The Wedding (2)
The imperial physician! Bring him now!
Illid’s urgent command rang across the palace servants. Maids scrambled in every direction, rushing to send someone to the main palace. From the raised platform, Karina’s voice cut through the chaos like a scream.
“His Majesty the Emperor first!”
She checked the Emperor’s pulse, then snapped an order at the nearest knight.
“Carry His Majesty to the physician—right now!”
There was no time to wait. Karina made the decision herself. The maids helped lift the Emperor onto the knight’s back. He bolted from the blood-soaked wedding hall and raced toward the main palace.
“Ah……”
Karina let out a broken sigh as she descended the steps. Her entire body shook violently, as though she had seen a ghost.
“No… this isn’t what I wanted……”
The sky was impossibly clear. Bright sunlight poured down, making the necklace at her throat sparkle.
A golden necklace engraved with a rose. The symbol of the noble Regentra family—the very same one now hanging around her own neck.
That necklace was drenched in blood. The collapsed figure trembled weakly. The white dress kept blooming crimson, as if the wearer had been stabbed.
I need to check her pulse. I have to know what poison she took!
Karina, who had been moving toward her, stopped dead. A crowd of people came running and closed around the fallen woman. Family, friends, and even Hellion—who must have arrived at some point—crowded in to examine her condition. In an instant they blocked Karina’s view completely.
Yes… who was it for… who…
Karina slowly lowered the hand she had reached out. Suddenly she remembered standing on the execution platform in the square.
So many people are weeping for that woman.
When she herself had stood on the guillotine, no one had been beside her. She had screamed until her throat tore, but not a single person listened.
I’ve climbed all the way here. I’ve become a duchess just like her, yet nothing has changed.
Her heart twisted strangely. The one dying was that woman, yet it felt as if she herself were being ripped apart and erased from the world.
Karina turned away. The person she needed to worry about now was not her, but the Emperor. Only if he survived could she survive.
Shoving aside the old memories and tangled emotions that tried to pull her under, Karina ran toward the Emperor.
In the moment she turned her back, one thought pierced her.
The day she had met her again—if only she had kept the heart she possessed in those old days.
Would everything be different by now…?
In the end… it really ends like this…
The metallic stench of blood filled her mouth. No strength remained in her body. Every fading sense screamed the same truth: she was dying.
“Haa……”
The poison was taking hold. At least it hadn’t been too late. She had managed to finish everything before signing the marriage vow.
“Ishtel……”
Illid gazed at her with trembling eyes, murmuring her name. His blue irises swirled with fear, horror, and even resentment.
Yet in the end he could not come any closer. When he saw the blood-soaked hem of her dress, he bit his lip and turned his face away.
Illid’s former fiancée. The woman who had looked so much like her. Perhaps her final moments had resembled this scene. Maybe that was why he could not look straight at Ishtel—because even now he was seeing the two of them overlap.
“Ishtel, snap out of it! Ishtel!”
Yulian shoved Illid aside and rushed forward, gathering her limp body into his arms. From the side came the sound of Baroness Turen and Roze weeping. Clinging to her slipping consciousness, Ishtel forced the words out.
“The temple… take me……”
“The temple? All right. I’ll call the priests. Just don’t lose consciousness, Ishtel!”
“Call… Hellion… for me……”
“I already did. He’s not far—he’ll be here soon. Just hold on a little longer.”
When she had accepted the potion from Malipa, she had believed without doubt that she would wake again, just as her great-aunt had. That was why she had not hesitated to mix it into water and drink it.
But the instant the poison spread through her veins, she understood. She might never wake. She might be the one who drew the fifty-percent chance of eternal sleep.
If this was the end, she wanted to see Hellion. She wanted his face to be the last thing she carried into the dark.
Even as she waited for him, the poison raced onward. Her senses drifted farther away; the people’s cries and the hands clutching her began to feel distant and unreal.
“Ishtel!”
But his voice cut through everything, clear and sharp. Hellion had reached her side. He lifted her into his arms.
The wedding hall had become a battlefield. A dying bride. Confronted with the nightmarish scene, Hellion could not find a single word.
Even if the situation made no sense, the despair he felt in this moment was overwhelming. A tear slipped from his blue eyes and fell onto her cheek.
“Come back to me, Ishtel. Please……”
“I’m sorry……”
There were so many things she wanted to tell him. Yet all that came out was this. Her fading mind made even one sentence feel like lifting a mountain.
