Epilogue — Sins of the Fallen Sun
When I trace the thread of my past all the way back to its dead end, the very first memory etched into my mind is the shrill scream of shattering glass.
"What the hell is that brat staring at so viciously? Just yesterday, he was scuttling into a corner like a cockroach."
The speaker was a good-for-nothing drunkard, the dark shadows under his eyes sagging all the way to his cheekbones. Yet beneath the matted, lice-ridden mess of his blond hair lay strands that looked as though a single thorough wash would make them gleam with breathtaking splendor. He was a creature of pure contradiction.
"He's only quiet because he's gotten used to your drunken tantrums. Please, stop this. I'm begging you!"
"Look at you, spreading your legs for anyone who walks by, and now you want to play mother? Cut the bullshit."
The man snorted in derision. At that, the woman gripped the hem of her ragged clothes and screamed.
"Anyone else in the world can say that, but not you—never you...!"
"Why shouldn't I? You begged for it, so I fucked you and gave you a brat, and now you're getting greedy—"
"Ha...!"
Struck dumb with indignation, the woman was nonetheless beautiful. She wore cheap cosmetics diligently, and her slender frame carried not an ounce of excess flesh. Unlike the man, she had preserved far more of her youthful grace.
She looked down at me with an inscrutable expression—eyes brimming with unshed tears, yet alive with a strange, turbulent excitement. Knowing nothing of the world, I merely tilted my head in innocent bewilderment.
"Let's go."
Her voice was resolute. I had no right to refuse, nor had I ever conceived that such a choice existed.
Creak.
The front door groaned as if condensing all the world's distortion into a single shriek, opening up to a landscape steeped in the stench of rot. It was the quintessential slum. Though separated from the glittering high quarters by only a short distance, we were nothing more than gutter rats, while beyond the border lived the 'respectable' humans.
Carrying me in her arms, she made her way toward the border of the human quarters. I was old enough to walk, but she held me tight, as though treating me like something precious. Yet her gaze burned into me with a suffocating, smoldering obsession.
"Good heavens, how can you be so beautiful? Loath as I am to admit it, your father's blood runs thick in your veins. Though mine contributed just as much, of course. Especially these eyes, blue as the rolling sea. Whenever Marquis Aquileum looked at mine, he'd whisper sweet seductions, saying they reminded him of aquamarines. Naturally, I ran straight to your father and told him everything."
She stroked my hair as if intoxicated by her memories, murmuring on.
"And this golden hair... Pathetic as your father is now, he was once the most handsome man in the entire empire. When he strolled past the palace fountains on a sunny day, the spray would scatter across his gold locks, catching the light in a prism of rainbows. Women threw themselves at him constantly. Thanks to them, my hands were soaked in so much blood."
Once started, the tales of the past unspooled endlessly. It was an impassioned reminiscence, like someone clawing desperately toward a brilliant era that could never return. Yet watching her, I felt as though she were reaching out for the reflection of the moon on a lake—a pitiful creature bewitched by an unreachable beauty, knowing she could never touch it again.
And at last, as if shattering that watery reflection, she pressed a single truth upon me.
"Never forget. You carry the blood of the Velonin Empire's legitimate emperor. Your life was never meant to rot away in a godforsaken sewer like this. Nor was mine. So remember this well, wherever you go: your bloodline represents the Empire's most exalted sun."
As if to validate her claim, the sun blazed fiercely in the azure sky. Merely stepping closer to the boundary of the bustling thoroughfare made it feel as though the world had suddenly shifted into vivid, saturated color.
In that moment, a resounding boom! of celebratory cannon fire shook the air.
"Make way for His Imperial Majesty the Emperor and Her Imperial Majesty the Empress!"
Several imperial guards roared at the top of their lungs, heralding a grand procession that stretched far down the boulevard.
The most striking sight stood at the heart of the column: the procession's protagonists. From a magnificent jewel-encrusted carriage open to the breeze, a couple and a little girl waved with beaming smiles.
The woman beside me ground her teeth. Her gaze flared with sheer malice, glaring at them as if wishing them dead on the spot. Yet among the dense, cheering throng, the venomous glare of a single destitute wretch could accomplish nothing.
"I should have killed her for good during our last tea... It's all because of that bitch! Damn it, how did she know? No, she was always like that. Nothing more than a penniless viscount's brat, yet she thwarted me at every turn—as if she'd lived an entire life before!"
Her paranoid mutterings showed no signs of stopping. After spewing venom at the resplendent Empress, she turned her curses toward the man of haughty, piercing gaze beside her.
