CATIP 08

CHAPTER :08

Dies irae, dies illa 131

– …….

I couldn’t bring myself to read those words aloud; my lips simply trembled.

My legs shook. Perhaps the only reason I hadn’t collapsed was that I myself was too utterly bewildered.

– “Your Majesty?”

Seeing me frozen like a sheet of ice, the maid called out to me again.

Through my trembling lips, I barely managed to shape a response.

– “It is… nothing.”

As I always did after denying it, I brushed the back of my neck.

Unlike the pitch-black, densely inscribed letters, I felt absolutely nothing on my skin.

So, I let myself indulge in a sorrowful, foolish hope.

That my eyes, weary of this wretched life, had merely suffered a strange trick of the light.

I lowered my hand. Contrary to my wishful thinking, reality was cold. The dark letters in the mirror remained exactly where they were.

My vision swam. I could barely manage a whisper to the maid, who was watching me with a questioning gaze.

– “The Lord has… merely sent me a message.”
– “Ah!”

At last, the maid let out a soft gasp.

– “So this is the legendary… I mean, of course it is, but it’s my first time seeing it appear right before my eyes. It feels even more… wondrous than I ever imagined.”

The maid’s eyes sparkled as she looked at me. In that instant, I could clearly read the awe swelling inside her.

But the more her eyes sparkled, the more a nameless emotion flared up within me.

An indescribable feeling, igniting like a tiny match, began to eat away at me.

– “What does it feel like to understand the language of the Gods? I dare not even imagine.”

*No.*

– “Your Majesty is truly a magnificent person.”

Never before had knowing this language felt so despairing, so devastating.

The maid offered a sweet smile.

– “Serving Your Majesty from so close will be the greatest honor of my life.”
– …….

Unable to offer any reply, I quietly closed my eyes.

The Divine Stigma.

A special prophecy bestowed by the Lord, which those who knew the divine tongue could read and interpret.

However, what had been delivered to me this time was a token signifying my return to the Lord’s embrace after a designated period of time.

The time permitted to me was, at most, 131 days.

My brief era was drawing to a close, and a new age was dawning.

The God who had abandoned me—the one I had praised all this time.

The tiny spark that had flared like a match eventually became a raging inferno, swallowing everything I was.

* * *

130.

The sun set on another day, and the moon rose. Naturally, the number decreased by one.

In the dark dawn, sitting all alone in my room, I stroked the stigma over and over and over again.

The sensation of my skin beneath my fingertips was familiar. Yet, something was undeniably different.

Though I hadn’t lived a long life, I found myself recalling the distant days of my past.

My earliest memory was a dismal, dreary shade of gray.

On that day, clutching my empty stomach, I was waiting for my mother alone in a cramped, filthy room.

The sun set and the night deepened, yet she did not return.

It was late in the night, and I was weakly blinking my eyes, exhausted from hunger.

– “Child.”

A stranger who appeared out of nowhere let me lean against their chest.

Then, they placed a treat I had never seen before into my mouth.

The sweet taste that burst inside my mouth is something I still cannot forget.

Only much later, after I became the Western Princess, did I realize it was a marron glacé—a delicacy eaten only in the palace.

– “Where is your mother, leaving you all alone like this?”

Unable to even say thank you, I merely shook my head at the stranger’s question.

Clicking their tongue, the person stroked my head.

– “Leaving such a young thing behind, completely out of her mind on cannabis…”

That nameless stranger stayed by my side all night.

My mother returned only around sunrise.

Drunk as always, she flung the door open, practically falling through it.

Her giggling laughter echoed through the room.

– “My baby, Mommy’s home.”
– “Baby?”

The stranger’s tone was fierce as they repeated my mother’s words.

What kind of expression did my mother wear then?

All I could recall from that distant past was the conversation they shared.

– “What on earth were you doing to crawl back at this hour? Do you dare call yourself a mother?”
– “Oh, please. I’ll raise my daughter however I damn well please. I don’t see why you’re interfering now.”
– “Even if she’s only half, royal blood flows in her veins. How can you raise her in this squalor?”
– “His Majesty insists she isn’t his anyway. Even though she looks so much like him.”

My mother’s attitude was also different from usual. There wasn’t a shred of gentleness in her; she was razor-sharp.

