Shhhhhh. It was a downpour that seemed ready to swallow even the eardrums whole. Fat raindrops swept mercilessly across Lani’s pale cheeks.

Clutching the hem of her skirt that reached her ankles, Lani splashed frantically through puddles, evading the assassins chasing her from behind.

“Ugh!”

She slipped on a patch of muddy earth and fell. She bit down hard and barely managed to get back up, but her clothes, soaked through with rainwater, clung to her like a trap.

“Ugh!”

The moment she felt her life was in danger, she had to escape the Grand Duke’s castle.

The pathetic, lingering desire to see Kahar one last time before she left drove Lani and the child in her womb into a corner.

One hour earlier. Lani went to the market to meet the person who would guide her to a distant foreign land far from the Grand Duchy. How long she waited at the agreed spot, she couldn’t say.

Then, without warning, a man appeared asking for her name. His appearance was nothing like a coachman or a travel guide.

When Lani grew wary, sensing something was off, men in masks rushed her all at once and swarmed her.

Fortunately, the magic necklace Lani wore saved her life at that moment. She escaped while they were off guard and slipped onto a passing cargo wagon.

But the assassins caught up with her quickly. They rammed the wagon she was riding and reached for her without hesitation.

Lani leaped into the suddenly pouring rain and narrowly escaped danger once again.

She seemed to have put some distance between herself and the assassins, but she couldn’t afford to relax. Lani ran and ran through an unfamiliar village.

Before long she reached the edge of the village. She hid herself in a dense forest and caught her breath.

“Hff…”

Those men were surely assassins sent by Lady Viviana.

Viviana Chloe, Grand Duke Kahar’s former fiancée. She despised Lani, who performed the companion rite with Kahar.

Viviana was a woman who had broken off her engagement with Kahar long ago yet still acted as though she were his fiancée.

To save Kahar’s life, Lani performed the companion rite, which required her to be physically joined with him. Once Viviana learned of this, she showed her true colors.

“How much longer do you think the child in your belly will stay safe?”

“What do you mean by that?”

Viviana came all the way to the secluded Od Palace, a place no one ever visited, and she already knew Lani was pregnant.

“How dare you carry the Grand Duke’s child. I won’t forgive you.”

Only Kahar and his aide knew about the pregnancy, so it struck Lani as strange.

Could Kahar have told her about it himself?

Viviana sneered at Lani, who instinctively wrapped her arms around her belly.

“A mere ward-maid, of all things. You’re not actually setting your sights on a place beside the Grand Duke, are you?”

She was right. Lani entered the Grand Ducal household in the first place as a divine singer to ward off Kahar’s curse.

No one aside from Kahar and his aide even knew Lani existed. That was the kind of existence she was.

A shadow. A ward-maid. A divine singer. A maidservant.

Carrying Kahar’s child did not mean she could stand by his side.

“If you’re trying to use the Grand Duke’s bloodline to climb up in the world, wake up.”

“I never wanted anything like that.”

“Good, then. Leave right now. If you don’t, neither you nor the child will live. The Grand Duke doesn’t care about you at all, but things getting messy wouldn’t be good for him either. You’ll need to disappear before he returns.”

Viviana smiled as she threatened to kill her if she didn’t leave immediately. Lani was genuinely terrified of her.

Her body grew weaker day by day since the pregnancy, and that alone was hard enough, but the fear that she might not be able to protect her child came first.

Kahar. He was a madman who saw Lani as nothing more than a tool. A bastard child would be of no use to him, a member of the imperial family.

So she ran. But Viviana broke her word and sent assassins anyway.

“Hk… hff!”

Even as Lani ran with everything she had, she cradled her belly carefully, afraid the child might be hurt.

She stumbled and fell several times on the rough forest path. Eventually she found a small hollow in a tree and hid herself inside.

She concealed her presence beneath the sound of the rain and made her way down the mountain in a wretched state, sometime near dawn.

She wasn’t sure exactly where she was, but it wasn’t far from the Grand Duke’s castle. She had to put distance between herself and it, quickly.

She emerged from the forest on her aching body. The moment she reached the roadside.

The body of a carriage that turned sharply slammed into her. Her body flew into the air, and that instant stretched out, slow and slower still.

Lani strained with everything she had to bring her hands to her lower belly.

My child. No. Not my child, please.

Thud.

Pain that shattered her body to pieces crashed over her like a tidal wave, and Lani couldn’t even scream.

