The brown-haired knight sprang up and slashed toward the lark-shadow’s right wing.
“Three!”
Inside the ruined palace, the gloom that had lingered for years was already drowned in the stench of blood. The knights, soaked in gore, had no idea how many times they had already raised their swords. Their bodies were covered in wounds; their arms were so swollen with blood from overuse they could barely lift them.
Even so, they moved like machines, repeating the same motions over and over.
The knights and their teammates still shouted their unified battle cries as they hacked again and again at the lark-shadows before them, trying to kill them all in the very same instant.
But that was almost impossible.
After all, this was a team of a hundred. Everyone’s combat strength was different, and getting every single movement perfectly synchronized was too difficult.
Every time it looked like all the lark-shadows had finally vanished, new ones would be born.
Stronger. More terrifying.
The princess’s attendants had already retreated aside. What had begun as a one-on-one fight had become two-on-one. The knights, with some inexplicable confidence, felt the comrades who’d been vital to passing the second trial were now people who needed protecting.
But the attendants knew the real reason.
Most of them were already severely wounded. The strength they had left couldn’t keep up with these battle-hardened knights. Even if they joined in now, they’d only drag the team down.
The clash of steel rang in their ears, the stench of blood filled their noses. Blood trickling from the cut on his forehead stung Hilton’s eyes.
He wiped away the bloody droplets.
“Hold on a little longer. One more round!”
The knight-commander drove his greatsword down, pinning a thrashing lark-shadow to the ground. Then he looked to the brown-haired knight standing not far from his side.
Leif had placed her body between her teammate—the lady-in-waiting who served Princess Boris—and the enemy, shielding her behind her. Brandishing her heavy chopping blade, she attacked the two lark-shadows flanking her left and right, one slash to each side. Her movements were practiced, clean, without the slightest waste.
At the same time, she kept a close ear on the sounds around her, tracking how the others were faring as they killed their own lark-shadows.
In Hilton’s eyes, this girl had only gotten into the knight order thanks to a recommendation from a high-ranking Temple lord. Yet right now her figure moved with true agility.
Her individual strikes didn’t deal much damage, but her speed more than made up for it; blow after blow stacked up into impressive cumulative damage. Hours of overexertion had soaked her clothes through with sweat, yet Leif was still holding a steady pace, fighting as fast as she had when she first entered the fray.
From the beginning, the lady-in-waiting teammate at her side—who looked more like a lovely ornament than a combatant—hadn’t lifted a finger. Even so, after fighting two-on-one all this time, Leif had somehow come through almost entirely unscathed.
Every time a lark-shadow’s sharp beak or barbed tailfeathers were about to brush her body, she would evade with an incredibly nimble motion, missing the attack by a hair.
Hearing the knight-commander’s words, the young brown-haired knight answered, then started counting again.
“…Four, five…”
Hilton dared not relax either. He kept up the fight against the two lark-shadows before him.
“Just a bit more…”
Those words, in and of themselves, carried a faint, ominous edge.
Most of the knights understood that all too well in their hearts.
This might really be the last time.
The lark-shadows were growing stronger, while their own movements grew stiffer and slower. Sooner or later, the majority of them would be unable to keep up with the lark-shadows’ power.
That moment was close.
Luckily, everyone seemed to have realized how dire things were. Not a soul dared relax now. Their attention was split between their enemies and their comrades. In the grueling slaughter, time itself seemed to slow.
At last, it came down to the final strike.
They shouted the number, then all swung their greatswords down at the two lark-shadows before them at once.
After a series of soft popping sounds, countless lark-shadows vanished into the air.
For a heartbeat the air went still. Everyone held their breath. Joy had no time to surface on their faces.
Their gazes slid toward a single point.
A young knight had his arm bitten clean off by a Firecloud Lark’s beak. The bird’s body only then began to slowly fade.
The one-armed knight looked at their faces, filled with guilt. Bright red blood gushed from his shoulder like a fountain. He toppled to the ground with a heavy crash, his face wet with tears and blood.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”
“Hilton.” Lance looked at the fallen knight—his comrade who might never again wield a sword. The blue of his eyes was now shot through with red.
“Maybe the one who’s wrong…is me.”
“How many times have I taught you?” Hilton snapped. “There’s a time for everything. Realizing your mistakes and repenting is something you do when we’ve won and walked out of here alive.”
