episode_0025

“What…?”

What did this woman just say?

Jim? Edric Snow White?

I grabbed her by the collar, once again closely examining her face. She looked paler than in the portrait, and her limp arms and legs lacked vitality.

Her eyes, now a murky red, seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. Her black hair was rough and stiff, as if it hadn’t been combed for a long time.

But even though she looked different from the portrait, I could tell. The woman I had by the collar was the first queen I knew, Aurora Snow White.

“Did you go mad from loving your husband too much?”

Suddenly, a hypothesis popped into my head. Loving someone so much that you want to become that person, to the point of losing yourself. Was that why Aurora thought of herself as ‘Edric’?

…But such a hypothesis was meaningless now.

That’s not what’s important right now.

I lifted Aurora by the collar and shouted, “Speak, Aurora. Why are you here when you were supposed to have committed suicide? Why are you alone in the room where the king supposedly died! Explain properly!”

“Aurora…?”

As I shook her by the collar and yelled, Aurora looked at me with hazy, unfocused eyes. Muttering something incomprehensible, she shrieked, using her bony fingers to claw at her own face.

“A–! Aurora! Aurora!! Where are you! Ah-!! Ah!!!”

“She’s gone mad…!”

“I can’t see her…! Ah…! Ah!!! Aurora!! Aaah!!!”

Startled by her screaming, I threw Aurora onto the bed as if discarding her. Seeing her writhing on the disheveled bed, I shuddered.

It was chilling to see Aurora, who could no longer stand on her own spindly legs, crawling across the bed toward the “canvas” where she had been sitting.

Trembling, she sat on the chair with her hands and wiped the ‘mirror’ on the canvas with a trembling hand. Then something began to emerge from the mirror.

It was like an old TV.

In a noisy screen, Aurora, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, was running through a flower garden. And Aurora, in a trance, looked at the mirror that reflected her ecstatic expression.

“Wait, Aurora. What if you fall?”

“Hoho, then, Your Highness will pick me up, won’t you?”

The mirror continued to show only that scene repeatedly. Through someone’s gaze, Aurora running through the flower garden, over and over again.

While looking at that figure, Aurora raised her brush. As if carving her reflection in the mirror onto the canvas, slowly, slowly, she began to draw again, teasing the brush.

No matter how you looked at it, the current Aurora was not in her right mind.

“What on earth…?”

Chills ran down her body at the madness Aurora displayed.

No matter how much she tried to understand, she couldn’t comprehend it.

Why was there only the ‘supposedly deceased Aurora’ in the room where the king should be?

Why did Aurora introduce herself as ‘the king’?

“…This is insane, seriously.”

I turned my head and looked at the mirror reflecting Aurora.

I could tell that this ‘mirror’ reflecting Aurora’s figure was Einzel’s ‘main body’. Well, it was smaller than the mirror in my room, but the appearance was exactly the same.

However, for some reason, even though I had entered the room, Einzel didn’t react at all. She clearly said she would be waiting in the room… Could something be wrong with the ‘contract’?

Thinking that I should at least take Einzel’s main body, when I reached out, I felt a spine-chilling sensation as if something was about to grab me from behind.

Unintentionally, I turned my head to look behind.

I vaguely understood the ‘situation’ in this room.

– It would be best to let go of the mirror right away, Vivian. And get away from ‘my Majesty’ immediately.

“You…”

The ‘woman’ who called me wasn’t touching the ground.

The woman in a fluttering white dress descended as if using the air as stairs, then stopped right in front of me. Growling, she let out a sound that seemed to demand immediate silence.

Dark black hair that seemed to have moved the night sky itself. Between the tilted head, vertically elongated crimson pupils glared at me as if to kill.

A woman with a portrait-like appearance.

And, a woman drawing a picture in front of me, with the same appearance.

I swallowed hard, asking Aurora, who was floating in the air, with a feeling of disbelief, wondering if what I understood was really correct, if this situation was really what I thought it was, hoping it wasn’t true.

“Did you… eat your husband?”

*

Vertically elongated pupils, a fluttering white dress.

The Aurora in front of me was embodying ‘that appearance’.

And, creating an artistic painting that would make others think it beautiful, the ‘queen’. It felt like all the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

There were still many questions…

Yet, I had come to understand what kind of being the ‘Aurora’ in front of me was. Bestowing artistic talent upon others and in return, consuming their blood and vitality, a fairy.

If ‘Aurora’ was this fairy, it explained why the king spent his time drawing in the corner and why her body was twisted like a crumpled piece of paper, drained of energy.

But…

‘Why… did the human Aurora become a fairy…? And why is the king inhabiting Aurora’s body?’ Now, it seemed I had to acknowledge that the Aurora drawing behind me was the ‘queen’. The real Aurora was floating around as a fairy, and had the king possessed her shell?

“Eating… I don’t like hearing that…”

Aurora responded with a chilling voice.

“Can’t we call it ‘uniting’ between us? Tell them it’s a ‘process’ where we can always be together, becoming ‘one.’ Right? Look, in the end, the queen also became ‘mine,’ didn’t she? Romantic, isn’t it?”

Aurora’s giggling expression as she spoke made me frown. I knew Aurora wasn’t in her right mind after hearing Queen Dowager’s story, but this was going too far.

Putting that aside, I couldn’t focus on the story due to the foul smell that seemed to paralyze my nose for the first time in my life. It felt like my head was about to explode, and I desperately wanted to get out of there.

As I failed to concentrate on her story, Aurora once again continued with an icy expression, looking at me and speaking in a sinking voice.

“Hey, Vivian. Seems like you can’t fix ignoring people just like ‘Her Highness,’ huh? Is it really the memory of the body that exists? Will Her Highness become like me as time passes?”

