The Weight of Mercy
It was not long after Ria entered the convent that Iris came to visit Mariel’s office. The visit was unannounced. The novice nun standing by the door cautiously relayed the name, and Mariel closed the document she had been reading. “Let her in.”
The door opened. Iris was, as always, the very image of composure. The blue patterns on her snow-white habit lay like frost upon fresh snow. Hair the deep purple of night melted into shadow. A thin, cold smile rested on her pale face.
“Lady Mariel.” Iris bowed her head. “I apologize for arriving without warning.”
“It’s quite all right.” Mariel welcomed her with a gentle smile. “What brings you here?”
Iris did not answer at once. Her grey eyes, touched with blue, slowly swept across the office before settling on the small empty chair. The warmth and traces of its recent occupant still lingered. A teacup half empty. A napkin with its edge crumpled. A worn, low chair. Iris’s smile thinned by a fraction.
“I heard you personally vouched for the new child.”
Mariel set her teacup down. “She was a child with nowhere else to go.”
“The Holy Kingdom never turns its back on a child with nowhere to go.” Iris picked up the thread as though she had been waiting for it. “However, the mercy of a saintess candidate cannot end with mere personal kindness.”
Mariel remained silent. Iris’s gaze drifted to the tips of Mariel’s fingers.
“Everyone in this order is watching you, Lady Mariel.” Iris spoke softly. “They believe that among all the candidates, you stand closest to the Lord’s light.”
Mariel still said nothing.
“If someone like you takes in and shelters a child of uncertain origin…” The corner of Iris’s mouth curved with faint venom. “People will not see it as simple goodwill.”
“……”
“The child Lady Mariel guaranteed. The child Lady Mariel showed mercy to. That is what they will call her.” Her voice remained impeccably calm. “You cannot be unaware of how heavy that name is.”
Mariel lowered her eyes for a moment. “So you’re saying I must be even more careful.”
“Will caution alone suffice?” Iris asked gently. “For one who stands closest to the seat of the saintess?”
Mariel quietly shook her head. “I was never suited for such a position to begin with.”
At those words, Iris’s grey eyes narrowed sharply. “You always speak with such humility.” Her tone stayed soft. “That is precisely why it feels so hypocritical.”
“Everyone already regards you as the saintess, yet you alone step back from that gaze.”
Mariel said nothing. Iris did not know. Those words were neither humility nor performance. Mariel truly believed she was a sinner unworthy of the saintess’s seat. Even while praying she had resented the Lord’s silence. Even while sending children to purification she had doubted whether it was truly mercy.
People called it compassion, called it mercy, called it a saintly tremor of the heart. But Mariel knew the truth. Pure faith was not the only thing inside her. There was fear as well. The desire to borrow the name of the Lord’s will simply to endure what she had done. How could someone like that become a saintess?
“The position of saintess is not granted simply because one wishes for it,” Mariel said quietly.
Iris’s eyes grew cold. “Are those words directed at me?”
“They are words I speak to myself as well.”
A brief silence settled over the room. Iris asked, “Then who do you believe it suits?”
“……”
“The name of saintess.”
Mariel could not answer immediately. Instead she recalled that day from several days earlier. Blue light settling over ashes scattered by the wind. Fragments of light weaving together like delicate threads in the air.
And the silver-haired child slowly falling from the center of that radiance. Mariel had caught her in both arms. A body cold as ice, light as down, so small it seemed it might shatter. As though the answer she had never been able to hear had descended in the form of a child.
“That is not something I dare decide,” Mariel said softly. “It is something only the Lord may know.”
Iris stared at her for a long time. “Lady Mariel always speaks of what you wish to believe as though it were the Lord’s will.”
“I only try to believe what I have seen.”
“Because of that faith, the day will come when you regret it, Lady Mariel.”
Mariel smiled, very faintly. “If that day comes,” her voice was endlessly calm, “then that too will be a burden I must bear.”
After that, Pia stuck to my side like glue whenever she had a spare moment. At first her intentions were painfully obvious.
“Ria.”
“What?”
“Going to see Sister Mariel again today?”
“No.”
“Liar.” Pia narrowed her eyes. “Your eyes just wavered.”
“They did not.”
“Tsk! A junior shouldn’t lie to her senior who is like the sky above her.”
“Then maybe you should stop lying to me too, Senior Pia.”
“I’m the senior, so it’s fine.”
I could never follow her logic. Pia followed me around simply because she wanted to see Sister Mariel one more time. She didn’t even bother hiding it. Yet the moment she actually stood in front of Mariel she could barely speak.
“The prayer we’re memorizing today begins here.” When Mariel opened the book, Pia would nod with a completely rigid face. “Y-yes. I know it.” And then she would get the very first line wrong.
“Pia.”
“…That was practice.”
“That sentence is from what we learned yesterday.”
“It’s review.”
