The woman reluctantly rose from her seat and gave a stiff, awkward bow of her head.

“I truly did not mean to burn you alive.”

“I see.”

“And it certainly wasn’t for the compensation money.”

“Of course not.”

My firm replies seemed to leave her with nothing more to say, and she turned and walked toward the entrance without resistance. I felt a sudden reluctance to let her go just like that, and the words came to me in an instant.

“I cannot bring your family back. But I will stop the war. I don’t know whether I have the ability or the right to do so, but I will do everything in my power to keep another war from breaking out.”

The woman did not stop. She walked out the door without any reaction. But just before it closed, she muttered something in a voice so low only I could hear it, something that sat between a blessing and a curse.

“Your best, huh. I’ll pray to the heavens that you can sleep soundly at night.”

After she left, I had no desire to speak to anyone. I was glad there were people who could see I was different from my cruel family, but there were still people in this world who carried wounds because of that cruel family.

“I’d like to be alone for a while.”

The thoughtful Elren and Hanna left me to climb the stairs to the second floor on my own.

Every last bit of strength had drained from my body. It felt as though gravity was pulling with all its force, dragging my flesh down into some bottomless abyss.

I couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, and sleep wouldn’t come, yet I lay down on the bed all the same.

Confined every day as I had been, I knew little of how the world worked.

Even so, I could sense that my father was not like ordinary people. Not because of his formidable power of a divine beast. My father killed people far too easily, and without a moment’s hesitation.

When someone crossed him, he burned them alive and watched the sight with a look of satisfaction.

I was always terrified of that. He paid little attention to me now, but I believed he was the kind of man who would one day burn his own non-ability user daughter to death with his own hands and think nothing of it.

Rodencia was not a country that needed wars of conquest. Its territory sat at a relatively high elevation, but the geothermal heat rising from the corpses of divine beasts kept the area around the capital warm year-round, and vast grain fields stretched across the land because of it. Descend to the lowlands, and you would find cold seas, fishing ports that ranked among the world’s top in seafood trade, and commercial harbors as well.

The people held fierce pride in their lineage as descendants of divine beasts, making Rodencia a largely closed-off nation, but as befitting a dynasty that had endured a thousand years, it had become entangled by blood with countless other nations, and its international influence was not something anyone could dismiss.

It could have remained at peace. Had it been content with what it already had.

But the royals, bloodthirsty by nature, reveled in war. And then my father was born, the most powerful ability user to emerge in a long while, and he chose invasion and conquest as his means of reversing the decline the royal family had brought upon itself.

He believed that the ancestors had squandered the nation’s strength through constant warfare simply out of their own incompetence.

On the battlefield, my father was formidable. I never witnessed it myself, but people said that the sight of him charging at the front on horseback, breathing fire, was like a god descending to earth.

The soldiers who served under my father in his lifetime were drunk on the conviction that they were chosen messengers of a god, and they fought beyond their limits. The result was the destruction of even the great Frianc Empire.

I had never once stood on a battlefield, yet I was tormented by guilt, wondering whether my father’s obsession with expanding his territory was somehow because of me, a cursed princess.

I trembled with constant anxiety, thinking that perhaps the reason he burned so fiercely for conquest was that the harbinger of ruin foretold in the prophecy had happened to be born as his own daughter.

There is no way to know my father’s true mind now, having never had a real conversation with him. What did he feel when he watched a person burn to death before his eyes? What did he think as he looked upon the countless deaths that spread like plague in the wake of his passing?

I love Rodencia. No matter how many terrible memories are bound up in that place, it is still my homeland, and a part of me. That land needs no more war. No more orphans, no more widows, no more parents who have lost children with no word to even name what they are, no more bloodthirsty, mad kings.

Suddenly, energy surges through my entire body.

Then what am I to do? What can I, with no ability and no standing, do to stop Lewian?

The only things left to me are my bloodline and my identity. Yes. The prophecy found its fulfillment through my existence.

