Inside the Mutual Death Prison (4)

Serina shook her head, answering with silence. It would be a cruel twist of fate if she were to die by the very sword she had taken for Mirabilis.

Mirabilis, with a resolute glint in her eyes, as if she had steeled herself with all her heart and might, raised the sword towards Serina’s neck. Serina couldn’t bear to meet that gaze, that expression, so she quietly closed her eyes.

When a skilled butcher swiftly cuts the major blood vessel of an animal with a sharp knife, causing the blood to gush out at once, the creature barely manages a final cry before its body shudders slightly and falls silent. But there was no way a palace lady who had never even killed a bug with her own hands could possess such skill.

‘Can I endure the pain?’ Serina worried about that. Although she was under a hypnotic spell to lessen the pain, no one knew the extent of its limitations.

‘I don’t want to die.’ But if she couldn’t avoid it, if she had to receive retribution for the evil deeds she had committed, she wanted it to be from Mirabilis, and no one else. As someone who had once been ‘Older Sister-nim,’ she wanted to be remembered in the heart of the lady who had been her ‘younger sister’ as someone dignified until the very end. Only that was the one death Serina could accept.

Absurdly, even the thought that Mirabilis would never forget her until the moment of her death seemed bearable. The only thing that weighed on her mind was her family’s affairs. Serina tightly clenched her teeth, her eyes closed, and waited for the cold blade.

The silence inside the prison was heavy, like a lump of lead. A long time passed, but all she could hear was the sound of the torch burning and the wind blowing outside the window.

She cautiously opened her eyes and saw Mirabilis, holding the sword in a position to strike down at her neck, her hands trembling. Mirabilis felt Serina’s gaze and placed her left hand on top of her trembling right hand that held the sword, but she couldn’t bring herself to swing the blade, only putting strength into both hands. With difficulty, she moved her lips as if to say something, and after a long while, she finally uttered a sentence.

“Why… why don’t you beg for your life?”

What should she answer? Serina herself didn’t know how to express her feelings in words, yet the words flowed out.

“There’s no way for me to live anymore. Even if I escape from here by relying on your mercy, it’s no different from living with one foot already in the coffin. I’ll be tormented by dwelling on past failures, and someday my heart will die. Even if I’m acquitted and released without your involvement, I’ll be exiled from the palace, crippled, and die lonely and sick somewhere. In that case… it’s better to die by your hand now. If I die by your hand, it would be a fitting death for me.”

Mirabilis, choking up, suppressed herself and asked again.

“Why don’t you beg for forgiveness and plead for your life?”

“It’s already too late.”

Now, there was no need to even think. Her mouth moved ahead of her brain, spewing out emotions that Serina herself didn’t know she had.

“There were times when you could have let go. Yes, what I did was wrong. But pus cannot become flesh, and once you set out on a path, you cannot turn back. It wasn’t a shallow resolution to turn back because things went wrong. I knew that, and I chose it, prepared to be ruined if I was caught. To capture you, only you.”

Serina swallowed and slowly gathered her breath.

“I don’t regret it, I absolutely don’t regret it. Even if I die here by your hand, or if I die miserably like a dog in the street, I will never regret that choice I made, having prepared for everything.”

“Older Sister-nim…”

Mirabilis uttered a single word with a voice choked in her throat. It was so faint that it was barely audible. The hand holding the sword drooped, and clear tears streamed down her cheeks, falling to the floor drop by drop, ttook, ttook.

“Right now, someone is crying in my heart, grabbing my arm. Telling me not to harm Older Sister-nim, asking what any of that matters. Every time I hear your words, I become more and more confused.”

The lady holding the sword wept blood in front of the woman hanging there, shedding tears endlessly. She tried to hold back out of pride, but once they started flowing, she couldn’t stop them at all.

“I should be going crazy with pain because of what you did, but why does a part of my heart well up with joy every time I hear your words? I should definitely kill you when I think about what you’ve done, but why do I still want to save you? All those actions should be humiliating, but why do I still want to hug you, kiss you, and embrace you?”

The venom gradually drained from her tone of monologue and the gaze directed at Serina. Or perhaps, this was closer to her unfeigned self after all her memories had been unlocked.

“Do I hate you? Do I love Older Sister-nim? Is this heart that doesn’t know how to stop even after knowing everything truly affection? It’s painful, this situation where I can’t grasp whether it’s hatred or love… this situation where I can’t even grasp my own emotions…”

Mirabilis trembled, then turned the blade she held in her right hand towards herself.

