For Eternal Rest - 2
Yuria's gaze stayed fixed on a single spot, lingering without end — the place where her younger brother Robert had stood only moments ago, offering his apology before walking away.
Her brother had always been a pathetic creature. Weak-willed, a fool who knew nothing beyond strutting about on the prestige of the family name.
And so she had judged him unworthy of the house. Whenever she looked at that coward who couldn't even hold her gaze, her mood only curdled further.
"Young Matriarch."
Had he dared to throw the word sister at her — a word she had no wish to hear — her mood would have soured on the spot, but Robert had carefully avoided that particular choice. What caught her instead was his gaze, empty of any feeling whatsoever. The eyes that used to waver whenever they met hers were simply gone. That fragile, cowering air had vanished without a trace, and if anything, he now seemed almost to stand up to her.
Yet the thought was wiped cleanly away soon enough. It made no difference whether he had changed. To Yuria, the name Robert had never meant anything at all.
This change, too, would not last the week. Those eyes as well — soon enough they would wear that pitiful look again.
Yuria turned her back and began walking in the direction opposite to where Robert had disappeared, carrying with her the faintest, strangest stirring in her chest.
By default, I was treated as a fairly serious problem at this point in time. A ducal house with prestige to uphold was never going to look kindly on a weakling of a son, after all.
I was their only son, so the expectations had run high — and failing to live up to them, I was naturally left to rot. So I drank. I dulled myself with pills, and when Father found me staggering about in a haze, he beat me. Funny, isn't it — even through those blurred memories, the beatings came back crystal clear. Perhaps it's only the bad ones that refuse to fade.
My first regression came at the very brink of my death. To be precise, moments before my first death — before I was executed on trumped-up charges of treason — a relic tucked against my chest had stirred. A kaleidoscope of light wrapped itself around me, and then a soft voice sounded at my ear. Even now, I have never forgotten it.
[ What is it that you truly desire? ]
And then came the words announcing the start of my second life.
At first I took it for an opportunity. Later, it came to feel like a hell that existed for me and me alone. Right up until I resolved to try again, I remember being half out of my mind in most of those lives.
Having come this far, I no longer have any desire to win back every one of those relationships. There are people I'm grateful to — but not one of them would even remember that I was grateful.
Still, if there is one thing I want with what fervor remains to me, it is this: at the very least, the Crown Prince will fall by my hand. In the past I could never go through with it, paralyzed by the fear of what might happen. But Crown Prince Keitel — the man who branded me a traitor. I wanted my revenge on him. Desperately.
Wasn't he, when you traced it back, the starting point of these hundred deaths? Counting only the times I was framed for treason by the Crown Prince and killed for it, there had been dozens since my very first death. The poison I was handed last cycle was no different — the treason charge had simply surfaced once again. I managed to talk my way out of the accusation itself, but the relationships that shattered while everyone fixated on it were what drove me to my end. Guillotine, gallows, poison... I couldn't help marveling at the sheer variety of ways I had died.
And the author of all those deaths: Crown Prince Keitel.
Killing Keitel was never my original goal. I believed that if I could just earn everyone's trust, I wouldn't die. But with every repeated cycle, one truth crystallized: my death, without exception, always had the Crown Prince's fingerprints on it. Unless I took my own life, the name Keitel was guaranteed to surface — and once I seized on that bizarre fact and began chasing it, nearly ten cycles had already slipped by.
A hundred regressions. Strip away the lives squandered on futility, and I'd say perhaps forty... were lived as something resembling a proper life. Even as it struck me what an obscene number that was, I felt my old contempt rise anew for the people who never changed, no matter how many times I tried.
What, in the end, had all that effort been for? I had more than enough evidence of everything the Crown Prince had done — evidence I'd have paid for with my life without a second thought. All that remained was to bide my time and strike. The treason charges were still two years out, which meant I had plenty of time left to me.
I had gathered every scrap of proof that I was no traitor over the last cycle. What remained was simply the question of how to drag the Crown Prince into ruin.
"...I'll have to rule out leaning on the family's power."
When the accusations fell on me, House Taylor had written me off as a lost cause. As they watched me hauled to the gallows wearing a hollow expression — what had they been thinking? I used to believe that deep down, they must have grieved. But after several laps through time, I know better now: they had reveled in it. To them, I had never been anything more than a charity case.
Some part of me had always known. I had simply refused to accept it, and kept trying other ways. I repeated my regressions to love again — to be loved again. Because I believed that was the worth of my existence.
If I believed in them, they would believe in me. If I somehow mended my behavior, their hearts would mend in turn. Wasn't that precisely how I had lived through most of my cycles?
And it had all meant nothing.
The man in the mirror was smiling. It was not a true smile. A bitter taste welled up in my mouth, spreading slowly across my tongue, circling and refusing to leave. I swept back my neatly kept gray hair. There had been a time when this hair turned snow-white. A time when my skin dried and split like old leather, when every nail was torn from these very hands.
But now I was whole. Regression leaves no mark on the body — that much is only natural. The soul, though, still remembers every wound, and sometimes, catching my own reflection, the phantom pains would come flooding back. It was the same when I looked at other people. Their cruelty resurfaced, and no matter how warmly they smiled, I could no longer see them any other way.
How did I ever endure it?
Wasn't it a wonder, even to myself — that after all those countless deaths, I remained this intact? And thinking that this farce would be the last of its kind, I felt an odd, cleansing relief.
What I wanted now was no longer the repair of relationships or anything of the sort. Eternal rest. A death where I closed my eyes once, was laid into the earth, and never opened them again.
Then, without warning, the view beyond the window caught my eye. It was a radiant day out there — not a single cloud, nothing but blue sky and vivid summer green. The shrill song of insects in the grass drifted up to me, and I felt something like peace. That peace would no doubt be shattered soon enough. But perhaps this was the only moment left in which I could afford such small, private feelings.