I would quietly point out the mistaken words from beside her. Pia would insist every single time that she had already known them, and Mariel would simply smile in silence.
After this pattern repeated several times, Pia began to stand beside me naturally whenever it was time to visit Mariel’s room. I never pushed her away. She was noisy, frequently wrong, and loved to boast and play the senior, but she wasn’t a bad child.
“Sister Mariel is truly amazing.” One day Pia rested her chin in her hands and muttered dreamily while Mariel had stepped away for a moment. She clutched the empty teacup with both hands, still staring at the door through which Mariel had vanished. “Do you like her that much?”
“It’s beyond liking.” Pia lowered her voice. “Sister Mariel is definitely going to become the saintess.”
I said nothing.
“Everyone says so…” Pia’s cheeks flushed. “I think so too. There’s no one else as kind, as steady, as willing to reach out to anyone the way she does.”
The moment those words left her lips, the door opened quietly. Mariel had finished her duties and returned. Pia shot to her feet and bowed deeply.
“S-Sister Mariel!”
“There’s no need to be so startled, dear.” Mariel covered her mouth and smiled beautifully.
But for the briefest instant, I noticed it. The curve of her lips was just a fraction of a beat late.
“Pia always sees me in such an excessively favorable light.”
“It’s not excessive!” Pia lifted her head at once. “I truly mean it.”
Mariel gently stroked Pia’s hair. “Thank you.”
Pia’s ears burned crimson at those two words.
Even after that day Pia remained cheerfully tactless and noisy as ever. Then one late afternoon the corridor suddenly fell silent, as though water had been poured over it. From the far end of the marble hallway, men in pitch-black uniforms walked with hushed steps. The nuns naturally stepped aside. The novices bowed their heads.
The moment I saw those uniforms my shoulders stiffened. Inquisitors. The Church’s hunting dogs. One of them was the young man who had seized my arm a few days earlier. The inside of my arm throbbed for no reason.
But Pia’s reaction beside me was entirely different.
“So cool…” A small, entranced voice filled with longing.
I looked at her. “You think they’re cool?”
“Yeah.” Pia couldn’t tear her eyes from the Inquisitors. “They’re the Inquisitors. The strongest shield our Holy Kingdom has.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
“I am.” Pia gave a small nod. “But they’re the ones who catch black mages.”
The tone of her voice was completely different from usual. The usual boasting that came with being the senior, the childish stubbornness, none of it remained. Pia’s small hand gripped the hem of her habit tightly.
“If they had only come to our village a little sooner…” Her words cut off. Pia seemed to realize her mistake and clamped her mouth shut at once. The cold gaze of the young Inquisitor passing by brushed over us. I lowered my head. For the briefest moment his eyes seemed to linger near my collar. Pia didn’t appear to notice.
She continued staring blankly at the Inquisitors’ retreating backs for a long time.
That day, even after following me all the way to my room, Pia didn’t chatter as usual. There were none of her usual playful boasts about being the senior or the junior. She simply sat in the chair, glancing repeatedly toward the door outside. Eventually, as though possessed, she stood up.
“I’ll be back in a bit.”
“To see the Inquisitors?”
Pia only gave a short nod in reply. “I’ll be quick.”
With those words she hurried out. Once the noisy, chattering Pia was gone, the room fell quiet at once. In that silence I unconsciously lifted a hand to my collar. The ominous gaze of the Inquisitor from the corridor kept resurfacing.
Had he truly not seen it? Or had a strand of hair revealed something? Anxiety moved my fingers first.
I pulled my hair forward and adjusted the high collar again. But one side kept twisting. The stiff, suffocating fabric scraped roughly against the sensitive skin of my neck. In the end I loosened the collar for a moment. Just as I was about to fix it properly—
Click—
“Ria?”
It was Mariel. My fingertips froze solid. With the loosened collar, the brand was completely exposed. The atmosphere in the room turned ice-cold. I stopped breathing. It’s over, I thought.
Mariel’s cherry-blossom gaze remained fixed without the slightest tremor on the skin beneath my neck. The brand a black mage had engraved. An indelible mark of shame, the trace of a master-servant imprint. If anyone from the Holy Kingdom saw it, they would summon the Inquisitors on the spot.
But Mariel did not scream. She did not push me away. She did not call for the Inquisitors. Instead she slowly, very slowly, raised her hand. I remained frozen, unable to flee. Her slender index finger carefully touched just in front of my lips.
“Shh.”
A whisper barely louder than breath. Then, with delicate care, she drew my pure white collar back into place and fastened it firmly. The stiff white fabric once again covered my neck. The brand disappeared.
I could not speak for a long time. Mariel remained silent as well. Her fingertips still rested on my collar.
“Why…” My voice would not come out properly. “Why are you letting it pass?”
Mariel looked at me.
“You clearly saw it.” I clenched my fingers tightly. “The black mage’s brand.”