He shook his head, dislodging a broken tile that had fallen from the shattered palace wall during the battle. It clattered to the ground.
“You either realize you’re wrong earlier, or you realize you’re wrong later. But here on the battlefield, your hands are for holding your sword, not for wiping your tears!”
Lance coughed once, used his sword to slice off a strip of his robe, and wrapped it around the knight’s bleeding stump.
A wounded attendant asked, “Commander Hilton…can we really win? I mean, maybe…maybe it’s not too late to leave now.”
“From the moment we accepted this mission in the name of the Sword and Blood Rose, its success or failure became bound to the honor of the entire order.” Hilton said, “We either fight to the death, or return triumphant. A knight, by definition, is someone who, under the Temple’s guidance, fights until the last drop of blood is spilled.”
His gaze swept over the young members of the order, all of them with not a hint of retreat in their eyes.
“We have long since been prepared to offer our lives to the sword in our hands,” he said quietly, “and to die on the road of battling evil. Flesh may be torn apart by fang and claw, but that is better than living a useless life and ending as food for worms. Our souls will one day dwell with the Lord. Bathed in holy light, led by angels, we will cross to the far shore and share in His glory in the world to come.”
The Firecloud Lark’s harsh “jie-jie” cry split the air again, as if mocking these overconfident knights.
This time, the demon bird’s cry was even sharper, more piercing, more wicked than before.
One hundred and two lark-shadows rose from the air again. Having drunk the knights’ blood, they had turned a deeper, brighter red, almost indistinguishable from the original body.
The knights exchanged glances, then formed up once more, ready for the final desperate struggle. The attendants raised their swords too.
The demon bird’s screech grew louder and louder, echoing through the whole of Tim City.
Having devoured countless lives, the demon bird spat human words. A strange, triumphant glee seeped through its grotesque voice.
“How utterly foolish.”
Through countless cycles of death and rebirth, the lark-shadows had become unbelievably strong. Due to the demon bird’s arrogance, they finally stopped fixating on disrupting the knights’ rhythm. Instead, they flew out of the nest in a perfectly neat formation, like a volley of blades, streaking toward the exhausted knights.
Those who had already reached the limits of their strength could barely withstand even a single strike.
The lark-shadows hovered in the air, necks drooping, looking down at the men sprawled haphazardly on the ground, each searching for the best place to bite.
They dove like long-beaked herons fishing, aiming straight for the hearts of the fallen, eager to feast on that heart-blood thick with burning desire.
Just then, a blinding beam of light shot up from below.
The light was so intense that in an instant it spread from a single line into a broad curtain of radiance. Like the keenest of blades, it swept down through the perfectly aligned flock of lark-shadows.
In the blink of an eye, the violently assaulted lark-shadows vanished like punctured soap bubbles, one after another, leaving only a chain of faint popping sounds.
Leif had just leapt forward with her cleaver, charging at a lark-shadow. But its now-solid skin was so tough that instead of harming it, her blade bounced off.
The tremendous recoil wrenched her balance away, and she crashed to the ground. Her tailbone hit the marble fragments with a thud. Pain throbbed up through her entire spine.
The brown-haired knight, who very rarely got herself hurt in battle, couldn’t help it—two lines of involuntary tears streaked down her cheeks.
She lifted her head.
What she saw grew more and more blurred and monstrous: one hundred and two Firecloud Lark-shadows falling from the sky like a spectacular fireworks display. Through the sheen of tears, they fused into one torrential rain of fire.
It was the most terrifying radiance she had ever seen.
Leif thought she would die in the very next second. Even so, she pushed herself up with her blade, preparing for a last-stand fight to the death.
At that moment, a pure white light washed over the red glow.
Leif didn’t even know where that radiance came from.
The brown-haired knight’s eyes went completely blind for a moment from the glare. Terror clawed at her as she groped forward with her blade, unable to see. She stumbled when her toes hit a chunk of stone, nearly falling—
And landed in an embrace that carried the faint scent of grass.
The smell was far too familiar.
Leif grabbed the owner’s sleeve and lifted her head, but all she could make out was the blur of a body, almost indistinguishable from the white light around it. The person wore a white robe, nearly fused into the glow.
The robed lady-in-waiting asked, “What’s wrong, my lady knight?”
“I…can’t see.” The brown-haired knight blinked hard against the stabbing pain in her eyes, her pure black irises unfocused in the air. “What just happened? Did we win?”