“In this case, I’d rather…”

The moment Mirabilis aimed the blade at her own heart, Serina forgot the situation and shouted.

“Regina Immobilis!”

At that moment, the body about to stab stopped abruptly. Or, almost stopped. When the hand holding the sword trembled and showed signs of moving again, Serina shouted again.

“Regina Recta!”

Mirabilis’s pupils momentarily lost focus, and the strength in her grip loosened. The blade that fell from her hand struck the stone floor, and the metallic sound sharply pierced her ears. Mirabilis snapped back to her senses at the sound, took a deep breath, and slumped down on the chair. Then, in a resentful voice, she asked.

“Are you trying to keep me from even dying?”

Serina also let out a deep sigh.

“Even if I die, I don’t want you to die too.”

“Liar.”

Mirabilis’s casually thrown word pierced deeply into Serina’s heart.

“Liar, you deceived me with strange magic and sweet words. You deceived me, making me rely on you with all my heart, and then you betrayed and mocked me. It’s the same now. You said your magic was broken and you couldn’t use it again, but you stopped my body with that magic as if it were nothing.”

Serina shook her head firmly, causing the hair that was matted and tangled from not being properly washed to sway.

“It is broken. You released it yourself just now.”

Hypnosis was broken. Just as a piece of iron that has been bent by fire in a smithy does not return to its original shape when the fire is extinguished, the effects of the mental interference that had been applied during the hypnosis did not simply revert to their original state. As she had confessed herself, the ‘real’ Mirabilis still remained in her heart, and the ‘fake’ was influenced by it.

“And… it’s absolutely not a lie that I came to like you too.”

Mirabilis released her strength as if in despair and leaned back against the chair. No one spoke. A damp chill and deathly silence, as if they had been cut off from the world, enveloped them. Even beyond the only window connecting them to the world, thick clouds dropping white snowflakes covered everything within the narrow field of vision in a soundless grayscale.

Suddenly, Mirabilis raised her head. Her face was etched with exhaustion and weariness, as if she were a traveler who had journeyed with her own two feet from the distant unknown to the end of the world.

Opening her rough, chapped, and dry lips, which had lost their usual luster and deep crimson color, Mirabilis began to recount the events from when she first met Serina until now, little by little. These were stories she could only tell now that the doors of memory that had been closed by the power of hypnosis had been opened. And Serina gradually became unable to grasp who the person speaking to her was.

“From some point on, you caught my eye. I couldn’t take my eyes off Older Sister-nim’s appearance. So, I thought I should take care of you in my own way. My heart fluttered, wondering if Older Sister-nim would like it…”

Serina listened quietly, occasionally interjecting and talking. Inside the frigid prison cell, like the biting wind of winter, the two women, bound by a strange relationship, had a long conversation that they had been unable to have until now.

“When I threw the teacup at you and you got burned, I was actually surprised too. I just threw it in a fit of anger, I had no intention of hurting you at all. But because you were forcing yourself to endure it, I acted out on purpose in that moment.”

“Thanks to you comforting me without blaming me even though I was burned, I was able to truly accept Older Sister-nim. If that hadn’t happened, I wonder if I could have truly acknowledged Older Sister-nim…”

“When you took the sword for me in front of my eyes, I was afraid of losing the first friend I had ever made. I felt like if I lost you, I would never be able to find someone like you again. Yes, for the first time in my life, I wanted to call someone a friend.”

“When Older Sister-nim took the sword, I was relieved in a way. Older Sister-nim won’t abandon me, Older Sister-nim will never leave my side… I hated myself for feeling this way.”

Serina smiled faintly, sometimes agreeing or adding to the conversation, but basically, Mirabilis spoke alone. The topic gradually shifted from past events to current ones.

“I heard a story from the magician Pallas before coming here, that magical connections originally only arise between blood relatives. That connection is strongest when they are identical twins.”

Her voice was consistently low and quiet, as if whispering.

“But you know, I also had my hair and your hair tested for magical connections, and although the magician glossed over it and didn’t see it properly… I saw it. Your hair definitely reacted to mine. I… I didn’t know what kind of bizarre thing was happening, so I couldn’t say anything, but I was surprised and scared. But…”

Mirabilis gathered her hands and gently placed them on her chest.

