Ep.8 - The Sisters' Tale (4)
Ep.8 - The Sisters' Tale (4)
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When loved ones leave for a time, most people see them off with a bright smile.
Few cling to them, sobbing and begging them not to go. Small children may weep bitterly when their parents depart, feeling as though they're gone forever—but as they grow up, they soon learn to let them go.
It was a natural phenomenon.
If you love someone, you naturally want to keep them close,
to protect them,
to be good to them—
but human beings could not live on love alone.
Humans had to form various relationships,
and they had to step outside the home.
And so humans learned to let go...
"Omma, Appa... please don't go on this journey, not this one. Please... can't you sleep just one more night and then leave? Yes?"
But on the day her parents were to depart, Neva clung to their sleeves and refused to let go.
Seeing weakness in her dignified eldest daughter, who had never once thrown a tantrum, her father gave her a warm embrace, and her mother stroked her hair again and again to soothe her.
"I had a nightmare... I'm too scared to sleep alone. Please, just one more day today..."
"Neva. If you cry like that, it makes things harder for your father and me. You are the pride of our family. You know that, don't you? Always dignified. Always brave."
"I don't want to! I said I don't want to... I said no!"
Neva ended up bolting up to her own room, locking the door, and wiping away her tears. Her parents' journey was slightly delayed by their daughter's tantrum, but in the end, they had no choice but to leave.
"Neva, come here. Come to Appa. Quickly now."
To soothe her, her father stood blankly in front of the door and waited for his daughter. He wanted to hold her one last time, listening to the sound of his daughter sobbing...
"At this rate, your little sister will wake up too. Neva, won't you stop crying now and open the door for me?"
"I don't want to! I said no!"
And still, Neva threw her final tantrum.
Shut inside the room, she buried her face in her pillow, retreated to a corner, and let the tears fall.
"I hate Omma, and I hate Appa too...! If you're going to go, just go!"
"Neva, please, just open the door. Let's hold each other one last time, alright? If we leave like this, it'll be hard for Appa too, don't you think..."
It was a common thing for children to have nightmares—about failing a test the night before an exam, or the picnic being canceled the night before the picnic...
"You know we have no choice. Appa and Omma have to leave. It's our duty. We're nobles. Your mother is a knight, and your father is the husband of the greatest knight."
"If you're going, take me too. Please... take me and Eva too..."
Inside the dark room,
having locked the door herself, Neva said through her sniffles.
"If you're going to abandon us and leave, then just go! Abandon everything and just leave!"
"Neva. Just let me hold you one last time. Please..."
"Go!"
"Ow..."
Eva, having been shoved into the bedroom the two of them shared, rubbed her bottom. The pain rushing from her forcefully thrown backside was enough to make tears prick at her eyes.
But what was more frightening was the chilling fact that after the door slammed shut with a bang, sounds came from it as if it were being locked from the other side.
"Uh, Eonni...!"
Eva crawled across the floor toward the door. Drawing close, she frantically turned the handle, trying to open it, calling for her sister.
"Eonni! What are you doing...! Open the door!"
From beyond the door, only a resolute voice could be heard.
"Stay in there until you've reflected on what you've done."
The sound of Neva's footsteps gradually grew distant. That meant Neva was leaving, having imprisoned her little sister in the room.
"Eonni! W-Wait a second! Eonni!"
Terrified, Eva pounded on the door and called out to her departing sister. There had been many times she'd been put in a room for punishment, but being forcibly shoved into a room and having the door locked on her stirred up an indescribable terror in the young girl.
It was the same space as always, but in an instant it felt like a prison. Though there was one large window, the option of escaping through it simply didn't exist for Eva, who had always been timid.
That place was a prison.
And Eva could only be freed after being locked there for ten hours.
By then, her pants and underwear were thoroughly soaked with urine, and her face was flushed bright red and streaked with tears,
but Neva spoke without the slightest concern.
"Don't even think about talking to those kids from now on. This is what happens when you hang around strange kids—you become a bad girl who doesn't listen to her eonni. Understand?"
"..."
Eva said nothing.
She only clutched the hem of her dress tightly with her small hands, felt the unpleasant wetness of her soaked lower half, and cried a little more.
...The girl who had locked herself in a room
had, in the end, come to lock her little sister in a room.
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From the day Eva was first confined to the room, the relationship between Neva and Eva only worsened.
Eva avoided Neva, and Neva, angered by this, handed down strict punishments.