The very prophecy that stained my entire life with blood and screams will now work in my favor.

I am, after all, living proof that the Rodencian dynasty met its end exactly as the prophecy foretold.

The time has come for me, the cursed princess, the severing of the divine, the harbinger of ruin, to personally show the lambs who cannot so easily abandon their faith the cruel reality that awaits them.

* * *

“What? You just let her go?”

The quill pen Heliones held in his hand crumbled silently in his grip after he received Elren’s report.

“We had to let her go. What else could we do?”

“Kill her… we should have detained her. She tried to burn someone to death!”

“Of course, I considered detaining her as well, but I judged it better to let her go.”

“I know you don’t act without thinking, but why?”

“She has value we can use, does she not? The former wife of the Emperor, injured while saving the very woman who came to burn her alive! Is that not a compelling title?”

“What?”

“We must make use of everything we can. With a time bomb like Lewian in play, House Balthar can sway public opinion however they please. We cannot afford to give them any more leverage.”

Heliones had always prided himself on being quite cold-headed, but in that moment he felt keenly that he was no match for the old man who had weathered every storm imaginable.

“I also arranged interviews with the reporters who were present. Unlike House Balthar’s gossip sheets, they will report only the facts, without personal bias.”

“The facts?”

“Yes. The facts, exactly as they are. Lady Lucian’s character is beyond reproach, so simply telling the truth is more than enough for our purposes.”

“Ah, right. There’s no need to fabricate anything, because my wife is already admirable just as she is.”

At Elren’s praise, Heliones grinned like a child, looking for all the world as though the compliment had been directed at him.

“Ah, and there was a small incident in which a portion of Lady Lucian’s skin was exposed….”

“What?”

The moment the word “exposed” left Elren’s mouth, Heliones could no longer contain himself and shot up from his seat. Even at the courthouse, when Lucian had abruptly removed her fichu, he had barely managed to hold himself back from leaping down and wrapping her in a cloak on the spot. And now this? Again?

“It was only a slight exposure of her back and waist where the lace overlay is attached. Compared to what most ladies of standing wear on a regular basis, it can hardly be called exposure at all.”

In truth, Heliones wanted exclusive claim to even a single strand of Lucian’s red hair, but hearing that it had not been a significant exposure, he sat back down with a sheepish look on his face.

“There were quite a few people gathered at the scene. At the courthouse, most of the spectators were nobles or parties involved, were they not?”

“They were.”

“This time, people who had only heard the rumors saw it with their own eyes. The… the marks.”

He understood what Elren was saying. In that moment, Lucian had transformed from a woman trading on her circumstances for sympathy into a true victim who carried a genuinely horrific past. At least in the eyes of those who had been there to witness it.

But Heliones knew all too well how much Lucian hated anyone seeing those scars. He could not fail to understand the feelings of a woman who covered her neck and arms with thick lace even in the height of summer.

“I don’t want to use her this way.”

“Neither do I. But Lady Lucian ran out there herself and tore the hem of her own skirt with her own hands to put out the fire.”

“…….”

“Lady Lucian is not a painting inside a frame. She thinks, and she acts on her own. We cannot stop her, nor should we, but we can make sure that what she does works as much in her favor as possible.”

Heliones agreed with Elren completely. Yet, afraid that this incident might leave Lucian with yet another scar, he said nothing and sat in grim silence.

Elren watched for a moment with a look of quiet sympathy as Heliones, who had been so cold-blooded even when cutting his own mother off entirely from society, now wore a face that looked ready to crumble into tears. Then Elren adjusted his monocle and returned to his usual composed expression.

“Lady Lucian is far stronger and more resilient than Your Majesty gives her credit for. She has been so buried in her wounds that she doesn’t see it herself, but since the two of you reunited, she has been moving forward, one step at a time.”

“Has she? Is she healing, even a little?”

“She is. In fact, she made quite a bold proposal just recently.”

“A proposal?”

“She said we should use her bloodline, her identity, and her painful past.”