“On the one hand, it felt like the magician had confirmed that Older Sister-nim and I were truly sisters…”

The soft voice that had captivated Serina calmly punctuated the air.

“…I was happy.”

Listening to the story that the Mirabilis she didn’t know was telling, even though she had said she would never regret it, Serina felt a cold pain seeping into her heart. When the topic ended, the two were silent for a while, but after a while, Mirabilis spoke again.

“I’m sorry for hurting you with the sword. I wanted to engrave the real me into you.”

Her tone was like an apology from a friend she had made outside the palace, so Serina didn’t know how to respond or what expression to look at her with.

“I like you, as I did before and as I do now. The past few months since I fell under your magic have been an unforgettable, joyful, delightful, and ecstatic time in my life. Like a magic spell from a story I heard in my childhood.”

His tone was so calm and affectionate that it was painful for Serina to listen to.

“Serina, can I ask you just one thing?”

“What is it?”

Mirabilis smiled faintly. It was an empty expression, like someone who was about to die.

“If I become yours… can you love me until the end?”

It was not easy to answer. The princess in front of her seemed to be fading like a phantom.

“…Yes, I will love you until the end.”

“Then, I ask you.”

She didn’t want to show the expression she was making, so her head kept trying to droop, but Serina forced herself to lift her face. At this moment, Mirabilis truly looked like a princess to Serina. Her eyes were filled with tears, and the princess kept blurring, so she tried to endure and engrave her image in her eyes.

“What if I don’t keep my promise?”

Mirabilis gave a sad smile. It was a beautiful yet sad, truly bizarre smile that she wondered if she would ever see again.

“Then, it will be my fault for believing a liar until the end.”

Serina’s heart felt heavy. How should she respond to that smile, to that answer? Was this truly the irreversible end of the relationship they could have?

“Regina Recta.”

Serina didn’t bother to put the power of incantation into her words. It was meaningless and unnecessary for the current Mirabilis. Without the power of incantation and magic, hypnosis no longer belonged to the realm of magic. If she had to give it a name, she would have to call it ‘hypnotism.’

Mirabilis’s mind no longer resisted and put itself into a hypnotic state. Serina took out the phrase of suggestion that she had put in before, which she herself didn’t know when she would use.

“Sciio te, Spero gwitam dueam tuam.”

(I know you, and I hope you live happily.)

Mirabilis flinched. The moment Serina spoke in ancient language, something deep within her heart seemed to respond to a distant call from above.

“Ideo hece eti numce”

(Therefore, here and now)

Something was preparing to rise. Mirabilis didn’t even know what it was. Every time that thing moving from the bottom of her heart tapped upwards, quiet ripples arose in various places on the surface of her heart, filling it and spreading far and wide. Mirabilis clenched her fists and waited for the next words.

Serina gritted her teeth. The set phrase was ‘a new name.’ Now, if she just revealed that name, that beautiful princess would truly and irreversibly become her possession. The perfect opportunity to realize the desperate desire that she had so fervently wished for, the desire she had poured out like a scream even in front of Mirabilis, was truly approaching before her eyes.

However, Serina couldn’t erase the image of the princess she had just witnessed from her eyes. The soft voice and eyes that had captivated her long ago, smiling sadly, pierced her heart even more deeply than the voice filled with anger and malice, pouring out hatred, and stabbed at the arteries of her heart.

That figure and tone were so sadly beautiful that Serina would never want to forget them in her life. The chains of poignant emotion gripped the reins of her frantically throbbing heart and suppressed Serina. Feeling the weight of another chain constricting her heart, his voice, clinging to the chains of reality and uttering his last words, fell weakly from his lips and dropped to the ground with a toouk.

“…Ego deicta opnia priostina uresecno… eti loubertatem tebei donao.”

(…I cancel all previous words… and I give you freedom.)

The moment Serina uttered the last suggestion, Mirabilis woke up in an instant. Something that had been surging and moving under the surface of her heart until just now vanished in an instant, and all the warm feelings and memories that she had felt as Serina’s younger sister filled the empty space in her mind.

However, those feelings no longer tormented Mirabilis. Deep and serene peace and tranquility soaked and caressed Mirabilis’s inner world, embracing her wounds.

Clear water quietly flowed into the furrows that had formed in the princess’s parched emotions, invigorating her heart and sprouting green shoots. The drab colors of Mirabilis’s mind gradually permeated like paint dropped on Korean paper.