The lady-in-waiting smiled.
“We did. Safe and sound.”
“It was you…”
Leif let out a long breath. As she adjusted to being unable to see, her thoughts finally caught up, and she realized the scene she’d just witnessed was probably the legendary sacred spellwork people talked about.
She actually didn’t know much about what a “Sacred Spellcaster” truly was. Compared to the numerous knights, such casters were far too rare. The few that existed were elusive, their whereabouts hidden.
All she vaguely remembered was the old priest mentioning once that many of the high-ranking clergy at the Temple’s center were not only thoroughly versed in scripture, but also bore the blood of Sacred Spellcasters.
Among Sacred Spellcasters, the purity of one’s bloodline determined one’s innate talent. Some very low-grade sacred spells could be performed by ordinary people if their faith was devout enough. But the higher-level ones absolutely required the blessing of that blood.
Sacred Spellcasters appeared often in knightly tales, usually when the knights were besieged by a horde of strong enemies. Unlike knights, who tended to excel at single-target combat, Sacred Spellcasters seemed to specialize in dealing with groups.
When he told such tales, the old priest always went on and on, piling on ornate and flowery phrases for everything. But when Sacred Spellcasters appeared, he always shifted tone, and spoke only of white light, holy radiance, and celestial chants.
No matter how he spoke of them, Leif never had a concrete image in her mind.
The only exception was back in the Aeseya Kingdom, when they slew the Prophet Beast. The dragon, disguised as a lady-in-waiting, had no weapon in her hand when she cut open the giant beast. Instead, an invisible, insubstantial yet unstoppable blade of light had formed in her palm, cleaving the Prophet Beast clean in half.
Leif had been puzzled then too, but the Prophet Tree Branch’s dazzling, beguiling gold had distracted her. She had meant to ask afterward, but once things were over, she’d quickly forgotten.
She had no idea why that moment suddenly surfaced in her mind now.
But she highly doubted that what the dragon used back then had truly been sacred spellwork. Since the title “Sacred” was right there in the name and Sacred Spellcasters had such close ties to the Temple, how could a dragon—viewed by the Temple as the very root of all evil—possibly also be a Sacred Spellcaster?
Sacred Spellcasters bore the blood of Heaven’s messengers. How could a sinful dragon possess the purest of blood at the same time?
That monster must have used some kind of evil magic that merely resembled sacred spells.
Once the white light finally faded, the Firecloud Lark let out a horrifically shrill scream.
“What are you thinking, my lady knight?” the lady-in-waiting asked.
Leif lifted her head toward the voice. With the light receding, her sight had recovered a little; at least she could now distinguish the lady-in-waiting’s figure from the background.
She fixed her gaze on the woman’s head, estimated where her eyes should be, and said, “Lady Natiaveda, you’re the only Sacred Spellcaster in our group. Just now was definitely your doing. I misjudged you by your appearance before. If I have been disrespectful in any way, I hope you’ll forgive me. Also…”
“What is it?” the lady-in-waiting asked.
“If there’s ever a chance, I truly hope I can fight alongside you, Lady Natiaveda,” the brown-haired knight said.
“Fight alongside me…” The lady-in-waiting’s hand rested at Leif’s waist. “To do something fun, I assume?”
“To slay demons and vanquish monsters.”
Leif spoke with utter seriousness.
“For example—slaughtering a demon dragon.”
The hand at her waist abruptly slackened.
If Leif could have seen the lady-in-waiting’s face just then, she would have found her expression dreadfully ugly.
“You’re that fixated on slaughtering dragons, my lady knight…” the lady-in-waiting murmured. “I mean, is something that dangerous really necessary?”
“Setting aside the honor and fame that come with it,” Leif replied, “eliminating evil is our duty.”
“Evil?” the lady-in-waiting said. “Are dragons inherently evil? The Temple is known throughout the world for its goodness. Even when facing heinous criminals, they still try to redeem them. And yet when it comes to demon dragons, they condemn them all as evil without exception?”
“I know there are plenty of stories going around in the streets about princesses falling in love with handsome dragon youths,” Leif said. “In those tales, dragons are always depicted as no different from humans—sometimes even more beautiful and more powerful than humans. You’ve probably been influenced by those stories, which is why you think dragons are innocent. But in the end, stories are stories. They aren’t history.”
