The smell of blood and death.

Killing intent falls like rain.

Cutting through the dark sky, dozens of people moved swiftly, like birds with light bodies.

Each time a sword moved, puppets carrying someone’s power returned to being ordinary corpses of blood and flesh and dropped to the ground.

Someone who had been confirming the horrific scene unfolding in the distance with eyes gently closed snapped both eyes wide open.

“Kugh.”

With a rough cough, thick blood dripped down. Many puppets had died. As expected, the two limbs who had stayed with that vicious woman to the very end were formidable. Last time it had been the beast knight searching endlessly, and this time the emperor’s lady-in-waiting had latched on.

The woman who had once been the Grand Witch and was now pouring every last drop of her life force into a single curse broke into a smile like a dry, withered leaf.

“Iberis, it seems you truly have been driven into a corner.”

The Lagrien she both loved and hated. Everything of that brilliant empire had been in her hands. If only she had managed to kill that girl without incident, it would never have come to this.

“Wretched thing.”

Gripping tightly so as not to lose what she held in her arms, the woman staggered forward.

The long hair within the rags that barely passed for cloth dragged uselessly along the ground.

Eyes drained of color and turned gray took in the brilliant imperial palace far in the distance, now coming into clear view. Exhilaration swelled and surged.

In that moment, the tattered hood fell back, and moonlight poured down onto the face it revealed.

“Haa.”

If anyone else had been present, if anyone who had known her in the days when she was called the empress consort and scattered beautiful smiles had been there, they would have drawn a sharp breath and screamed.

A face wrinkled and shriveled as though every drop of moisture had been drained from it, eyes stripped of all color, hair rippling in shades of gray, a face with no trace of life.

What stood there was not the vibrant Grand Witch of before but an ordinary old woman on the verge of collapse. The face, gaunt as though she had not eaten, gave one a strange crawling sensation just to look at.

This was precisely it. This was the greatest reason the emperor’s agents had not yet been able to find the Grand Witch.

“Huu, huhuh. What a ruin.”

The witch, staring at the back of her own wrinkled hand, shook her shoulders and wept and laughed at once. Then her eyes flashed wide open.

“Damned thing, trying to slip away on its own?”

All that remained to the witch now was spite and venom. She, who had done anything and everything to keep from aging out of her obsession with her appearance, had she not given up her vivid youth. She had been forced to throw everything away just to kill that wretched Iberis.

And so the emperor had to die.

She would make it so without fail.

When the wrinkled eyelids, trembling faintly, shut tight, she felt the soul of someone firmly connected to the witch’s dying heart through the curse.

The one who, even riddled with wounds, refused to fall like an unyielding mountain range. That cold and merciless thing. That girl’s soul, which was difficult to call a human soul at all.

Stabbed and pierced, burned and frozen, subjected to every curse and agony, and still she survived and held her walls completely intact, that girl!

‘Iberis.’

Over the course of a year, she had certainly succeeded in killing her by degrees. Fate, the world itself, seemed intent on throwing every good thing it had at that one girl, and the Grand Witch had been determined to set herself against that fate.

Casting aside even what was most precious, throwing away even her last lingering attachment.

Gripping once more what lay lightly in her arms, the witch’s lips quivered at the corners. Something that was neither clearly laughter nor clearly weeping mixed together.

‘And yet!’

She had been dying, without question. That wretched thing had been on the verge of collapse. Once the dragon’s formidable bloodline crumbled, the empire was set to be trampled mercilessly by their own emperor gone out of control.

The moment the curse was completed the Grand Witch would die, but she had no lingering regrets. The enemy who had ruined her would die alongside her, so what was there to fear?

And yet a change had occurred.

“What trick has she played?”

Iberis was trying to slip free of the curse’s net. Whatever method she had used, the vitality of life was stirring within her once more.

It was for that reason that she had sent the puppets she had stored away as a last reserve, sending them out recklessly.

‘Could it be that to break the curse, you spread your legs for men? You, who put on such airs of purity and called carnal affairs filth, have you fallen so low?’

Imagining the emperor reduced to that state made exhilaration and laughter burst through her, but she could not permit the curse to be undone like this.

