185.

…Ah.

Johannes swallowed dryly. He could not bring himself to answer. Not because it was terrible. Simply because those wild emotions that seemed to invade randomly at first, against his will – no, he could no longer attribute Idris’s scream to Idris alone.

Yes. Now it is his. Through the memories injected like poison, his own experiences were layered upon the feelings of another that he had witnessed. So his words are choked. He cannot even make excuses.

He felt it. He knew it. The thrill of pressing down on that child. The sensation of his spine going numb just from the delusion of offering up a body to be eaten, eaten, eaten. He already knew that desperate climax to his bones. And it was clearly connected to Idris’s unconditional murderous intent. Yes.

Unconditional ‘murderous intent.’

There was no way he would have let that child live.

Johannes, who had unconsciously held his breath, let out a low exhale that trembled slightly.

“…It would indeed be impossible.”

Kretzman shook his head with a faintly satisfied expression. As if he no longer intended to face Johannes, he turned his body in the direction he had nodded and approached the stone coffin in the center of the inner sanctuary. Selecting a coffin exactly the size to fit Idris’s head, he lifted the cover while continuing to speak.

“You must have realized. The consciousness that is you is one of the values produced by ancient curses entangled with that woman, through calculations comparable to those of a god. The curse is silent and thorough. In the end, you are the product of a curse that will slowly but surely destroy that woman down to the last hair on her head in place of my son, more slowly than a spider but more certain than deadly poison. A rider of death mounting the black horse that is my son, gripping the reins according to the calculated formula input into you, sometimes spurring it on.”

“……”

“…The glorious armor astride the stirrups may be empty, but…”

Kretzman laughed briefly as he lowered the coffin lid over the head. Glancing at Johannes, who stood with a dazed look behind his shoulder, he muttered:

“To kill one’s lover with one’s own hands, or to die by the lover’s hand. What a pitiful choice.”

“……”

“But what use is there in pitying the feelings of something that does not exist?”

His mocking fingertips slowly scratched the coffin lid.

Then, suddenly.

Kretzman’s expression changed drastically. He turned pale in an instant. His eyes bulged as if struck by lightning on the back of his head. His whole body, including his shoulders, stood rigid. His stunned face peered down at the stone coffin beneath his gaze. Idris.

The man suddenly called out to his son as if collapsing. Breathing heavily with heaving shoulders, he looked around before lifting the stone coffin containing Idris’s head with both hands, as if he had made some decision.

“Let’s… go. You… I’ll send you to that woman you so longed for…”

His thin arms, barely grasping the edge of the coffin, were visibly shaking. The blue ripples caused by his sleeves seemed about to foam. Kretzman dragged the stone coffin backwards towards the wall.

“That woman, when she sees your head… what kind of expression will she make… Let’s watch and see…. Ah, I will, with these eyes, watch closely….”

I will watch.

The man’s muttering continued unbroken. Somehow avoiding the books and miscellaneous instruments settled like sand on the dark blue underwater floor, he disappeared beside a bookshelf. There seemed to be some kind of doorway out of Johannes’s line of sight. Johannes even heard the thud of a wooden door swinging open. Of course, there was no such door in the underground sanctuary, which was like a cave.

Kretzman vanished so casually.

Johannes alone in the deep blue prophecy.

13. Walked on Four Legs (2)

“Alas… Alas… You who were as beautiful as a white flower and as benevolent as a fruit tree…. But the pitch-black end does not even brush past the pure lady’s bedchamber…. You who are silent today must not be you who sang yesterday…. Alas. Alas….”

The mournful wailing of ninety-nine women in mourning clothes, prostrated at the Valdemar family burial ground, faintly seeped into the dark ossuary beneath the chapel. They were free people hired by the Duke to mourn. Those women would cry day and night for three more days, then on the fourth morning, they would get drunk on the wine offered by the Duke’s household before scattering to their own dwellings like fallen leaves.

Five days had passed since the day Johannes encountered Kretzman. Until that night, Johannes had tried never to recall Inette again, and the Duchess Gustavus closed her fever-dried eyes forever. She was twenty-nine years old.

But wasn’t it supposed to be seven days?

Johannes, sitting in the middle of a long pew, gazed at the marble coffin-shaped tomb meticulously carved in his mother’s image and unconsciously counted the days. It seemed he clearly remembered seven days. Just over a fortnight ago, Kretzman’s voice had prophesied the Duchess would die in a week. But since even he had barely paid attention at the time, his memory wasn’t exact. 7 days. 7 days….

What would be the point of digging deeper?

The marble Duchess, standing on stone roses, had her eyes open more gently than in life, but empty without pupils. The madness that had seemed innate was nowhere to be found. As the torch flickered to the priest’s recitation of prayers for the dead, short shadows cast something like expressions on her solid face.

Mother, are you at peace there? Johannes, sinking into solitude, asked of the life full of twists and turns, but the white-lit lips remained closed. In truth, what he really wanted to ask was this:

Is your ‘soul’ truly resting there?

