So Death Has Become a Young Lady!?
The same words echoed endlessly through my consciousness.
[I cannot die, I say!]
It was someone's desperate scream. The voice rang out as though welling up from the very bottom of a deep and lightless abyss.
That cry, a tangle of will and terror, felt less like a sentence than like the very essence of a soul pouring itself out.
[I cannot die, I say!!!]
In the end, that echo forced my consciousness back where it belonged. But it was a curse, not a blessing.
................!!
The instant I came to, pain flooded through every cell in my body as if they were all ablaze. It was agony so violent I couldn't so much as blink. Each breath felt like being ground to pieces in a mortar studded with blades.
While this motionless body of mine screamed silently beneath that monstrous pain, I caught snatches of a conversation.
"I cannot explain it, but the patient fell from the very top of the citadel's spire. As a result, she plummeted all the way down to the base of the cliff. That left her skull depressed and caused comminuted fractures throughout the spine, from the cervical vertebrae all the way down to the lumbar."
The voice of a man presumably the doctor reeled off one clinical term after another.
"Her pelvis was crushed outright, and... most of the organs of her abdominal cavity had been forced outside the body. I am sorry to say..."
"That's quite enough."
The deep voice of a middle-aged man cut the doctor off. Sorrow was soaked into every syllable.
Then isn't she basically a corpse already!?
From what I could gather, the doctor's explanation seemed to be about me.
"No, forgive me, but there is more I must explain."
At that, the doctor's voice changed abruptly.
"In truth, we were already preparing for the funeral. And yet... the patient's body is healing. The bones have reknit themselves, and the organs are finding their way back into place."
"What on earth are you saying?"
"I have worked as a healer for more than thirty years, and never once in my life have I witnessed recovery like this. It is enough to make me believe the patient is immortal. She will live. She may well make a full recovery before long."
I was utterly confused. The top of a spire? Did he mean the roof of a building? Then why on earth had I fallen from a rooftop? Had I gone up there drinking, or something? And what was this about a cliff?
Besides, how does anyone survive with their intestines spilling out and their spine shattered to gravel? What was I now, a flatworm?
I tried to rake through my memories, but my mind was as hazy as fog. Only a single image stayed sharp. A great height. A falling cat. A hand reaching out toward a poor little creature.
Whether it was fortune or misfortune, my consciousness began to dim once more. Relief washed over me at the thought of being freed from that horrific pain.
Consciousness returned.
Faint light seeped in through my eyelids. I tried to open my eyes, but it was no easy task — as if someone had strapped lumps of lead to them.
The first thing I saw when I finally managed it was a white ceiling carved with delicate patterns. Even shifting my gaze sent pain rippling through my whole body.
I tried to raise myself up, but it was impossible. My entire body was heavy and sluggish, as though I'd been sunk deep beneath the sea. Even moving a single finger was a struggle.
In my confusion, my lips moved of their own accord.
"El... Elizaaa..."
That very instant, a sound rang out from a corner of the room.
"Lady Katerina is awake!"
Several people hurried to the bedside at a rush of footsteps. All of them were young women. Dressed in white aprons over black, they began bustling about at once.
One tidied the bedding, another readied a glass of water, and still another went to the window and adjusted the curtains to soften the light.
What... is going on here?
Dazed and bewildered, I could do nothing but stare blankly at their movements. Why had the name Eliza come out of my own mouth? And were these lovely women truly calling me "Lady Katerina"? I couldn't make sense of any of it.
But there was one problem more pressing than all of that.
"Water..."
My throat was parched. My mouth was so dry my tongue seemed to have stuck to the roof of it, and even when I tried to speak, only a cracked rasp came out.
"Water, if you would be so kind, I pray..."
I barely managed to get the words out, but my whole body flinched at the strange flourish I had spat out without thinking.
I've never once used a manner of speaking like that in my life...? No, hold on—!
Then, as though a floodgate had burst open, the memories came pouring in.
The colossal fortress city on the northern frontier — the Grand Duchy of Eisenmark — and Katerina, daughter of the Grand Ducal House of Eisenmark.
The cloudless sky seen from atop the spire. The shaggy creature — almost certainly a Norwegian Forest Cat — hanging precariously from the roof's edge. The hand reaching toward the beast to save its life, and the falling body that was the price.
But I am surely...
I am not Lady Katerina.
The person I am lived on a peninsula where death was plentiful and life had all but vanished... an ordinary man of the modern world.
Two sets of memories colliding left me thoroughly disoriented. And yet, strangely, my body moved without resistance. I took the glass of water the maids offered and drank. It came as naturally as if I had been drilled in it all my life.
"Lady Katerina, you must lie back and rest."
The maid I remembered as Eliza spoke with worried eyes. It was uncanny how vividly her face and her name surfaced in my mind.