The moment I spoke the words aloud, my throat went dry. “In the Holy Kingdom you don’t simply overlook something like this. You hand them to the Inquisitors or send them to purification… That’s what you’re supposed to do.”
Mariel did not answer. A long silence filled the room. The hand that had fixed my collar slowly fell. Mariel stared at her own fingertips for a while, as though the sensation of what she had touched still lingered. Or as though she were recalling something she had lost long ago.
“…I too.” Only after a long time did Mariel speak. Her voice was low and careful. “In the past, I also believed that was right.”
“…Believed what was?”
“That anything touched by black magic must be purified.” Mariel’s voice stayed low. “That it was not punishment but mercy. The only path that spared them further suffering.”
I pressed my lips together.
“The order taught it that way, and I learned it that way. But…” Mariel was looking at me, yet her gaze seemed to pass through me toward some distant past. “At first my hands trembled.”
“……”
“The second time I recited the prayers. The third time I did not close my eyes. After that I believed it was simply my duty.”
Mariel’s fingertips trembled faintly. “Black mages. People consumed by black magic. Test subjects as well.”
She spoke very slowly. “We called them all purification. Because we believed it was mercy.”
“……”
“Daisy was one of them.”
It was a name I had never heard. Mariel’s voice caught for the briefest moment before the name, then continued after she steadied her breath.
“She was a very small child. She looked at me without understanding what had happened to her or why she had to stand before me.”
Mariel did not smile. “After sending that child away, I kept stopping before the same question.”
Her gaze slowly lowered. “What exactly was the Lord doing?”
“……”
“When black mages destroy cities, ruin the living while they still breathe, and drive even innocent little children to their deaths.”
Mariel’s voice grew very quiet. “What exactly was the Lord doing at that moment?”
I could not speak.
“If the Lord is truly watching over this world, why does He stop nothing?” Mariel smiled faintly. “While so many people are broken, why does He remain silent until the end?”
It was too thin and fragile an expression to be called a smile. “At some point I could no longer tell whether I truly believed in the Lord’s will, or whether I was simply calling it the Lord’s will so I could endure what I had done.”
Her fingertips trembled again. “I still have not found the answer. In a world where God remains silent, what should I believe? Whether what I did was truly mercy.”
“Or whether it was simply…” Mariel slowly lowered her gaze. “A name I clung to so I would not break.”
“…”
“I still have not found the answer.” Mariel swallowed a small breath. “A person who resents God yet wants to believe her own deeds were mercy.”
She looked at me and smiled faintly. “How could someone like that become a saintess?”
I stared at Mariel. “Then why… for me…”
Mariel gazed at me for a moment before whispering, “That day.” Her eyes trembled quietly. “You descended into my arms from the sky. Amid that miraculous blue light.”
Her eyes trembled again. “As though the answer I could never hear had come down to me in the form of a child.”
My breath caught.
“I thought I could not stand in that place.”
“…The seat of the saintess?”
Mariel did not answer, but the silence itself felt like one.
“Yet when I look at you…” Her gaze rested on me. “I wonder whether the answer I could not find might be inside you.”
Only then did I understand. Mariel was mistaken. She had taken my resurrection as a miracle sent from heaven. As an answer from God. And further still, as a divine response that might allow her to stand in the place she believed she could not.
The saintess.
That was how Mariel saw me. But I was nothing of the sort. I simply died and came back. Far from a saintess, I was a bomb that would explode on the purification pyre the moment anyone learned the truth.
Yet Mariel had fixed my collar. She had not handed me over. And while looking at me she was searching for the answer she could not find.
In that moment a thought flashed through my mind. In the original story Mariel had been a perfect saintess. She had not been this fragile person who wavered or resented God. No matter how desperate the situation, the original Mariel had never once stopped praying.
Then something must have existed between the current Mariel and the one in the original work. Had she found the answer? Whether the purification she believed in had truly been mercy.
In a world where God was silent, what kind of person she ought to be. Had finding that answer allowed Mariel to become the saintess?
I could not be certain. But if that was the case—if I could help her find that answer even a little—if Mariel could become the saintess as she had in the original story—then she would become the largest, strongest shield in the world that would protect me.
“Ria.” I lifted my head at Mariel’s voice. She was still watching me with those tender eyes. “You do not need to say anything right now. I will not ask, either.”
Mariel carefully adjusted the end of my collar once more. “Not until you are ready to speak of it yourself.”
I could not answer. Then suddenly I remembered Pia. It had been far too long.
“Pia…” My words trailed off. I looked toward the closed door. No answer came.
Mariel’s gaze turned in the same direction. I opened the door carefully. The corridor was empty. Instead, right in front of the door, a small hair ribbon lay fallen on the floor. The old, faded blue ribbon Pia always wore. The one she had been fiddling with only moments earlier.
I moved to pick it up but stopped. The end of the ribbon was crumpled. Pia was nowhere to be seen.