“You’ve probably never read the Temple’s records on dragon atrocities: there was once a kind shepherd who took in a youth disguised as a dragon. The dragon, after entering his home, ate his two children. Once there was a little girl who went to play in the forest and met a beautiful dragon maiden. The dragon invited the girl home, then cooked and ate her. Once a child went out to play and never came home at night. When the villagers went looking, they found she’d been eaten by a dragon. Once—”
“All right, my lady knight. It’s obvious you have no talent for storytelling; those stories are not scary at all.”
The lady-in-waiting covered Leif’s mouth and burst out laughing.
“Aren’t those just the tales adults tell children to scare them into not bringing strangers home, not playing outside alone, and coming back early at night? They don’t sound any more credible than that book I read recently, The Love Stories of Dragons and Knights.”
“When I was little, there were a lot more details. Not suitable to get into now. But…yes, they were…”
Leif admitted it without blinking. Grandma Samantha had always used dragon stories to frighten her, afraid she’d sneak out.
“When I had nightmares as a child, I really did often dream of dragons catching me and deep-frying or roasting me.”
The lady-in-waiting smiled, brows and eyes curved.
“But you do admit it, my lady knight. Dragons are more beautiful than humans, stronger than humans, and they have far more wealth… Aren’t those all virtues?”
“Dragons use their beauty to trick people,” Leif said. “They wear a human-looking face, but aren’t truly human. They pretend to be weak to win people’s sympathy.”
She rubbed her eyes hard a few more times. The scene before her was finally almost clear, though a few worm-like floaters still drifted through her vision.
Fortunately that light was sacred, not ordinary. It didn’t truly damage her eyes. If anything, once the brief blindness faded, Leif felt she could see more clearly than usual.
She looked at the lady-in-waiting.
“And they lie without shame, toying with human feelings. I seriously doubt whether such cold-blooded creatures even have feelings the way humans do. Their beautiful, powerful forms are terrifying.”
As she spoke, she looked around at the people lying all over the ground. A holy streak of light still hung in the night sky, especially striking in the darkness.
Wherever that holy light had passed, the blood on their faces seemed lighter, and their wounds didn’t look quite so severe anymore.
The Firecloud Lark’s anguished screams continued, like something being splashed with boiling oil.
Holy light healed ordinary people, but its damage to evil beings multiplied. Burdened with countless lives, the Firecloud Lark had been gravely wounded when all its phantoms were destroyed.
Only when the holy radiance in the sky finally dissipated did everyone get to their feet and look toward the lady-in-waiting behind Leif.
Unlike the initial doubt and condescension they’d had toward her, their faces were now filled with respect.
“May I ask…are you a high lord from the Temple?” Hilton bowed, then asked carefully. His thick hair seemed to soften as he stood before her. “If…if it’s inconvenient to say…”
His guess had good reason behind it. The most powerful Sacred Spellcasters were all gathered at the Temple, and the spell just now—though Hilton didn’t know its name—was clearly of tremendous power, undoubtedly a high-grade sacred spell.
Which meant this frail-looking lady-in-waiting could very well be some high-ranking Temple lord traveling in secret, concealing her identity.
“Why didn’t you step in earlier?” Lance muttered. He was supporting the knight who’d lost an arm. The young man was covered in wounds; as one of the team’s main frontliners, he had not only fought his own share of lark-shadows, but also shielded his companions from attacks. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice hoarse—not from pain, but from emotion.
“If you have this kind of power, why didn’t you act sooner?”
“Lance!” Hilton shot him a glare, clearly warning him not to stir up trouble.
The lady-in-waiting was still unnaturally immaculate—her hair not even slightly mussed, not a drop of blood on her robe—standing in stark contrast with the others, who were a complete mess. It was as if she didn’t belong on this battlefield at all.
“Just because she’s a lord from the Temple?” Lance said. “But he’s lost an arm. He’ll never fight again.”
“Enough, Lance. You know how things were just now. This is my own carelessness.” The one-armed knight forced a smile.
“If the Firecloud Lark hadn’t pushed us to the brink, the lord might not have been able to end things in a single blow. We should be grateful just to have our lives. As for me…it’s only an arm.”
Lance kept staring at his friend’s stump, sniffed hard, and the tears flowed silently down his face. Even when Hilton dragged him to the corner by the ear, he still shot the lady-in-waiting a wounded look.
The lady-in-waiting nodded to the one-armed knight, then addressed them all.
