Her voice… never recovered. The horribly torn palate and unevenly melted teeth from the terrible poison were nothing.

Sunk in endless despair, she simply wanted to die.

But Francis wouldn’t allow even that. Abominably, he pushed thin soup into her throat and kissed her passionately.

After he left, Aella would insert her fingers into her throat and vomit everything she had eaten.

Thus, a very slow death gradually soaked her garments. However, what approached her as she longed only for peace was, surprisingly, a warm hand of salvation.

A strange-faced imperial physician secretly handed her a book and whispered.

“Read it all and burn it.”

The powerful handwriting filling the first page was familiar. Aella knew the owner of this writing.

The moment she recalled that dear face, a sensation like dandelion seeds tickling her skin spread throughout her body.

Aella sobbed silently.

[Dear Aella, I will come to rescue you soon.

In the season when the Raphelmar Mountains wear white hats, on the night when their peaks glow round, we will meet again.]

‘Leonhardt von Tilke.’

Her childhood friend who supposedly lay next to her in cradles since they were babies, her tender first love, and now the head of the Grand Ducal House of Triden, which had become enemies with her family.

Leonhardt, who always came running when she called, even while acting resentful.

He had reached out his hand to her once again.

‘I will come to rescue you soon.’

His sincere voice seemed to echo in her ears. She pressed her forehead to the floor and sobbed.

The crying that burst from her throat resembled the faint sound of wind brushing against snow. Nothing could be more sorrowful than not even being able to cry properly.

However, in the next moment, Aella had to blink several times to push back tears.

Because unfamiliar handwriting playfully addressed her.

[May you enjoy your reading, Deer Aella.

-The author of this excellent book, Nicholas Biscati-]

Swallowing the sobs that shook her body like aftershocks, she turned the page.

Repeatedly opening and closing her eyelids, Aella rubbed her eyes vigorously with the back of her hand.

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

This was a fairy tale.

The protagonist was a deer married to a selfish eagle. When she reached the part where a greedy ostrich suddenly appeared and took away her husband, Aella burst into laughter.

‘Am I… the deer?’

Was he teasing her?

But Leonhardt von Tilke didn’t have the temperament for such jokes. If so, he must have written it this way deliberately.

‘The selfish eagle is Francis. The greedy ostrich is Natalia Dohimer.’

Thinking this way, everything made sense.

Aella read the book over and over until she memorized it, then placed it in the fireplace. She would have done so even without the imperial physician’s instruction to read and burn it.

This was because the book implied a blasphemous plan that shouldn’t even be kept in mind.

‘Rebellion.’

For some reason, the once-solid imperial authority was shaking, and loyal subjects had turned their backs. The rebellion prepared in secret was imminent.

From then on, Aella counted the days until January when snow falls on the Raphelmar Mountains, waiting for the night of the full moon.

Her hopes were cruelly shattered on the evening of that full moon.

As darkness fell, the door opened with a bang, and Francis walked in hastily. Count Nils, his favorite, was with him.

“Aella, I’m sorry.”

He had never apologized before. Aella realized something had gone terribly wrong.

‘Has Leonhardt been captured? Is that why…’

Francis’s face, with bloodshot eyes and dried dark red droplets, twisted strangely.

He roughly pushed Aella, who was backing away, onto the bed and climbed on top of her.

Count Nils forcefully pinned down her struggling arms. Her resistance was futile against the strength of two men.

“I didn’t want to do this. I wanted, d*mn it! I wanted to be happy with you! I don’t understand why things went so wrong.”

“……”

“You’re wise, so you know well. How much I loved you.”

They didn’t even try to cover her mouth. The only sound coming from her slender throat was heavy breathing.

Eventually, Francis grabbed the dagger handed to him by Count Nils.

‘What are you doing! Why, me. Why…!’

She wanted to scream if only she could.

But the moment Aella opened her eyes wide, the sharp blade deeply cut into her throat.

Hot tears filled her purple eyes.

Simultaneously, she felt as if tiny particles of bright yellow light were rising like a heat haze. That light broke into tiny pieces like pollen and floated lightly in the air.

Is this… what dying feels like?

The moment she thought something was strange, her husband exclaimed irritably.

“Is this working properly?”

“P-perhaps you should try again…”

“Ah, this is maddening!”

The blade pierced her throat again. When he stabbed her for the sixth time, Aella’s breath stopped.

Yet she could vividly feel it. Her husband continued to slash at her neck until it became as tattered as worn leather.

He swung the dagger frantically as if being chased by something. His mutterings, wrapped in madness, were heard continuously.