“What are you saying, you crazy woman…”

“That mouth of yours is just the same. Reminds me of the old days, doesn’t it? What did I call you when we first met? Ah, right. A b*tch, Her Highness’s lapdog, a beast in heat, wasn’t it? Completely different now.”

I pinched my nose and thought I should at least open a window. If I kept this up, I felt like I would suffocate in this rotten stench.

After completely pulling back the blackout curtains, I could properly assess the state of the room as sunlight poured in. It was incredibly dirty, chaotic, and filthy. No wonder I felt nauseous.

While surveying the room, something bulging on the bed caught my eye, as if something was hidden under the blanket on the bed where the king had been struggling earlier.

…Bad thoughts crossed my mind.

Approaching the blanket with the thought “Surely not,” Aurora warned with a sly smile.

“Oh? Really gonna look? I wouldn’t if I were you.”

Her warning seemed to confirm my suspicions. Nevertheless, I slowly approached the bed. With a feeling of “Surely not, surely please not,” I lifted the edge of the blanket.

“Gasp…!”

“Hahaha!!”

The corpse of the ‘man’ lay twisted and lifeless on the bed, resembling a withered mirage. As I retched, Aurora clutched her stomach as if finding it amusing, chuckling softly.

Aurora soared skyward and approached the ‘man’s’ body, spreading her arms as if to boast, offering them to me. Her radiant smile was an added touch.

“Ta-da! It’s the ‘shell’ of His Highness! Didn’t I tell you? If it were me, I wouldn’t look at it.”

“What on earth have you done?”

“What have I done?” Aurora interrupted her laughter abruptly.

“If His Highness is to live, ‘I cannot exist,’ so His Highness needs to die once. And for His Highness to become me, ‘I need to exist.’ Do you think His Highness has died? Look closely.”

Aurora slowly approached the ‘woman’ who was sketching, caressing her face. However, ‘she’ seemed either unaware of Aurora’s presence or simply ignored her, engrossed in her drawing.

“I’m alive inside of her, aren’t I? And now, there isn’t much time left.”

Aurora brushed the seated ‘woman’s’ face with her finger, gazing at her own body with a rapturous expression. She clicked her tongue, gazing at me with vertically slit pupils.

“His Highness will be with me. His Highness wants that too. So, could you not interfere? With our love. Now, really… There isn’t much time left. Surely, just like ‘that person’ said…”

“‘That person’…?” At the moment when Aurora made an intensely emotional expression, nausea surged within me. No matter how much I pondered, I couldn’t comprehend the ‘love’ these two spoke of.

Killing each other to be together? Becoming one another? Nonsense.

Exhaling deeply, I decided I needed to withdraw from this place. Since we couldn’t communicate in the first place, I had no idea what to do.

“Alright. But Einsel must be returned. I’ll take back Einsel, and you won’t be disturbed while being with His Highness. How about that? I think it’s a fair deal.”

I’m sorry, but that’s not possible. As you can see, His Majesty is quite fond of that mirror.

“Oh, really?”

I let out a small sigh. Then I kicked over the canvas of the ‘king’ who was drawing and lifted the Ainsel hanging on the wall. Straight away, I began to run towards the door I had entered through. There was only one person who looked like a withered mirage and a fairy. I judged that I could easily escape with Ainsel’s main body alone.

Even though I turned my back and ran, I ended up falling to the ground the moment I started running. In an instant, Aurora, who had rushed over me, began to strangle my neck.

“I told you. Don’t take it. Just because His Majesty likes it!”

I tried to grab Aurora’s hand, but for some reason, my hand couldn’t reach it. Up until now, I could definitely touch creatures like Undine or Banshee. Why couldn’t I touch only Aurora? I struggled hard to reach her hand, but it was in vain. My struggling hand continued to pass through Aurora’s arm, and the sensation of being strangled remained.

“If you don’t want to die again, put down the mirror. I don’t want to kill someone other than His Majesty either.”

“Cough, cough…!”

As my breathing became more and more difficult, I couldn’t regain my composure. I felt like I should put down the mirror even if it was to survive, but would this crazy woman really not kill me if I put down the mirror?

But as my throat tightened more and my vision blurred, I could only feel the fear of death. No matter how much I thought about what I could do right now, nothing came to mind. Ainsel, who used to help me, was unconscious for some reason. Although I had learned witchcraft from Ainsel, I couldn’t do it in a situation like this where concentration was needed.

Then what can I do now?

As my breath became more and more suffocating and the pain intensified, I called out to ‘her’, whom I had promised, while exhaling my last breath. She had clearly said she was the wind.

“Si…phew…”

As I called her with a sighing sound, a storm raged in the room.

The pictures on the floor and ceiling began to go wild, and the sound of thin, dry papers tearing filled the room.

As Aurora’s arm, which had been choking me, started to twist in the wind, she finally let go of my throat. Lying helplessly on the floor, I clutched my sore throat and coughed up a dry cough.

“I thought you forgot our promise because you didn’t call for so long, but it seems that wasn’t the case.”

Suddenly appearing, Sylphy looked at me with a kind smile. Turning away from me to face Aurora, Sylphy warned her in a low voice as if growling.

“Get lost, you rag doll dressed in Lyanthi’s corpse. I don’t know who made you, but if you don’t want to take off those disgustingly corpse-stitched clothes, you better disappear in front of Ye immediately.”

Upon hearing this, Aurora showed no expression and simply vanished with a blank look. Despite the room being in disarray from the wind, I lay there and breathed a sigh of relief, feeling alive.

Sylphy, fluttering over to me, perched on my chest and grinned, resting her chin on her hand.

It was like a puppy-like expression, as if asking for praise after doing well.