And so the witch was heading for the imperial capital. So that when her black heart met its final beat, she could complete the curse and scatter the seeds of poison.

Iberis and the witch stood on the same bridge of the same curse. It must never come to pass that only one of them escaped. Of course not.

“Yes, that can never be allowed.”

The witch’s lifeless eyes dropped to what she held in her arms. A grin baring her rotted teeth was chilling. Yes, that is how it must be. Is that not right, Iberis.

“Did this mother not offer even you up as a sacrifice?”

With the wind, the cloth around what she held stirred, and a dry skull was briefly exposed before disappearing again.

To complete the curse perfectly, a sacrifice sharing the same blood was needed. The reason she had taken the trouble to escape with the young princess who knew nothing of the world had been precisely for this.

Just then, in a house along an alleyway, a door creaked open and a child with sleepy eyes poked its head out. Their eyes met. Perhaps sensing some chilling instinct, the child’s lips parted as a cry began to rise.

The witch smiled.

“Shh.”

A bone-dry finger grazed the child’s cheek. In the instant the face of the child who had been about to cry turned ashen, the witch was already gone.

She vanished like mist.

Toward the imperial capital.

Toward that brilliantly gleaming imperial palace.

Toward the place she had fled like a criminal, the place that had once been her cradle.

“Wait for me, Iberis.”

Death would yet close its hands around the most noble throat. The witch, who had already lost everything, now had nothing left she could not do.

* * *

The nobles had by now sensed that something out of the ordinary was happening.

The Grand Duke had arrived in the imperial capital and continued to appear in social circles, yet the emperor herself had not shown her face at all.

Furthermore, whatever had transpired, the atmosphere with which the Grand Duke regarded the emperor had changed entirely. Considering how stubbornly hostile the ruler of the North had maintained his stance toward the empire’s sovereign, it was a deeply unsettling shift.

And then, after that, even Kaian, the darling of the social season who had been in a peculiar standoff with the Grand Duke, had disappeared without explanation.

The handsome man whose beautiful appearance had drawn the attention of every flower in the social world had suddenly vanished. Some made inquiries to the Marquis Tessa household, but the marquis remained silent.

And with the commander of the imperial knight order, who was like the emperor’s shadow, and the head lady-in-waiting both nowhere to be seen, unsavory rumors gradually began to spread.

“There is talk that Her Majesty has been cursed.”

The Grand Witch, the Empress Dowager. There had been a steady undercurrent of voices saying that wicked woman could not possibly have given up. The sight of Iberis, the emperor, standing unshaken like a fortress wall had kept such thoughts from daring to surface, but was the situation of late not suspicious?

And furthermore……

Another rumor caught fire alongside it.

“I heard something different. That Her Majesty has taken a lover! Could it not mean that Her Majesty is beginning to think about an heir……?”

The emperor Iberis’s lover.

That blunt sovereign who had shown as much interest in relations between men and women as in a piece of rubbish on the ground, had begun to turn her gaze toward someone?

Word had also reached people that cries of pleasure had not ceased from the imperial chambers, and everyone was busy speculating about the identity of this lover.

Some said it was the Grand Duke of the North, who had suddenly appeared in the imperial capital. Others said no, it was Kaian who had not been seen, who had finally bewitched Her Majesty the Emperor with that beautiful face of his. 

Others said no, the mad Black Mage had been brought from the tower into the palace as an attendant and hidden away, and given his status as a criminal, he was being kept secretly as a kept man. Others said that was impossible, that it had to be Sirak, the commander of the imperial knight order who was always at Her Majesty’s side……

All manner of talk was spreading in that fashion.

In the end, it was a situation born of Iberis’s prolonged absence. And yet the emperor still did not show her face, and the mood in the social world was growing increasingly unsettled.

If the former were true, the wellbeing of an empire that had barely stabilized was cause for concern. If the latter, it could be the kind of thing that would change the order of the empire going forward.

“We will have to watch closely and see.”

Whether a storm of blood would blow again, or a warm wind would come instead. The nobles who had survived felt, somewhere beneath the surface, a clear and unmistakable sense that the empire stood at a crossroads.