“This can’t be, this can’t be… Aella, please! Even after I’ve done this. D*mn it! This can’t be the end…”

When the stabbing stopped after more than fifty cuts, the full moon hung at the top of the sky.

As rough footsteps echoed from afar climbing the stairs, Francis dropped the dagger lifelessly. His attitude was one of resignation.

In the chilling moment of silence that followed, bright red blood belatedly gushed out.

Soon, knights with swords poured in through the open entrance.

“We’ve found the emperor!”

With someone’s thunderous shout, the emperor sitting on her body was dragged away.

Suddenly, the particles of light that had been floating gathered into a thick river and rushed somewhere. She felt as if she had reached the River of Oblivion that separates life and death.

At the end of that flowing light, a man with a massive build came running. It was Leonhardt.

His hot hand firmly grasped Aella’s limp arm. Strangely, the heat of his touch felt vivid.

“…Aella?”

The voice of the man who couldn’t bring himself to embrace her trembled and scattered hopelessly.

Aella finally felt her soul releasing from her cooling body. Peaceful death embraced her like a river.

She had suffered enough. She only wished for peace. Now she would truly rest in the arms of the mother of life. She surrendered herself to the surging golden waves.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

When Aella opened her eyes again, she saw a familiar ceiling.

“Your Majesty, are you awake?”

And a face she had missed.

Tears burst forth at the sight of the maid from whom she had been unfairly separated. Along with her voice she thought lost forever.

“Huk… Tilda?”

Wasn’t Tilda surely banished?

She had stood in for Aella, who was falsely accused of deliberately causing the Empress Dowager to fall from her horse.

Of course, that ‘Empress Dowager’s fall’ was an elaborate trap set by Natalia Dohimer.

Aella at that time had no choice but to fall victim despite knowing this. Because the fabricated evidence was clear.

‘But how…’

Her old friend, from whom she had parted long ago, was looking down at her with a worried face. As if they had never been separated for a moment.

“Yes, Your Majesty. It’s me.”

“What on earth happened…”

“You fell at the bottom of the Empress Dowager’s Palace stairs.”

“…I did?”

“Yes. How worried I was! You were unconscious for a week. Oh my, why are you crying so much? Are you in pain?”

A gentle hand wiped her eyes.

“Huk, no, I’m not.”

She remembered this conversation.

The hot sensation in her throat and the maid’s worried gaze were exactly the same as in the past.

Aella could tell. Somehow she had returned to a moment in the past.

Twenty-three, the time when her suffering began.

“…I’ve returned.”

“Yes, His Majesty the Emperor, who is away, will return tomorrow.”

“Yes… he would.”

And the next morning, Francis uttered the words that had changed Aella’s fate.

“Natalia is pregnant with my child.”

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Everything had been trivial.

Even when the emperor of the Empire came to the Ducal House of Lorendal in the Kingdom of Siren, Aella’s homeland, to fetch a bride.

“I will take that woman as my wife.”

Even when Francis pointed to Aella instead of her sister. And thus broke off her ongoing marriage negotiations with another man to make her his Empress.

The same was true of the day her husband visited Mardieu to monitor his younger brother, a cardinal, and reunited with Natalia.

And when Aella fell down the stairs while rushing to the Empress Dowager’s summons.

Who would have known? That such a trivial breeze would bring such high waves.

Aella got out of bed. With elegant steps, she crossed the bedroom and neatly placed the copy of the contract her husband had given her on one side of the desk.

Everything was clear now. The things she needed to do unfolded one by one in her mind.

‘I had plenty of time to think in my previous life.’

She had thought countless times in that narrow tower. So now it was time to act.

Aella pulled the bell cord to summon her maid. As if she had been waiting, a cheerful voice squeezed through the bedroom door.

“You called?”

It was Tilda, the maid who had followed her from her homeland, Siren. Though she had shed tears upon seeing Tilda last night, tears threatened to flow again.

Aella raised her head, waited for her eyes to dry, then smiled gently.

“Could you bring me the shoes the Empress Dowager gifted me?”

“Yes.”

“And the ribbon I embroidered last time. I want to gift it to someone else.”

“Understood.”

As she watched the maid walk away, a flash of madness appeared in Aella’s bright eyes.

Natalia Dohimer. She would bequeath everything to her.

The Empress Dowager’s harassment, her self-centered trash of a husband, and even the seat beside the soon-to-be-overturned throne—all of it.

˗ˋˏ ♡ ˎˊ˗

Tilda quickly brought the shoes and ribbon.

A large diamond boldly reflected light on those shoes made of red silk lined with velvet.

The Empress Dowager liked to summon Aella to the tea room at the top of her palace. Always with the demand that she wear these shoes.