A Love(?) Letter (2)
House Viscount Peschinar. It was one of the families that cropped up now and then when you played through the story as the protagonist in Luminor Academy.
If there was one peculiar thing about it, it would be that the family didn't actually exist within the world of Luminor Academy at all — it was a fabricated household, invented by someone with private intentions and made to look as though it had always been there.
It was a name you saw especially often if you played through Seraphin's route, and once you learned the truth behind the Viscount Peschinar family, everything became remarkably obvious.
Because the name "Viscount Peschinar" was, in essence, nothing more than an alias for Seraphin herself.
It was common knowledge you could work out in seconds just by analyzing the anagram of Seraphin and Peschinar — the consonants and vowels of "Seraphin" had simply been reshuffled and remixed into the Peschinar family name.
Granted, a few players did complain about the absurdity of a medieval fantasy setting using Korean-letter anagrams, but then again, Luminor Academy had been a domestic game to begin with.
And if you really wanted to nitpick, doing it in English wasn't impossible either. You simply had to turn Seraphin into Peshinar. That one was actually discovered by the player community.
In fact, there were far more people who just shrugged and accepted it than there were those whining about a broken immersion, and honestly, the Korean version was far more accessible than having to parse an English anagram anyway.
So why had Princess Seraphin created a fictitious sender called "Viscount Peschinar" instead of simply using her own name? To have a means of contacting people while dodging everyone else's eyes.
The moment a princess like Seraphin wrote her real name on a letter, that letter became official mail that couldn't be casually delivered just anywhere.
But she couldn't forge another family's name either.
If she sent a letter pretending not to be from a noble at all, there were plenty of aristocrats who would fail to recognize it as correspondence from Seraphin and toss it aside or let it gather dust.
In other words, it was a kind of dual identity — a persona reserved for private or confidential correspondence, as opposed to the official letters dispatched from the palace on state business.
The reason the name showed up so often on Seraphin's route came down to exactly this private correspondence.
Seraphin couldn't send the commoner protagonist a letter bearing her own name, so on her route, she would contact the protagonist under the name of this "Viscount Peschinar" — sending love letters, no less.
…Hold on. Love letters?
"…Don't tell me."
The personal letter Seraphin had sent to Ethan under an assumed name.
Back when I played Luminor Academy, the vast majority of the personal letters Seraphin sent the protagonist under a pseudonym were love letters.
Which meant there was a real possibility that this letter, too, carried Seraphin's personal feelings for Ethan.
…Honestly, the moment the thought crossed my mind, it didn't just seem possible. It seemed downright likely.
That day, when Ethan held the palace gates alone against a boss monster — even by my eyes, a man's eyes, he looked genuinely magnificent.
Setting aside the Ethan of the original Luminor Academy, holding off the King Serpent even briefly at this point in the timeline would have been a punishing feat for anyone. If it hadn't been Ethan, the only person who could have faced the King Serpent at this stage, even momentarily, would probably be "Full Moon Seraphin."
In any case, thanks to Ethan's hard-fought efforts, the number of casualties had been reduced — that much went without saying.
And to Seraphin, who valued human life above all else, that display of his must have looked genuinely appealing.
After all, the very reason Seraphin fell for the protagonist in the first place was a gradual attraction to his righteous deeds, with the romance building step by step from that foundation.
With no protagonist on the scene yet, it wouldn't be at all strange for those feelings to turn toward Ethan instead.
…Honestly? Not bad at all.
I couldn't jump to conclusions right this second, but the thought flickered through my head that Seraphin would actually make a rather excellent match for Ethan.
As the Third Imperial Princess, her family went without saying — a house that stood shoulder to shoulder with the Blackwood Dukedom I'd mentioned earlier.
Her looks were, by official in-game description, the stuff of peerless beauty, and when we actually met last time, she radiated an aura that practically dripped with it.
Her one tiny flaw was a personality that ran a little too meddlesome, but even that was meddling strictly within the bounds Seraphin could manage herself. And a small imperfection or two is exactly what gives a person their human charm.
Besides, that so-called flaw was more than compensated for by all her other virtues anyway.
…I realize it anew every time, but she's a character Lilith could never hope to compete with.
In status and in beauty alike, Lilith didn't have a leg to stand on.
If I judged purely by personality, the original Lilith might have been slightly better-tempered than Seraphin — except that in this world, the contents of that personality, the person inside it, had already been replaced by me.
Ironically, I'd lost even the single virtue the original Lilith possessed: her decent personality.