– “You!”

The man’s subsequent roar was deafening.

Startled, I crawled into the corner and curled into a ball.

– “Do you think I send you money just so you can burn it on cannabis?”
– “Can’t I do what I want with what’s mine? You’re acting awfully generous over such pocket change. If you’re going to nag me because it’s not enough, then give me more.”
– “How can I trust you when you’re still running around like this? Am I supposed to just watch as all the cannabis in the capital flows into your hands?”
– “For someone who is supposed to be a…, you know so little of the world. Even if you sold the royal palace, that would be impossible. Do you even know how much cannabis costs?”

My mother quietly approached me as I hid in the corner.
The memory of her familiar hand caressing my bony, emaciated back.

– “To think you are raising a child of royal blood—even if only half—in this manner! If you are going to act like this, send her to the royal palace at once.”
– “Make some sense, and maybe I’ll pretend to listen. That is absolutely out of the question. Do you expect me to just stand by and watch the Queen devour my daughter?”

Starting from those squabbles, all the way to now. Yesterday.
Up until the day I was sentenced to death, memories floated back to me like scattered fragments.

– “Ah…”

Unable to accept reality as reality, I collapsed onto the bed.
The scent of fragrant oil drifting to my nose. The texture of tightly tanned leather.
The lingering touch of *him* that seemed to drift from somewhere.
Everything in this room, which at some point had naturally become mine.

Things so familiar and natural suddenly felt incredibly foreign.
It felt as though I had been cast completely adrift in a place I had never set foot in before.

Sensing the inescapable truth within that feeling, my shoulders began to shake.
In spite of myself, I burst into tears.

I had always been a child who did not cry.
It had likely been that way since before I was even consciously aware.
Other children might learn that crying and throwing tantrums could solve their problems, but I, who spent my days alone guarding a room while waiting for my drunk mother to return, could never learn such a lesson.
Because crying would solve nothing and only leave me collapsed from exhaustion, even tears were a luxury I was not allowed.
Yet now, I felt a helplessness far deeper than in those days when tears were forbidden.

There was no way to stop the tears that had burst forth.
The time permitted to me was far too short.
Even knowing this reality, I could not gather my thoughts, let alone do anything meaningful.
Only a despair from which I could never escape alone swallowed me whole, refusing to let me go.

My Largo,
Only after being placed in this situation could I finally make sense of who I was.

In the past, I often wondered if I was somehow broken.
During my days in the West Palace, I never once thought the Queen’s contemptuous torment was unfair.
Even when my body was broken by her cruelty, I accepted the maids’ words telling me to understand her instead.
If I had been in the Queen’s shoes, I too would have found the existence of a bastard child abhorrent.

I had never muttered that the King’s disregard and contempt for me were unjust.
When I was reunited with the King who had abandoned me, I might have been disappointed by his attitude, but I never hated the man himself.

Even after the death of the mother who gave birth to me and raised me.
My mourning for the mother who had cherished me like a flower was a single tear.
Like that, whether it was joy, sadness, hope, or even despair—
I had never felt any of it deeply.
I desired nothing, and I coveted nothing.

I had simply walked the path along the signposts permitted to me, accepting what was given.
When the signposts drifted, I drifted; when they crashed down upon me, I let them.
I faced everything and simply accepted it.

The world I saw was always colorless.
Compared to the world I experienced, the colors of loneliness, sadness, solitude, and despair were hot, their temperatures burning red.

My world had always appeared to me that way.
Not as a space I was actively living in, but as somewhere slightly detached.
The sensation of watching all of this from outside a cold, transparent glass coffin.
The feeling that my life was not my own.
Perhaps that was why the me watching from that distant, far-off place could feel relatively little… or so I thought. But then,

Whenever I watched people who cried, laughed, shouted, rejoiced, and trembled with emotion over every little thing—
even when I looked at the King, who had said he felt no ill will toward a person like me—
a small doubt would take root within me.

*Was I, as a human being, perhaps broken somewhere?*

But at the very least, there was one thing I was not.
When faced with unavoidable death.
When I realized the stigma that appeared on me meant I had barely four months left.
When the Lord decreed my death.
When I finally knew that I must disappear from this world.

I completely, utterly collapsed.