbreakingly small—too fragile to be seen as a threat.

“How dare a stupid girl like you even think of defiance! If she’d just quietly disappeared like before, you could’ve lived as you did when she wasn’t around! I’ve been your dearest, your only friend since childhood, even playing family with you—how dare you ignore me?”

Pheon reached out and gently closed Caella’s eyes.

“You should’ve looked only at me! I told you not to turn your gaze away! After I cast that seal, you should’ve obediently stayed silent—why did you waver for that stupid woman and rebel against the seal, leading to this mess!”

The husband burdened by guilt couldn’t even give his wife a proper funeral. Pheon covered Caella with his cloak, stained not only with others’ blood but his own as well.

Her dirty, tattered clothes caught his eye. He wanted to cremate her so the advancing imperial army wouldn’t claim her corpse, but there was no time.

“Trying so hard not to be seen as a filthy bastard, yet your tastes are still cheap. Well, blood will out. Are you so unsatisfied with just one, like your mother? For a sealed test subject, how dare you push me aside and turn your eyes to that woman? Know your place! You should’ve been grateful when I claimed you—how dare you refuse me!”

The man who should never have refused had done so—and ruin followed. Only hypocrisy remained in Beatrice’s furious screaming, for she knew well that this place would be her end too.

Pheon was pleased that Beatrice, too, would not get what she wanted.

“Should I have cast a stronger seal since you’re not even human? If it was going to end like this anyway, I should’ve tightened your leash!”

Seeing the imperial soldiers swarming behind Beatrice as she ranted incomprehensibly, Pheon tightened his grip on his sword. As a branded traitor, he had nowhere left to retreat.

“Anyway, your family ends here. Not that you even had one—your daughter-in-law is already dead, your son will soon die, and all this while your father knew nothing…”

At that moment, a distant, monstrous roar shook the air. Beatrice’s face paled at the sound brimming with fury.

“…knew nothing…”

It was the Mad Dragon roaring.

Instead of rushing to stop the rampaging Mad Dragon—whom the Grand Duke of Lusenford had faced many times before—he cut down the enemy right before him. Fighting to the death was all he had left. The Mad Dragon’s roars grew louder in the distance as arrows and spears rained down like hail.

*

“Are you going to see His Majesty?”

It was just something that had happened—something present in his memory but unknown to anyone in this current world, an event that never occurred. Thus, the Princess Ostein, who leapt right before him, disregarding all etiquette, was a stranger to him.

She wasn’t the Grand Duchess Lusenford, nor the Emperor’s spy—whose intelligence Beatrice, his precious agent planted in Kline, had so thoroughly testified to—nor his wife, whose heart had grown numb from neglect and scorn.

Nor was she the woman who had starved to death, curled up with eyes unshut. The guilt he alone remembered was his burden alone, unrelated to the noble young lady standing before him.

Yet his shameless eyes scrutinized her thoroughly—had flesh returned to her once-hollow cheeks? She looked healthy, surely—but then why was she so deathly pale? He felt an uncouth curiosity.

“I—I also have urgent matters to relay to Father. I don’t know what this is, but I’ll deliver it to him myself.”

Her youthful voice trembled. Her small, soft hands clung to the heavy box the Grand Duke held. Caella had no time and no excuses.

The man before her was terrifying. To someone as small and frail as herself, his sheer towering presence felt threatening—but she thought desperately.

‘An excuse… what excuse can I make?’

If only she’d had time to prepare carefully! But right now, throwing herself recklessly in his way was her only option.

Inside the box the man carried lay the pistol that had killed her father. If it reached the Emperor’s hands, Duke Ostein would die, and Caella—left powerless—would lose her title, her estate, and be sold off to this man.

Then, after enduring endless scorn, she’d eventually be framed, imprisoned, and forced to drink poison from her rival’s hand.

“I just saw Lady Lavalle near the Aquitelle Palace on my way here.”

During their four-year marriage, that woman had been so dominant in his life that she was the only one who came to mind—so she used her as an excuse. It was a lie invented to make the Grand Duke turn away—but saying it filled her with bitter despair.

She’d always tried so hard to impress him, to be good enough. She’d believed—or wanted to believe—that her efforts as Grand Duchess and wife would be rewarded.

Her feelings of affection had vanished, replaced by desperate attempts to carve out a place for herself. Thus, even now, the habit remained: she groveled shamelessly before Pheon, and it felt wretched.

Well, wretched or not, it was the right choice. Besides Beatrice Lavalle and the Empress—her mother—nothing else moved this man. Caella knew that much.

“She seemed alone, though there were some gentlemen nearby.”

Caella clung to the box with trembling hands, fabricating lies. She would absolutely not let him enter alone with that box. She couldn’t bear to witness that scene again.

So Caella pushed this man—this man who had never truly been her husband—toward the Emperor’s mistress. What happened between them was none of her concern. No—she hoped they’d finally be together and both ruin themselves!