The moment he realized it, cold bitter water rose from one corner of his chest. So very heavily.

Inette.

Since meeting Kretzman, Johannes’s body had entered a stable period as if by a lie. No bones occasionally tearing through his skin. No inner eyelid blinking inside his eyelids. No vision turning into a black melted sight.

It seemed to be because Johannes’s emotions had strangely settled since that day, but the nape of his neck was occasionally chilly. Perhaps it was like a flag not fluttering before a storm. Johannes sometimes had such ominous thoughts with his reason dampened as if waterlogged. Emptiness.

Could even such trivial sentiments be part of the curse and emptiness? Johannes deliberately erased the naturally forming image of his sister and turned his attention elsewhere. It would be a lie to say he wasn’t daunted by Kretzman’s claims, but the intensity of the shock and rational comprehension were separate issues.

What have I been feeling all this time? What have I felt, how have I struggled? To think that all of it was actually something that didn’t exist in the world. It doesn’t really resonate. Yet the back of his head felt a bit dull, and he couldn’t understand why. He didn’t want to understand.

I don’t know.

Suddenly he felt the Duke’s forearm touching his left shoulder and the guard knight’s forearm touching his right shoulder. The knight’s collar, with his head slightly bowed, was imbued with a somber air, even if feigned.

However, the cruel muscles beneath the Duke’s ceremonial robes held not even the disappointment shown on the day a subordinate like an arm or leg had fallen in battle, let alone the grief of losing a wife. It was merely the stance of a warrior silently following custom.

A warrior’s appearance on the day of his wife’s funeral. Yes. That was the Duke’s own humble attitude. As Johannes coldly acquiesced without a word just then.

No. You asked that woman differently.

Suddenly, a familiar whisper brushed the back of his head. A chill instantly ran down Johannes’s spine, which had been sitting straight. Just as cold sweat was about to form in his fist neatly placed on his knee, the sound of the congregation rising from their seats rumbled the ceiling of the underground ossuary.

Johannes’s gaze, suddenly coming to his senses, fixed on where the eyes of the crowd were focused. He caught a glimpse of long blue sleeves, nearly touching the ground, swaying among the silently bowing people.

Inette, about to be married, was entering the ossuary.

Johannes forgot the time and place. So much so that he didn’t even notice the sight of Griselda and the guards lined up a step behind Inette.

It was merely ingrained habit that he showed the courtesy of rising from his seat like a knight of Gustavus, albeit with a bewildered demeanor, after staring at her with a dazed expression, much too late.

However, his posture was so distracted that he made a scraping sound by pushing back the long bench he shared with several knights including his father the Duke, to the point of disrupting even the manners he had barely managed. Having just barely regained his composure, he instantly nailed his absent-minded gaze to Inette’s every move. Or rather, he simply forgot everything but her.

He saw from the back of her hands, neatly folded in prayer on the silk sash at her lower abdomen, to her slender shoulders that even the thicker clothing could not conceal. Though she had wept so sorrowfully on the day his mother scratched her neck until she bled and fainted, now her cheeks were as cold as ice.

Her long, dense eyelashes held eyes of such ruthlessly clear blue. Those eyes that did not seek out her brother even with a momentary sidelong glance.

He could not blink even once. He took her in with his eyes so persistently. His beautiful sister, sickeningly so. The one and only daydream held by him, who was said to be nothing more than an inanimate object. The radiant girl who had briefly come to him, an ugly one, under the name of blood relation. The one and only reason for the beginning of his life, which was no more than a human imitation. Ah.

At last, cold sweat ran down his spine, which had turned pale, with a convulsion. The murderous intent that had repeated like a tiresome lust was today merely a seizure gripped by fear. As soon as he saw his sister’s face, which he had not thought of at all for those five days, reflexively, snap.

I’d rather strangle your neck. Such was the feeling his heart, which had been as motionless as a stone statue, harbored as if having some kind of fit. He was so afraid. So afraid that his knees were all a-tremble. Of what? He didn’t know. He only knew that he would fail again today. I’d rather strangle your neck.

The tips of his feet gradually turned towards Inette as she walked towards his mother’s tombstone, twitching as if about to spring forth at any moment, yet he still could not move an inch, like a stone statue. For some reason, he simply could not approach her.

With his entire consciousness fixed on Inette alone, he did not even notice that his own face, staring at her so intently through the crowd as if to pierce through her, looked even more like that of a dead person. Your neck…. Your, neck…. And so, he kept dying alive, trembling in fear.

On the night of that woman’s first wedding, you asked her as you wept. That woman who held your crying hands wept quietly along with you. To such a woman, you asked again and again.

Why she gave birth to you like this, and why she abandoned you again.

The man whispered again behind Johannes, who was frozen stiff.

…Yes.

In the end, you are my origin, in a sense.