The only thing I had going for me was the sheer length of time I'd spent at Ethan's side, to the point where we'd grown used to each other — and frankly, I wasn't sure that even counted as an advantage.
Oh well. If Seraphin really had taken an interest in Ethan, I'd just have to gracefully admit it and root for the two of them.
Marriage talk involving someone of Seraphin's caliber wasn't a matter of hearing rumors often or not — it was simply an unprecedented event in itself, no matter that the other party was Ethan Richard Blackwood, the young lord of Blackwood.
Ethan claimed to have no interest in Seraphin on the surface, but if real marriage talk ever came through, it was more than enough to spark his interest…
No. What the hell am I even thinking right now?
A chill ran down my spine the instant I caught myself — not only weighing whether Seraphin was a good match for Ethan, but actually calculating how she stacked up against me.
It wasn't as if I was in any position to editorialize about his fiancée in the first place, and a connection with someone of Seraphin's standing was nothing short of a miracle to begin with.
At the recent masquerade, I'd gotten so entangled with the main cast of Luminor Academy that I'd briefly forgotten my own place.
Or maybe that idiotic act of pretending to be his temporary fiancée had gifted me some delusion of grandeur.
I needed to get a grip. I was nothing more than a debt-bound maid whose neck could fly off or who could be sold off to some far-flung place at any moment without anyone finding it strange. …For at least the next three years, that is.
"Then, since this is a letter from Princess Seraphin, I should set it aside and have Ethan read it himself—"
…No. Wait just a second.
Come to think of it — wouldn't handing this letter straight to Ethan actually be the wrong move?
And with good reason: nothing about this letter, from top to bottom, read like correspondence from "Seraphin."
There was no other seal or inscription attached proving the sender's royal blood, nothing written to that effect.
Seraphin had addressed Ethan from the very start as the house of "Viscount Peschinar," which meant I, too, was obligated to treat this letter as mail from "Viscount Peschinar."
And within my duties — reading and sorting the mail that arrived for Ethan — letters from someone of viscount rank fell squarely into the category I was expected to screen first.
If I'd delivered this to Ethan without so much as opening it, all hell would have broken loose in an entirely different way.
Among the general public, and even among the high nobility, only a tiny handful knew that Viscount Peschinar was Seraphin. Ethan, naturally, remained unaware of it as well.
So picture it: I hand him a letter from "Viscount Peschinar" without checking it first?
While saying something like, "This appears to be from Princess Seraphin, my lord, so I'd recommend reading it yourself"?
Ethan or not, witnessing an act of idiocy that brazen would leave him two hundred percent suspicious.
God, I almost got completely fucked.
It wasn't as if I didn't already have a record — back at the palace, I'd carelessly revived my past-life memories and acted like I knew the palace layout inside and out, and it had earned me a dose of suspicion.
If I'd pulled another suspicious stunt on top of that, things would have gotten very difficult to talk my way out of.
…Still, there was something oddly nerve-wracking about reading a letter addressed to a member of the royal family before she did.
But the sender on the outside was "Viscount Peschinar," plain as day, so surely no one could later cry insult-to-the-crown over it.
…Ah, screw it.
What was I supposed to do anyway? Deliberating wasn't going to solve anything.
Above all, the moment Seraphin chose to send a letter under the name of Viscount Peschinar, she should have accounted for the possibility that a servant might end up reading it.
The other young noble ladies had already had every manner of embarrassing love letter exposed to me without their knowledge — even Seraphin couldn't reasonably expect to be the sole exception.
Absolutely not because I was curious about the contents of Seraphin's love letter. I was acting this way purely because it was what "Lilith, the exclusive maid" was supposed to do. That was all.
With that thought, I brought the silver letter knife over to Seraphin's secret love letter (presumed), and carefully scraped away the sealing wax that closed the envelope.
Pop.
With the soft sound of the seal coming loose, the envelope opened to reveal two sheets of paper.
The first thing that caught my eye was that the front and back pages had been lightly fastened together with a second dab of sealing wax.
Even if the outer seal came undone and someone read the first page ahead of the intended recipient, they would be stopped from reading any further — a two-layer safeguard.
Seeing such suspiciously elaborate sealing, I couldn't help feeling that this letter was looking more and more like a genuine love letter by the minute.
What exactly did the princess's love letters contain — the ones I'd never actually gotten to read even in Luminor Academy?
With a heart beating just a little faster, I began reading the letter from the very first line of the first page.
And the instant my eyes touched the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first page, a creeping horror crawled over my entire body like ice water.
To Miss Lilith Rosewood.
"……!!!"
…This absolute lunatic.
Just how far ahead is this woman calculating everything?