So I swept the stray thoughts aside. Revenge and all the rest of it — I discarded such useless fancies and slowly ran a hand down my face. Moments like this, when I could simply breathe, existed only in the days right after a regression, and this was one of them.
When I thought about it, this time, at last, I would truly die. The things I had never allowed myself to see while fighting to survive — I wanted to take at least a little of them in now.
Knock, knock—
"Young Master. It is Renald."
I was annoyed to have my thoughts scattered, but Renald's manner suited me just fine. So the words I'd spoken earlier had taken proper effect, had they? Thinking fondly of a butler who, miracle of miracles, no longer flung the door off its hinges, I spoke.
"Come in."
Renald entered with the utmost care, glanced at my empty teacup, and bowed his head. It was a posture that bordered on servile, but I took it as proof that the knowledge of how easily he could be thrown out of this house had done its work on him. And if he were thrown out, there would likely be nowhere left that would take Renald in.
"What is it?"
"His Grace the Duke asked after you earlier, Young Master. When might you intend to call on him?"
I asked without turning around, and Renald answered with his head still bowed. His Grace the Duke — my father summoning me. Thankfully, that much I did remember. The treatment I'd received on the occasions I'd forgotten and let it slide had been wretched enough that forgetting was not an option, even had I wanted to.
I would go see him eventually. But not today. As it happened, today was a day for receiving a most welcome guest. And with that thought, I could guess exactly why Renald had come. Someone would be arriving here shortly to see me.
"So my fiancée is coming."
"...That is correct."
Renald's eyes narrowed for an instant, plainly startled, but he bowed and confirmed it soon enough. My fiancée — across every one of my lifetimes, those words had pointed to a single woman. Theresia Violet. The woman I had loved, and who had once loved me back.
Though by this point, whatever had existed between us had long since warped beyond recognition. A scandal had spread — that I, with a fiancée already, had taken another woman into my arms — and the present situation was one of frantic damage control.
Who had spread that scandal, I wondered. It was Theresia who had gathered me up in my confusion. You could never do such a thing. It's nothing but a misunderstanding. But as the rumor swelled, even the way she looked at me began to change. The contempt and disgust in her eyes came from the very woman who had loved me. She began to wonder aloud whether it might all be true after all, then demanded I prove it — if I really meant it.
And how, exactly, was anyone supposed to prove such a thing? That was what the old me had thought.
"Then have tea prepared. No — there's hardly any need for tea. Prepare nothing at all. When the time comes, I'll go out and greet her personally."
There was a faint thread of laughter woven through my voice as I said it. Renald stared at me for a long moment, thrown, but once he understood that I meant every word, his lips parted carefully.
"But if you receive her that way... will that truly be all right, Young Master?"
"Of course it will. She won't be expecting any grand hospitality from us anyway."
I remember, with terrible clarity, the face I made the day I realized Theresia had approached me from the very beginning with her eye on the Taylor fortune. There are few things in this world as wretched as feeling betrayed. To understand that everything you had felt was one-sided — that even that had been an illusion. It is enough to drive a person mad.
"Then I shall do as you say. She will likely arrive shortly."
Renald seemed genuinely ill at ease about the way I intended to handle things. Well, House Violet was a prosperous family in its own right; he must assume that such treatment would only breed resentment.
I was trembling too, as it happened. But it was not fear. These were words I had never once, in all my lives, been able to say aloud — this was closer to the euphoria of finally spitting them out. It was House Violet's doing that the scandal of me meeting another woman had spread. And knowing all of it, it was Theresia who had said those things to my face. Naturally, nothing tender remained.
When Renald had gone, I looked at the empty space where no one stood and laughed under my breath.
"I do wonder."
The reason Theresia was coming to me today was to secure my consent to break off our engagement. And the old me would have clung to her for the sake of one hope fine as a silk thread. Because if I let her go, I might die. Even as she used me, I held on — to survive.
Though I had known for the longest time that it was useless. I held on purely on the off chance.
"If I'm the one who calls off the engagement first... what face will she make?"
Severing my ties to the past, one by one — nothing had ever felt so electrifying.
Theresia had first come to know the man named Robert at a ball. An unusually frail man, for all the weight of House Taylor behind him. Despite his height, his pallid skin made him look infinitely delicate — and his character, predictably, was no sturdier. At some point, Theresia had begun drafting a plan to make use of him.
The engagement would be sealed. Then, once he believed himself hopelessly fallen for her, a scandal would break. If, in the wreckage, she alone understood Robert — he would cling to the only person who understood him. And when his feelings for her climbed to their very height... wouldn't that be the perfect moment to let him fall?
Today was the day to set that final period. How she had laughed at the letter that arrived mere days before — the one demanding trinkets and jewels as proof of love. Fool that he was, he had sent them with such tireless devotion that House Violet had amassed quite the fortune.
No doubt today would be the same. Even with the end of the engagement on the table, this pathetic man would lay his fortune at her feet all the same.
But the moment Theresia stepped through the entrance of the Taylor mansion, the color began to harden on her face.
"Welcome."
There should have been a line of guards drawn up to receive her. Instead, the stark, empty entrance held only a single figure. The man she had come to meet today — and the very man she had been calling pathetic mere moments ago.
Theresia, on the verge of answering that greeting, swallowed a breath that wouldn't come. The instant their eyes met, a chill slid down her spine, and her body began to shake.
"...Why such an expression, Theresia?"
It was a soft, gentle smile. But to Theresia, it did not look like a smile at all. If anything, it looked like a serpent that had finally shed its borrowed skin, coiling to swallow her whole.
"On such a lovely day."
Robert gave a small, quiet laugh.