“If you go now, you might meet her. I’ll deliver this for you instead.”

Speaking like a madwoman, Caella tugged at the box containing the pistol and ammunition. But the box wouldn’t budge. Why? She looked up at the young Grand Duke.

“I… I saw her just moments ago. Really, just a few minutes ago.”

So there—your beloved, the woman you can’t live without—is waiting. Go quickly. After repeating words she’d never say while alive, they now felt oddly familiar. Perhaps she should’ve spoken them while she still lived, not in dreams.

Why had she ever poured her heart into a man who’d never treated her as human?

A man who’d vehemently refused to marry Caella, forced only by the Empress’s dire punishments, had warned her from their very wedding day not to expect anything or make foolish moves.

That man stared at her as if devouring her, unblinking for a long while, before slowly replying.

“I’m actually returning from an audience with His Majesty.”

Caella instantly snatched her hand from the box and grabbed her dress hem, dashing straight into the garden. Fury surged within her.

The husband she’d given her all to was still toying with her, and her father’s life hung by a thread. Or perhaps… her father was already gone.

“Caella, you can’t enter without His Majesty’s permission.”

But the hand grasping her from behind was strong. Did he think she didn’t know that? She turned back, dazed. This dream didn’t need to drag on. Either way, her death would be meaningless.

“It’s alright. I know.”

Perhaps Caella had smiled as she spoke those words with utmost politeness and honorifics. No—she had smiled. Knowing the world would never be kind to her and that death was inevitable, she smiled.

Her bright smile made the arm holding her falter for just a moment—and she leapt again, running toward her death.

“Caella!”

It was an act of utter disrespect—to violently shake off the Grand Duke’s hand, to dare enter without the Emperor’s summons. All of it was forbidden, unthinkable.

Yet Caella broke every taboo, dashing into the garden of monsters with gaping jaws.

Her mind raced. The protective magic charm she’d begged her father to wear only shielded its wearer once. The pistol, even if reloading took time, could be reloaded—and the ammunition inside was surely ample.

At best, she’d snatch her father during the reload and drag him onto their waiting carriage. More likely, they’d both become the Emperor’s entertainment and die. Either outcome was fine. A swift death was better.

“Caella!”

A low, desperate cry rang out behind her—but Caella, who knew exactly where her father had been murdered, couldn’t be stopped.

She sprinted wildly through dense shrubbery. Her hair flew loose, and clad only in casual home attire with a hastily thrown-on shawl—unfit for a palace visit—Caella reached the spot where her father had died.

“What’s going on?”

She saw the Emperor lowering a pistol, and opposite him, her father—pale as death. He was alive!

‘The charm worked!’

The Emperor, her father’s half-brother, turned sharply toward Caella’s unexpected arrival, his bulging eyes wide with surprise.

Though he had just pulled the trigger at Caella’s father, he stared at these uninvited guests with no guilt—only annoyance.

Intruders without permission deserved punishment. The delicate princess, breathless from running, couldn’t even speak. Or perhaps had nothing to say. She’d already resigned herself to death.

“Your Majesty, I apologize—but this gift arrived slightly late, so I was returning to present it to you properly.”

As her narrow chest heaved like a bird’s from her unaccustomed sprint, the Grand Duke quietly approached behind her, holding the heavy box, and spoke.

The Emperor’s expression twisted. In truth, the pistol he’d just “tested” by aiming at his “younger brother’s head” had been empty—unloaded. The live rounds were inside the box Pheon now held.

What a tactless, provincial fool! How could a man buried in the northern wastes know that in Kline, it was customary to present pistols fully loaded as gifts!

The Grand Duke had always been this way—but what about Caella? The Emperor glared at her, nearly collapsed on the ground, with pure irritation.

His half-brother’s insignificant only daughter was enough to kill just for being annoying. After all, he was the sort of man who’d pull the trigger on a whim, even without real irritation—just because the pistol was already in his hand.

“And the Princess came with me—we heard urgent news at the entrance and rushed here together.”

The Grand Duke lowered his head, seeming reluctant to elaborate on the “urgent news” Caella herself had never heard of.

Urgent news? The Emperor stared expectantly at Caella, urging her to speak—but the reply came instead from a steward running up from behind.

“Your Majesty, Her Imperial Majesty the Empress…!”

In that instant, the Emperor’s face—previously filled only with boredom, irritation, and arrogance—changed completely.

“…has lost consciousness!”

The Grand Duke, the Empress’s son, watched impassively as the Emperor dropped even his pistol and rushed past them. Caella, who had been ready to die right there, frowned at the Emperor’s retreating back.

‘What’s this?’

In her memory, the Empress had never once lost consciousness. Something had changed.

The Empress—the woman the mad Emperor loved obsessively, or disturbingly fixated on—mother of the Grand Duke—was said to have fainted.