"Don't even think about coming out. Stay there all day."
"I said no! Heuk, hik... heuk..."
"I absolutely won't open this until you've reflected on what you did wrong."
Eva could no longer go to school.
The voluntary withdrawal papers Neva requested didn't have Eva's seal stamped on them, but since it was Neva who submitted them, it was processed as a withdrawal without any issues.
"Ro-Roselia. Please, just open the door... I need the bathroom..."
"I'm sorry, young miss... Neva-nim told me absolutely not to open it..."
Eva ended up spending all her days at home.
Going outside was not permitted to her.
While Neva continued her training as a knight, Eva had to spend her days locked in her room.
The only things Eva could do were stare at the wallpaper and look at the garden through the window.
Looking at the flowers she had gathered and tended in the garden, Eva sniffled and waited for her sister.
Until her sister came back and freed her again, she waited endlessly...
"Eonni, please, just open the door... please? I'll just go give the flowers water and come right back. Please..."
"No. Eonni said clearly. If you go out without permission, I'll lock you up for an entire week."
The hours of confinement only grew longer.
The new method Neva had devised kept her little sister safe, and there was no worry of her being tormented by others either.
"Rapina. Listen carefully, understood? Among the pink flowers, there's one with a slightly rounder shape—that one needs water once every three days, and the one with a slightly deeper blossom color needs it once at lunchtime..."
"A-Ah, young miss. Even so, there aren't just one or two pink flowers..."
"P-Please! If you don't do it exactly like that, the roots will rot and it'll be a disaster. Yes? You have to look closely and give them water. Understood?"
As time passed, fearing Eva might escape, Neva went so far as to close the window as well,
and because of this, Eva, now unable to check on her flowers, could only sit blankly in the room, feeling time crawl by.
There, Eva was always sniffling.
It wasn't like this before.
She'd always been so happy.
"Heuk, hik... they're all dead..."
"I-I'm sorry, young miss. I tried my very best, but..."
In the end, one of the servants who couldn't bear to watch any longer secretly opened the door for her. Having slipped out to the garden without Neva's knowledge, Eva saw the flowers that had already died and burst into tears.
The purple flower she had picked while holding her father's hand on a walk by the riverside, the red flower her mother brought back from a distant dispatch mission,
the small yellow flower she'd gathered with her sister, and the squat, ugly little flower that smelled so wonderfully fragrant that Eva especially loved it...
Eva alone knew how to care for all those many flowers.
Even though she had earnestly instructed the servants, the flowers died in the end.
Small plants that could not feel their owner's loving touch could not survive.
As if with each withered flower, a memory withered too.
Eva held them tight and wept.
But.
On that very day she had sneaked out to the garden, Neva returned home earlier than usual.
"..."
"It hurts! It hurts!"
Having harshly driven out the servant who had dared disobey her, she roughly dragged Eva to her feet.
Neva's tightly shut mouth said everything.
Clenching her teeth, fury blazing, she dragged Eva along.
"I said it hurts! It hurts!"
"..."
Eva was dragged away, the sight of the flowers she hadn't finished watering and those she hadn't properly laid to rest searing into her tear-filled vision.
Against Neva, whose strength was already in a class of its own, there was no way to resist. A large bruise bloomed on Eva's delicate arm.
"Eonni, please!"
Still, Neva resolutely shoved Eva into the room.
And she gave orders to the servants from outside the room, loud enough for Eva to hear.
"Pull out every flower in the garden."
"N-No! Eonni! I was wrong, I was wrooong..."
Neva, who wanted Eva to stay only in the safety of the house, was ultimately determined to sever even the last remaining link to the outside world.
Because to Neva, more than any memories contained in the garden, Eva herself was precious.
"Nooo... please, eung? Eonni, eung...?"
But to Eva, the memories contained in the garden were precisely her life's driving force, her last thread of hope.
"Those are the ones we planted together with Omma and Appa and Eonni... Please, don't touch the garden... I-I'll stay only here. I'll absolutely never go out. Just please, don't touch the garden..."
"..."
Neva, not so cruel as to trample her little sister's desperate pleas, ultimately gave her one more chance.
————————————
Eva, like the flowers she tended,
became a flower that spent her days confined to the mansion.
"Eonni, this flower is pretty, isn't it...? Eung?"
Whenever Neva returned, Eva would always carefully hold a single blossom and present it to her. Hoping that someday her eonni would return to the way she used to be, waiting for the day her eonni would smile kindly again as she once did.
