Shame of the royal family. Harbinger of a ruined nation. Bloodline of a curse. Severed divinity.

These were the titles attached to me: the only non-ability user among the Rodencia royals, the sole blood of the late queen consort, and a woman deemed barren.

There were far more vulgar slurs than these, of course, but these were the ones used in official settings.

I never particularly thought it was unfair.

Any member of Rodencia’s royal family was expected to wield the power of a divine beast, yet I was the first person born without that ability in over a thousand years.

The powerless royal foretold to bring ruin upon Rodencia. That was me. So it made sense that my father, the late king, my stepmother, my half-siblings, and every servant who worked in the palace all found my existence to be a bad omen.

Everyone must have thought it would have been better had someone like me, whose very existence was a curse, never been born at all.

Even amid that cold reality, my mother was the one person who loved me for who I was, not as the harbinger of ruin from the prophecy. But she had long since passed.

After that, I carried on a wretched existence, barely kept alive simply because I bore the blood of a great king.

My father paid no attention to the daughter born of a wife who had been executed for conspiring with an enemy nation, and my stepmother and half-siblings despised me as someone who might bring Rodencia to its knees.

Every day, I endured horrific t*rture. Under the pretext of preventing the prophecy from coming true, they put me through every conceivable form of torment in the name of awakening my ability.

But no matter how brutal the t*rture, my power never bloomed. Stabbed, cut, burned. I remained the harbinger of ruin from the prophecy.

At some point, the t*rture stopped being about developing my ability and became something closer to punishing in advance the original sin I had been born carrying. They did it simply for their own amusement.

My younger brother Lewian, the sibling directly below me, seemed deeply displeased that I was still alive. Each day he inflicted t*rture brutal enough to k*ll me, and then spoke to me as though he were doing me a favor.

‘Someone like you should be killed on the spot! But I’m letting you live because you’re family. Be grateful that I’m trying to develop your ability out of some small hope, because I don’t actually want to k*ll you!’

Every time, I always wanted to say the same thing in return.

That I hadn’t particularly wanted to be born either.

That I had never wanted this kind of life, one steeped in nothing but loneliness and pain.

But I knew that talking back would only start the t*rture again, so I simply held my breath and played dead until the sound of his footsteps faded and finally disappeared.

At nineteen, I entered a political marriage, as any princess would.

My husband, chosen as a match for the harbinger of ruin, was the last heir of a count’s family that my father’s tyranny had wiped out entirely.

Stripped of both political power and financial control, the half-ruined Count Belzen had no choice but to accept a forced marriage to a cursed princess who amounted to a punishment in herself.

Neither of us had wanted the marriage, but life together was not so terrible.

The servants of the Belzen household avoided and ignored me, the cursed princess, but at least there I no longer had to smell my own flesh burning or the reek of my own blood.

On top of that, my husband, Count Belzen, was quite kind to me, unlike the others who went beyond ignoring me to outright contempt.

He told me warmly that he was someone who was innately attracted to men, so we could never be a true couple, but that he hoped we could get along well as family.

Because my husband could not be with a woman, we never consummated the marriage. Concealing that fact earned me the stigma of being barren, but I spent those years in relative peace.

Three years later, my father granted permission for a divorce.

I willingly agreed to the divorce for the sake of my husband, who had suffered guilt over meeting his longtime lover while still married to me.

I hoped he would find happiness with the person he loved so dearly, free from the guilt of being a married man.

The man who became my ex-husband remarried in less than half a year. And in under two months after that, he had a son.

With no one in social circles willing to associate with me, I had not known that my ex-husband’s lover was a woman, nor that she had been pregnant at the time of our divorce.

When I found out later that everyone had apparently known except me, I felt a little embarrassed, but what could I do?

There was no reason my ex-husband would have liked me. He already had someone he loved, so he would have had no desire to have a child with the harbinger of ruin.

So he had deceived me with those lies, and then, troubled by his own conscience, had put on a show of being kind.

People gossiped openly in front of me. They said I would not have been abandoned like that if I had at least given him a child, that he had left me because I was barren.

I never bothered to explain that I simply had not gotten pregnant because we never consummated the marriage.

A cursed royal that even a husband of three years did not want to touch, or a barren woman. I figured the two carried about the same reputation.