“I prefer not to reveal my identity.”
She did not explicitly deny their guess, which only made them more certain she was an emissary from the Temple.
“What happened today was a last resort. The commotion was…unavoidable.”
“We’ve inconvenienced you, my lord.” Hilton’s face flushed red.
“I’m deeply ashamed.”
“Those outside will surely have noticed something,” the lady-in-waiting said. “Even so, with a hundred and two of you here, it will be difficult to single me out at a glance. I must ask all of you, under any circumstances, not to speak of what happened here today. Act as if it never occurred.”
At that, their speculations about her mission grew even wilder. They all decided it must concern something of great importance. If her identity was exposed, it would cause a catastrophe.
One after another they rose and swore, pledging on their lives never to reveal today’s events to anyone who wasn’t present.
In the chivalric code, keeping one’s word was the most basic rule. On the Deya Continent, whenever someone swore an oath or signed a contract, an unseen force watched over the one who had spoken. Even for ordinary folk, once words became an oath, breaking it would bring punishment.
Leif watched the lady-in-waiting hesitate for a bit, then finally stoop to pick up the severed arm from the ground.
She called to the one-armed knight.
“Come here.”
He answered, walking over with a puzzled look.
The lady-in-waiting pulled away the bandage the knight had wrapped around his wound. She placed her empty hand over the bleeding stump, closed her eyes, and began reciting complex incantations. A white light bloomed from her palm, and the bleeding soon stopped.
Then she pressed the severed arm against the empty shoulder and kept chanting.
After a while, with a scream of agony from the knight, the woman in white let go.
He rolled on the ground from the pain. When he finally staggered upright, his hand flew to where arm met shoulder, eyes going wide.
“My arm…it’s grown back…”
Everyone was struck speechless by the miracle; they could only think to themselves that nothing less could be expected from a Sacred Spellcaster.
Lance helped the knight up, lifted the sleeve, and carefully examined the join. Then he looked at the lady-in-waiting’s back and said in a low voice:
“My lord, I apologize for what I said earlier. You are truly worthy of our deepest respect. I will pray for you always—may you be healthy and long-lived, and may the Lord’s glory shine upon your face forever…”
The lady-in-waiting held out a hand toward Leif, her expression slightly wan.
“I spent too much energy just now. I’m terribly tired.”
Leif immediately stepped in to support her, letting the woman lean against her.
It was already deep into the night. The Firecloud Lark’s cries were growing weaker. Its power to shroud the ruined palace seemed to have weakened too. The stifling heat inside that had felt so suffocating now eased a little as a few cool raindrops fell, cutting the edge off the summer swelter.
After a round of tending to their wounds and resting, they moved on to the second trial.
Very few teams ever made it past the first. The deeper they went, the fewer corpses littered the ground. It was hard to say whether that was something to be glad about.
“The second trial tests your will,” Hilton said. “You’ve already had a taste of it during the day.”
He spread open the sheepskin scroll and pointed at a section in the lower right, where the handwriting was particularly messy and rough.
“That’s why I brought you here earlier in the day,” he continued. “You needed to acclimate. If you hadn’t gone through the outer tests first and came straight to the second trial, you would almost certainly lose yourselves in it.”
Leif wiped rain from her face.
“May I ask how the second trial is different?”
“Greater temptation,” Hilton said solemnly.
“Greater…temptation?”
If temptation for her meant roast chicken, cola, and milk tea, then “greater temptation” might simply mean a bigger chicken, larger colas, and larger milk teas.
Leif felt quite confident she could handle that. She glanced around and noticed everyone else seemed relieved as well.
“You all know,” Hilton said, “that the author of this scroll handed it out, then willingly went back into the ruins to die. He rejected a king’s lavish reward, passed up fame and glory that were already in his grasp, and returned to the Firecloud Lark’s nest because he couldn’t bear to part with the dreams it gave him. Just think how great that temptation must have been.”
“Yeah, if he already made it out, why go back?” one knight muttered. “I really wonder what’s in the dreams the Firecloud Lark shows people.”
“Whatever you desire most,” Hilton said. “It’s different for everyone.”
“But dreams are always illusions. No matter how much you want what’s in them, you can’t actually reach out and hold it.” Another knight shook his head. “To abandon real things for a dream—that’s just too stupid.”
“That’s right.”