Who am I? An ordinary man of a dying country? Or the daughter of a noble house, in a world I had never seen, on a land I had never known?
Even as those confused thoughts tumbled one after another, words flowed smoothly from my mouth.
"Do not worry yourself, I pray. Thanks to you all, I feel a little better."
With the maids supporting me on either side, I finally managed to rise from my bed. My legs didn't yet have their full strength back, but surprisingly, I could stand and move on both of them.
And to think that, when I'd first opened my eyes, I had assumed I'd be bedridden for at least a year.
Slowly I made my way across the spacious bedroom and came to a stop before the full-length mirror standing in one corner.
"Ha—...!"
My breath caught at the figure reflected in the glass.
Waves of golden hair spilled down over slender shoulders, and crimson eyes the color of rubies stared back at me. Skin pale to the point of porcelain, a soft, generous bust, a sleek and graceful waistline.
In a word: a beautifully nurtured body, every inch the young noblewoman.
"...This is impossible... it simply cannot be."
Doing my best to ignore the way my speech kept correcting itself without my consent, I reached out with a trembling hand and touched the mirror. The cold surface of the glass met my fingertips. It felt newly, sharply real.
But the astonishment lasted only a moment before a heavy emotion began to bloom in my chest.
Where had the life I'd lived gone?
That ordinary but meaningful routine — waking every morning to get ready for work, meeting friends on the weekends, striving toward a dream.
That life, which I had lived earnestly in my own way and which hadn't been bad at all — where on earth had it...?
"My lady?"
Eliza's worried voice reached me. In the mirror, her gaze met mine, and pure concern filled her eyes.
"I'm quite all right, truly."
The diction flowing out of my mouth reminded me, once again, that this was no dream. This was reality.
First, calm down. Let's take stock of the situation.
I forced out a deep breath. Suppressing the urge to let loose a hysterical scream then and there, I resolved to think it through calmly, as though I were drafting a report at the office.
First: the situation I was in. This was clearly not the world I had lived in — not Earth. Even the glimpse of a fortress visible past the window looked like nothing to be found anywhere on Earth.
Second: my current identity. The women I took to be maids... no, the maids called me "Katerina." And that was this body's name. "Katerina, daughter of the Grand Duke of Eisenmark."
I moved my body slowly. This flesh was not mine, and yet it answered without the slightest resistance, as naturally as if it had been mine from the very start. Not to mention this manner of speech that spilled out of me unbidden...
I shook my head. Trying to process too much at once would only plunge me back into confusion.
The Grand Duchy of Eisenmark...
Strangely enough, the moment that word surfaced, memory came flooding in like a rising tide.
This land in the empire's northeastern marches was ringed by rugged mountain ranges and dense coniferous forests. Once it had suffered under the threat of the northern barbarians, but now those same tribes had become its allies, and the duchy wielded greater strength than ever before.
Far poorer than the Empire, yet fully capable of sustaining itself, its principal industries were lumber, mining, and what little farming the cold allowed. And the family that ruled this grand duchy was...
The Grand Ducal House of Eisenmark.
Something heavy settled in my chest. This was memory tangled up with emotion.
Having earned its ducal title long ago for turning back the "Demon Cavalry Legion of the East," House Eisenmark was said to carry a powerful warrior's temperament in its blood, generation after generation.
The current head of the house — my father, no less — had made his name in his youth as the finest knight in the Empire.
Yet many judged him the greatest of knights but no great general. In his wars against the northern barbarians, he won every battle and lost every war, the front steadily pushed back until he was driven onto the defensive.
But the Grand Duke of Eisenmark — Chadomir Gigant Eisenmark — was such a magnificently boisterous soul that he was wildly popular among those very northern barbarians. So popular, in fact, that a peculiar pet name even sprang up for him among their tribes.
And his popularity ran so hot that the barbarians, though losing every engagement, developed no intention whatsoever of ending the war — they simply kept dragging it out.
In the end, as the war wore on, their enthusiasm gradually cooled, and at last both sides agreed to an armistice.
Then, right there at the armistice talks, the leader of the northern barbarians — the Chosen of the Thunder God — courted the Grand Duke, the marriage succeeded, and with the chieftains swearing oaths of fealty to the Grand Duke of Eisenmark, the war ended forever.
Hold on. You fell so hopelessly for the leader of the enemy faction mid-war that you let them off with a truce? And then, while you were at it, sealed it with a marriage alliance?
I couldn't breathe. Too many memories — absurd memories — came crashing in like a tidal wave. I shut my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath.
"Lady Katerina, are you quite well?"
Eliza's anxious voice reached me.
"Please grant me some time alone, if you would..."
Though guilt pricked at me toward Eliza, for now, time to myself was what I needed most.