"And that man! Every single time, at every critical juncture, swooping in like fate to save her...! Unlike my husband, he was disgustingly flawless. Who would ever guess that beast clawed his way up from the frozen north? No, to begin with, your father had nothing over that man except his face and what he could do in bed!"
Her bloodshot eyes turned back to me. Those blue irises, clouded with obstinacy and fixation, were still lovely. But I did not know how to offer comfort. In all my life, I had never witnessed one human being comforting another. Born to a vagrant who was once an emperor and a prostitute who was once an imperial mistress, the only thing I knew of my parents was the hollow glitter of their bygone glory.
"Phew... Since we're already out, we might as well buy some food. I don't have enough to feed that parasite, but I can scrape together enough for you."
A small pouch jingled. It was miserably thin, with vast empty space within, making the solitary clink of coins sound all the more hollowly clear.
Clinging to her pitiful vanity, she stepped onto the street, drawing disgusted stares from every side. People cursed her, as if catching glimpses of her notorious past beneath her faded beauty. Kindness was an alien concept here; it seemed every foul curse in the world had been invented solely to be heaped upon us.
The moment her turbulent past was crushed beneath the heels of reality arrived in a flash.
A passerby, refusing to yield the path, scoffed and shoved past us with his broad shoulder. Losing her balance in an instant, she tumbled headlong toward the roadway where the parade was underway.
A sickening, ruthless crunch tore through the air.
I was spared only because she had flung me away with all her might in that fraction of a second. That was all my young mind could grasp before I collapsed onto the paving stones, frozen for what felt like eternity. For me, it was the catastrophic upheaval of my entire world—yet to the crowd, it barely registered as an inconvenience.
An imperial guard dragged her blood-soaked body away like refuse.
That was how I parted with the woman who gave me life. A tragedy witnessed by countless eyes under the open sky, yet dismissed in the blink of an eye as nothing more than a trivial nuisance.
"So that wicked wench finally kicked the bucket."
"Pretty pathetic end for a villainess who used to hold the empire in the palm of her hand."
"Shame, though. She had a pretty face; I was thinking of paying her a visit one of these days... What a waste."
"Well, when else would commoners like us ever get a chance to bed the Emperor's woman?"
"I wanted to see her spread her legs for copper coins beneath the very peasants she once treated like flies..."
Crude, lustful banter bounced between them. Yet even the vile jeers defiling her memory flared up with cheap arousal only to cool just as swiftly. Such was the end of a woman who once ruled the world at her whim.
Clutching the coin pouch—the only thing she had left behind—I retraced my steps back the way we came. Walking back into the slums, I felt nothing at all. Was I too young to comprehend my mother's death, or was I simply incapable of feeling anything? If it was the latter, then true to the blood of my parents, I must have been born fundamentally broken.
With every step, women young and old watched me with strange, unsettling gazes. They looked as if they wanted to say something, barely restraining themselves. Back then, I assumed it was simply because I had inherited my parents' striking features, just as my mother had said.
The cold, unvarnished truth greeted me with a sneer.
The moment I crossed the threshold into our hovel, the first thing I saw was a gang of menacing thugs. Beyond them, a blond man lay trembling on the floor, bleeding from his skull.
The dark hollows beneath his cheekbones looked unnervingly black. Gasping for ragged breath, the single word he managed to choke out was:
"Fuck..."
That was my father's parting words to me.
"Guess it's true what they say—there's no debt in the world you can't collect."
The men chuckled. The intruders who had brought a former emperor to such a wretched end were loan sharks.
"Raise this one right, and he'll make back our principal tenfold servicing rich women."
"At least his folks left him their looks, eh?"
"Wait, won't this come back to bite us? He used to be the Emperor."
"Dumbass! Look around this shithole! They set this up so living would be such a disgrace he'd off himself anyway."
"Man, the high and mighty really are the most vicious bastards. Guess that's what an education gets you."
"Enough jawing. Grab the kid."
Their clutches reached toward me, reeking of greed like the hands of hungry ghosts clawing for vitality. As their fingers closed around my shoulders and wrists, my mother's frenzied parting command echoed through my mind.
The blood of the legitimate emperor.
The instant I turned the words over in my mind, the world drained into monochrome. Every splinter jutting from the rickety table and every strand of cobweb claiming its corner of the ceiling sharpened with impossible clarity.
Then, a black mist shimmered into being like a mirage—and with it came an absolute, intoxicating certainty that it answered to my command. Faced with this impossible phenomenon, the men recoiled in terror, but our hovel was far too cramped for escape.
Bloodcurdling screams tore through the air.
I was five years old.
It was the first time I ever took a human life.