Besides, had I not managed to live in peace for three whole years? Compared to the daily t*rture carried out in the name of awakening my ability, being deceived was practically a salvation.

So I kept my mouth shut until the end.

Two years later, another political marriage partner was chosen for me.

Once again, I was selected as a bride meant to serve as punishment, to inflict humiliation upon the other party.

The other party was the sole surviving member of the imperial family of the Frianc Empire, which my father had personally destroyed.

My new husband was four years younger than me, barely past the age of twenty, and he was a beautiful person with a cool, sharp quality about him.

With hair like ebony, mysterious ash-grey eyes, and delicate features, he was thoroughly indifferent to me.

And understandably so. I was the daughter of the man who had destroyed his homeland and killed his father and brothers. I thought that indifference alone, rather than hatred, was already generous enough.

Throughout our two years of marriage, my husband neither drew close to me nor pushed me entirely away.

We never consummated the marriage, and there was no emotional exchange of any kind, yet we always shared breakfast together and attended official events side by side.

That was enough for me. With everyone in the household except my husband treating me with contempt, his indifference was, in its own way, a relief.

A peaceful life free from t*rture. That was all I had ever wanted.

To avoid upsetting him as much as possible, I simply held my breath and lived like someone who did not exist in his life, like a ghost.

We walked side by side but could never meet, like parallel lines. That was the marriage we had. And then, in the middle of it all, my homeland Rodencia fell.

My father had been a powerful ability user who used that power and his charisma to expand his territory, but he had made just as many enemies in doing so.

After my father died suddenly of illness, my incompetent and cruel half-brother Lewian became king, and Rodencia fell in less than half a year after that.

During those six months, my husband avoided me. He came home less often, and on the rare occasions we crossed paths, he openly averted his gaze and moved away.

The newspaper arrived at the house every day. Watching my husband’s behavior and reading the articles, I knew the end was coming, both for the Rodencia dynasty and for my marriage.

“Sign this.”

My mother-in-law, who had treated me with cold contempt throughout the marriage, held out the divorce papers with a remarkably composed expression.

There was no trace of the elation one might expect at an enemy’s daughter finally becoming a stranger, nor any of the hatred that had built up layer by layer over two years.

She was simply cold, handling it the way one handles routine business.

I signed the papers without checking any of the terms.

And just like that, the surname “Gertil,” my ex-husband’s name, fell away from behind mine.

“This is your alimony. It should be more than enough to live on.”

I had not expected any alimony, but when I checked, it turned out to be quite a substantial sum.

Enough money to buy a small house in the countryside and live modestly for the rest of my life.

Though I had been a wife dismissed as the shame of the royal family, I had at least had somewhere to lean. Now, for the first time in my life, I was wholly and entirely just “Lucian,” and I accepted that money without expression.

“Thank you.”

“This is the end. Many people hold grudges against your homeland. Go somewhere quiet and live like you’re dead.”

“Yes.”

“And never let Heliones lay eyes on you again.”

Even if he did lay eyes on me, he would treat me as though I did not exist anyway, so that final warning seemed rather pointless. Still, I obediently lowered my head.

“Yes. I will do so.”

A few brief instructions from the lawyer, and the divorce proceedings were over. It was a hollow ending, fitting for a marriage that had been nothing to begin with.

I simply wanted to live quietly. I wanted to paint, the thing I loved, and keep my distance from all the complicated affairs of which nations were forming alliances and which were invading which.

I bought a three-story wooden house in a quiet seaside village. If you opened the door from the second-floor bedroom in the morning, the sunlight shimmering on the waves looked like the Milky Way scattered across the surface of the sea. It was a view that made it impossible not to pick up a brush.

I also found a maid who was diligent and warm-hearted. The freckle-faced girl, who had just turned fifteen, was quite cheerful and perceptive, and she made for good company.

Once my life had settled, I opened a painting class. I taught students and painted for those who wanted commissions.

It did not bring in much money, but being able to do the thing I loved freely, without having to watch anyone else’s mood, was genuinely enjoyable.

The scars etched into my soul and body would never fully disappear, but at last I could finally leave the wounds behind and move forward.

I had not known that taking uncertain steps down an uncharted path could feel this good. Each morning when I opened my eyes, my heart stirred with a small sense of anticipation, wondering what might be waiting for me that day.