At that moment, she heard laughter. Lying face down on the ground, Lani barely managed to roll her eyes toward the source of the sound.

The one pressing down on her wrist with a shoe heel, hard enough to snap it, was none other than…

“Viviana…”

“Kahar was mine from the very beginning.”

“The, the child…”

Ah… her belly hurt like it was being torn open. Between her legs felt warm.

She felt wronged, tormented, afraid. But she didn’t have the strength to even open her mouth. She could feel death drawing right up to her face.

Lani looked at her broken, mangled hand. She hurt it the moment she tried to shield her belly.

“Handle it completely.”

“Yes.”

The voice of the man carrying out Viviana’s order was resolute.

Lani closed her eyes, accepting the death that was coming. It felt like her body was being moved somewhere.

How much time passed? Five minutes? Or five hours? Five days?

She couldn’t hear anything, as though everyone had gone. Lani wrung out her last remaining strength and laboriously felt along the ground.

With fingers broken and bent, she left marks in the wet earth.

She started with a misshapen star and moved her hand. That here, our star existed, but could not shine.

Because I hated that you, who knows nothing, are still beautiful.

Kahar de Diozart.

May you hurt, and hurt again. And though it will never happen, may you think of the child even once.

Scratch, scratch. She drew the Grand Duke’s castle and the great nature surrounding him.

Lani wrung out her remaining divine power and dug into the earth with her fingertips.

Blue water, a winding river, the winds of Ferriland.

Even the valleys of the Eren mountain range that you, Kahar, must have looked upon.

Lani drew until the very end with her broken hands.

It was solely for the child who faded away without ever seeing the light of the world.

In her final moment, she gathered every last bit of her divine power.

Because it was a life you gave back to me, I wanted to live.

But I could not live.

Lani’s body slowly stopped pulsing against the cold ground.

If I could meet you again, I would want to covet a place by your side, just once.

And that I want to meet the child again.

Because I did nothing for our baby.

I will follow you in death, she offered as a sad gift.

***

Five days since setting out to find Lani, who vanished without a trace.

Grand Duke Kahar laughed like a madman, then went stone-faced, ran, then stopped, over and over, driving his subordinates into mortal danger.

He combed through the entire Grand Duchy and even the borderlands, but could not find her.

She couldn’t have gone far. If Lani moved, someone would have spotted her. There would be witnesses.

At the end of his relentless pursuit, Kahar tracked down even the hideout of a bandit said to have crossed paths with Lani.

And within just one hour of arriving, a mountain of over a hundred corpses rose up.

In the middle of it all, Kahar stood in the shape of a death god and shook the blood clinging to his sword.

“You’re the only one left alive now. Still nothing to say?”

“P, please spare me! Please spare me!”

“If you want to live, tell me what I want to hear.”

Kahar pressed his foot down slowly on the kneeling bandit chief’s thigh. The chief’s eyes bulged grotesquely from the pain of what felt like twisting muscle.

“Krgh!”

“Not that pathetic begging to be spared. Tell me that my Lani is alive and safe, somewhere close where I can find her quickly.”

“Kkhh!”

“Tell me that my Lani is eating her favorite cookies and waiting for me.”

Those blue eyes radiated madness. The terrified bandit chief trembled and struggled to recall the woman he saw in the mountains a few days ago.

It was a day of heavy rain. On the way down the mountain with his men, they found a woman barely clinging to life. No, she was practically a walking corpse on the verge of death.

“Chocolate-colored hair and emerald eyes. You really don’t remember?”

“I, I don’t know that much about her.”

In the darkness, he only barely confirmed her face by firelight. He couldn’t check her hair color or eye color.

She was beautiful and a woman, so he thought maybe she’d be of some use. He slung her over his back and carried her down, and on the way he ran into a merchant group passing nearby.

“I just, I just handed a collapsed woman over to a merchant! That’s all!”

“Handed over? Who? My Lani?”

“P, perhaps… if it’s her, then maybe…”

“Why are you only saying this now? You’re not trying to test what little patience I have left.”

Kahar’s voice dropped even lower and his eyes gleamed.

“Who did you hand her to?”

“…I’m sorry. I, I can’t remember.”

“You sold Lani off, and you can’t even remember what the merchant looked like. There’s no reason to keep you alive any longer.”

Kahar’s sword gleamed with a cold, sharp light, looking ready at any moment to slice through the plump bandit’s neck.

With the moonhalo at his back, Kahar was strangling the bandit with his gaze alone.

Only then did the bandit desperately wring out his memory.