The knights and attendants all thought back, unbidden, to the obvious flaws in the things they’d seen in the daytime. The temptation had been there, but at most it caused a momentary shock; look twice and you could spot the cracks. No one would really give up their life for that.
“Don’t let your guard down, children,” Hilton said. “You’ve just gone through a brutal battle. Your mental fatigue and physical pain will make you softer, easier to tempt. ‘You may not know what you truly want, but the Firecloud Lark knows better than you do.’”
Leif suddenly recalled what the lady-in-waiting had said before: those things that couldn’t be bought with money, taken with force, or acquired by sheer effort.
With a grating creak, Hilton pushed open the great doors of what had once been the king’s private bedchamber, the sheepskin scroll in one hand.
Years of dust slid from the doors in a choking cloud, making everyone cough.
“Pairs of two,” Hilton said.
They entered in the same order they had when they’d first come to the palace. Leif and the lady-in-waiting were last.
The innermost section of the ruins had once been the king’s residence, and it was where the final trial lay. The stone structure still held its form, but all the once-glorious curtains and rare wooden furnishings had vanished.
After the brown-haired knight and the white-robed lady-in-waiting stepped through the threshold, the grand doors slammed shut behind them. Everyone who’d entered earlier vanished from their sight.
Only the two of them remained in the hall.
“Cough, cough…”
Leif covered her mouth as she coughed, then her foot hit something hard under the dust. She picked it up and found gold and gemstones in her hand.
She raised her eyes to the eight tall marble pillars inside the hall. Faint carvings still traced their surfaces, hints of past splendor, but here and there, pieces were missing.
Leif held the gold and gems up to the gaps, and realized they must have fallen from the pillars over the years.
While she was looking up at the decorations, the lady-in-waiting called out.
“My lady knight, look here.”
Leif took a few steps over and followed the direction of her finger.
Two skeletons lay on the floor, locked in an embrace.
The gold and gems in Leif’s hands slipped from her fingers.
“This pair is probably the adventurers from over ten years ago,” she said quietly. “They made it all the way to the last trial, and still…”
“Are you afraid, my lady knight?” the lady-in-waiting asked. “Don’t be. I won’t let us end up like that. If anything truly dangerous happens…”
She lowered her head and rested it on Leif’s shoulder, her voice tinged with amusement.
“…just hide behind me.”
Leif mulled the line over. It sounded familiar—then she remembered she herself had said nearly the same thing that morning, and realized Natiaveda was teasing her.
She turned her head away, focusing instead on any clues she could spot. She had a feeling the scene before her would change at any moment, that strange things might appear out of nowhere. She tried to keep her heart calm, denying the Firecloud Lark any chance to tempt her, and at the same time memorized her surroundings so she could spot anything amiss once illusions appeared.
But after a good long while, the woman behind her was still utterly silent.
Leif’s unease grew. She turned around.
The white-robed lady-in-waiting was standing stock-still, staring at some empty point in the air. In those clear golden eyes, like polished amber, the reflection of a figure could be seen—and it was clearly someone who wasn’t in the room at all.
That figure was moving.
“So you do have desires after all,” Leif murmured. “As I thought…”
She slowly approached.
“The Firecloud Lark’s dreamcraft is this subtle? Not even a ripple…”
She rose on her toes, trying to see who was reflected in those golden eyes.
“The thing Lady Natiaveda longs for… It must be a beautiful, sweet dream…”
But before she could discern the figure in Natiaveda’s gaze, a screech of tires tore through her ears.
She spun around.
The ruined bedchamber vanished. In its place stretched an asphalt road. People walked along the sidewalks. A white vehicle stopped in front of her.
It was huge. She had to crane her neck just to see the window.
She looked down at her hands.
They were a child’s hands.
The front window rolled down, and a stocky man stuck his head out, his wide face squeezed through the frame. A flat crew cut, a square jaw, thick brows—at first glance, the middle-aged man was intimidating. But when he smiled, a dimple popped out on his left cheek.
He stretched out a sweaty arm and called to her with a grin.
“Gan-gan!”
It had been…what, over ten years now? She’d only seen that face in photographs for a long time.
Leif’s mind reeled a moment. Then she turned away, decisively.
Thankfully, the scene behind her hadn’t changed. The lady-in-waiting was curled on the ground now, body hunched like a shrimp, her pale face drenched in cold sweat, as if enduring terrible pain.