"It's pretty."
But her eonni did not smile.
The young Eva would always wipe away tears as she looked at that eonni, but Neva, still only about middle-school age herself...
Would she have known that she loathed herself for being unable to smile at the flower?
———————————————
The incident erupted one afternoon.
Neva, having returned from training as usual, looked for Eva. When her sister was nowhere to be seen, she called the servants and asked after her whereabouts.
"What did you say...?"
"W-We have committed a sin worthy of death... She was definitely in the garden, but she suddenly vanished..."
The reply she received was nothing short of irresponsible and stupid. Neva screamed on the spot.
"Bring her back, right this instant!"
Perhaps it was the influence of the future Queen candidate she had come to serve, or perhaps too much pain had simply changed her,
but the emotions Neva displayed were enough to evoke something beyond evil. For the girl she once was could not lose the last treasure remaining to her.
————————————
"Heok, heo-eok..."
It was Neva, not the servants, who found Eva. Even faster than the servants who searched every corner calling the young lady's name, she ran on her own two legs with all her might to every place Eva might have gone.
"Ah, Eonni..."
"Huu, huuk..."
Neva was a mess from having rummaged through everything in all directions, but Eva was a mess just as much as Neva was.
Her cute dress was entirely caked in mud, and torn here and there, revealing glimpses of bare skin beneath.
"I-I'm sorry. Eonni..."
Eva walked over slowly. Sniffling as she did, she held a single flower in her hand.
"I-I was going to pick the flower and come right back, but I fell on the way..."
Blood dripping from her knees fell plop-plop to the ground. Looking at a single flower as red as that blood, Neva ground her teeth.
"It's the flower Eonni used to love... The ones in the garden all died, so I went to find it again..."
That day, Neva slapped her little sister across the face for the first time.
No, it was even the first time she had struck anyone outside of knight training.
"E-Eonni..."
The single flower Eva had obtained through so much hardship was crushed under Neva's foot, spitting out its fragrance. Petals scattered one by one with each stomp...
"Eonni, Eonni... stop, stop... hik, hik..."
Delin looked at the two sisters.
"Stop... please, hik..."
"..."
He looked at Neva, who was silent, and Eva, whose words spilled from slackened lips.
"I'm scared, scaaared... Eonni..."
"..."
The two sisters, already far too grown, were etching each other's pasts with every tear.
On the day she slapped Eva's cheek,
Neva set fire to the garden.
Ignoring Eva who wailed and rattled the iron window bars, ignoring even the tears of blood that streamed from that little girl's eyes,
she seared the sight of that blazing garden into those small eyes.
"If you're going to act like that too, then just get lost. Get out of my sight."
"Nooo! Heuk, hi-euk..."
The memories went up in flames.
Blue moonlight poured down upon Eva's sorrow.
"Why did you do thaaat..."
"Get lost."
The little girl was cast out from the mansion with nothing but a few gold coins and a torn dress.
The small girl who clung to the iron gate in front of the main door, sobbing and begging to be let back in, promising she would never go out again—
Neva never let her back in.
Perhaps there had been no real intention to chase her out.
Just as she had locked herself in a room,
perhaps she was simply locking herself within the mansion.
"Eonni, I'll pick an even prettier flower... please just forgive me..."
But for Eva,
who had no talent,
was a fool,
was young,
and was foolish,
she needed the blossoms that had always brought happiness to her and her family.
"Eung? Eonni..."
"I don't ever want to see the likes of you again."
If only she had grabbed hold of the weeping girl before she left, she surely could have brought her back.
Eva never returned.
Just as Neva's parents had done, the little girl also left her eonni's side.
Even with belated regret, Eva did not return.
The little sister who had vanished with those foolish words about going to pick a flower never once showed her face to her eonni again.
Even with prayers offered every single day, Eva did not return.
Even searching far and wide and making inquiries everywhere, Eva was nowhere to be seen,
and no one knew the whereabouts of the girl called Eva.
Even after she turned over in her mind the flowers Eva had loved, and laid out a beautiful garden and waited for her,
all that remained in the great mansion was a knight bearing an even deeper wound.
In the broken mansion, only a splendid garden unsuited to it gave off a lonely, longing fragrance.
There, the knight waited for her little sister every day.
Endlessly.
Cursing herself for harshly driving her little sister away,
punishing herself with ever more brutal training,
not even daring to wish for happiness, merely chasing criminals or laboring for the Queen, and nothing more.