The poison had spread so thoroughly that the bright sunlight itself felt like broken glass against her skin. Darkness swallowed her vision as though someone had extinguished every light in the world.
Cradled in Hellion’s embrace, she recalled a wish she had not allowed herself to remember in a long time.
To wake once more and watch the night sky with Hellion.
That was the wish that had finally surfaced now, at the very end.
The hand that had been clutching his lost its strength. The next instant, she was pulled into a deep, endless darkness.
A full week had passed since Ishtel Regentra lost consciousness. In all that time she had not woken once, lying in a sleep as deep as death.
The Emperor, who had collapsed from the shock at the wedding, fortunately regained consciousness for brief moments. Each time he woke he asked after Ishtel, but he never received good news. He would then sob until exhaustion claimed him, collapse, and slip back into unconsciousness—an agonizing cycle that repeated without end.
Ishtel had been moved to the temple for treatment. No trace of poison had been found in her body, so the diagnosis was that a spell targeting the mind had been used. Yet even the high priests with the strongest divine power could not wake her.
In the end the priests swallowed their pride and sought help from Malipa, the woman they usually scorned. No one surpassed her in the realm of the spirit. Malipa accepted the task with obvious delight.
Daily life in the imperial palace had ground to a complete halt. It was only natural; both the Emperor and the Duchess of Wintera—the two most vital figures—had collapsed.
A mountain of matters required the Emperor’s approval. Hellion and Illid, as members of the imperial family, had to act in his stead, but even that proved difficult. After the wedding, Illid had shut himself inside his quarters and refused to take a single step outside.
Hellion cared for both the Emperor and Ishtel while handling his own duties. But he could not touch the responsibilities that belonged to Illid. The ministers clamored for immediate decisions. At last Hellion strode to his cousin’s residence.
“His Grace the Archduke has ordered that no one be allowed in.”
“Move.”
Hellion roughly shoved the doorkeeper aside and threw the door open. Even the loud bang failed to make Illid turn. He sat in a chair, pouring liquor into an empty glass.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!”
Hellion stormed forward, snatched the glass, and hurled it at the wall. It shattered with a sharp crack, spraying fragments everywhere.
“Get out here. Stop hiding in your room like a coward—come out and do something! Anything!”
Hellion slammed both hands down on the desk. An ink bottle toppled, spilling black across the wood, but Illid did not even flinch.
“You lunatic. You created this mess and now you expect someone else to clean it up while you sit here wallowing? Is that it?”
Even under Hellion’s torrent of accusations, Illid remained silent. At last he slowly lifted his head. His eyes were hollow, like those of a man who had lost his mind.
“How… is Ishtel right now?”
“You have the nerve to ask? Do you really think you have the right?”
“No. I don’t.”
Illid let out a deranged giggle. The laughter quickly dissolved into sobs. Tears slipped through the fingers covering his eyes and fell in heavy drops.
“She’s going to die. She collapsed vomiting that much blood—there’s no way she can survive.”
Illid staggered to his feet and approached Hellion.
“Sierra died the same way. In front of me, wearing the exact same white dress, coughing up blood. Her clothes turned completely red, her body convulsed… she suffered so terribly……”
“Shut your mouth. Ishtel is not going to die.”
“Then she wouldn’t have stayed unconscious this long! A whole week and she still hasn’t woken!”
Illid’s voice cracked with despair.
“Even in my dreams I keep seeing it—Ishtel’s eyes as she looked at me. She hated me. She resented me. Even if I followed her in death, she would never forgive me.”
“You crazy bastard, stop talking like you have a conscience. If you want to die, then die yourself!”
Hellion seized Illid by the collar and hurled him to the floor. Illid lay on the cold stone, laughing in a broken, miserable way.
Hellion stared down at his cousin, seized by an unbearable sense of disillusionment. He had liked Illid. He had liked that he was his only cousin, liked his clever and gentle nature.
“I didn’t know you were this pathetic……”
The memory brought only regret. It was disappointing. If this was all the man amounted to, he should never have bothered with him in the first place.
“Ishtel is not going to die. But if by some miracle she does, then you will die by my hand. You, Ebony Bladin, and Karina Regentra—all of you.”
Leaving the chilling threat behind, Hellion turned and left Illid’s quarters.