This is Adelaide’s room.

Thump. Thump.

Knuckles tapped the wood. No voice answered from within.

Drawn curtains, chairs squared like soldiers, paper and pen aligned. The mattress and quilt held no dent, no warmth. The room was still caught in last week’s maid-scrubbed perfection. Every sign pointed to a simple truth: the owner wasn’t here.

Thump. Thump.

The sound swung back and forth like a pendulum in a clock’s chest. Though no stir came from inside, the visitor at the door seemed certain Adelaide was within.

The visitor was right. Adelaide was still in the room. From the chamber behind the bookshelf came the skitter of things falling.

She stood at the table in the hidden room. Glass shards glittered at her feet. Scrolls lay open like open wounds. For someone with compulsions, she ignored the chaos with a stranger’s indifference. Her right hand snatched a parchment at random. Her left was a locked fist, trembling.

She loosened spasming fingers. A narrow cut ran across her palm, and blood with an unnaturally vivid hue welled out. One of the most precious liquids known. She didn’t bandage it. She pressed inward, forcing more to spill.

Gritting her teeth, she waited until the measure felt right, then smeared her palm across the seal. When blood kissed the parchment, it hissed like metal meeting a thousand degrees of heat. The invisible array laid over the scroll dissolved.

Only when the self-immolation charms were quiet did she rip the scroll open. Lines of Elven incantations unfurled—beautiful as poetry, toxic as petals lacquered in venom.

These were hand-copies from the days Adelaide decoded taboo Blood Magic for the black-cloaked order. Long-lost Blood Magic slept in them. For anyone who would learn profane craft, every glyph was an oracle—heretical scripture, blessed in reverse.

Adelaide took one glance at the title. Irritation flashed across her face.

“Not this one…”

Her voice was squeezed through clenched teeth. She flung the scroll aside like refuse, then mechanically drew another. The motion was so practiced it felt done a hundred times over.

This time, as she reached to smear blood, her vision split into double. Her body bucked against her soul. Her heart skipped a beat. The scroll dropped and thudded against the wooden table.

Breath leaked ragged at the corner of her mouth. She braced on the table and barely kept from collapsing. Even so, her bone-pale arms shook without end. Anemia made the world swim and smear. Before her mind went dark, she snatched up a jar of spinal fluid. Red light flared. The vertigo abated. Her sight pulled back into focus, just enough to read her own hand.

Not yet... I still haven’t found it...

She grabbed the fallen scroll and tore it open again. The first words—“The No-Moon Night Feast”—stabbed her eyes. A tide of fury rose from her core and broke its banks. She slammed a fist onto the table. Her eyes, sleepless for tens of hours, were veined in red. Her fragile heart hammered at a sick, reckless pace.

“Damn it... Where is ‘Tessmi’s Lament’?!”

— “Tessmi’s Lament,” a forbidden art meant to be erased from the world.

Legend told of a noblewoman named Tessmi, who lost her child in an accident and wept without end. A Follower of Pleasure, Krus, passed her manor and heard her grief. On a whim, he slaughtered a farm family that had just welcomed a newborn, sparing only the child—for refinement.

He twisted the child’s bloodline by force, then gifted him to the noblewoman. She saw the child’s dark irises, mirrors of her own. Joy burst in her chest. She held him as her own flesh. Bathed in love, the child grew, yet felt a constant lack, a hollow under the ribs. Suspicion, anxiety, the itch that never fades. One night of thunder and rain, he met Krus again, who poured truth like poison into his ear. Madness took him. He went home and strangled Tessmi with his own hands. In her final breath, her choking cry knifed through the rain, then ended under Krus’s delighted laughter. The evil art bears that sound as its name.

In theory, “Tessmi’s Lament” vanished with Krus from the histories. Adelaide hunted it still.

Ever since she returned from the underground research facility, she hunted.

She had to know what those royal bastards did to Mira.

—

One week earlier, underground, at the instant Adelaide and Toka met blades.

The closed space rang with the shriek of Bloodsword against the knife-edge of Toka’s hand. In the clash, Adelaide was clearly on the back foot, her body layered with strength-boosting spells, blocking his sweeping cuts by grit alone.

She wavered, thinking of Skela. Then, in a blink, the pressure on her sword hand multiplied. It shoved her bodily into a corner. Toka’s brute force was a tide she couldn’t hold. Her blood-red blade was forced back toward her face, slicing through the veil that hid her features.

That surge shattered their balance. Adelaide seemed driven into a pit of disadvantage. Yet the face revealed under torn gauze held no panic.

Instead, Adelaide smiled.

Balance was broken—just as she wanted.

Her right hand clenched. The Sacrifice Domain array in her palm cracked. A red flash bloomed as she pressed that hand to her heart.

The next heartbeat, Adelaide vanished from the wall where Toka pinned her. In the same breath, a hair-thin bloodline traced from Toka’s right chest up toward his shoulder.

It happened faster than vision could register. Only when his right arm fell limp did the line split, a spray of beading blood opening into a wound that tunneled from chest to back.

Toka dropped to his knees. Blood bubbled from his lips and nose. The purple slime armoring him sloughed away. Adelaide stood behind him, paler than before.

The outcome was decided.

There was only one reason Toka’s strength would spike so violently: his life-link to Skela had been cut. With Skela no longer a drag, his burst power multiplied—and that sealed his loss.

Without a hostage, no matter how his power surged, he was no match for Adelaide. And she knew his weakness.

“Truly... cough... worthy of the Douglas Family’s eldest daughter…”

Toka coughed blood. He slumped against the wall. Red soaked every stitch and seam. Death’s ash colored his skin, yet his broken words carried a fevered joy, as if he’d glimpsed some grand truth.

“You... did you use that, too... to cast legion-grade magic...?”

Adelaide stared, a cold light under her lashes.

“I see... I see!”

As he spoke, deep-blue threads of mana needled from the wound. They weaved through torn flesh, reconnecting muscle and bone, stitching him shut.

“Speed yourself with your own blood... and the Sacrifice Domain has no cap on casting speed... I see. No wonder you triggered three legion-grade spells in a blink...”

He muttered, and as the bleeding slowed, his voice smoothed. Water mana with extreme affinity worked at inhuman speed, repairing what the blade had ruined. It continued until Adelaide’s sword-tip rested against his Adam’s apple.

“Confident, healing yourself at leisure while I’m standing here?”

She lifted the tip, forcing his chin up. She meant to frighten him. Meeting his eyes, she found no fear—only a curious glow fixed on her.

“You know what happens next, Mr. Toka.”

“I’m arrested and face righteous judgment.”

“You’re really optimistic.” Adelaide’s smile held no warmth. Her blade flashed cold.

“Because I won’t expose you. You decoded those Blood Magic scrolls for us. Exposing you is exposing me,” Toka shrugged, as if to show his right shoulder was whole again. “And you won’t kill me. Our interests don’t conflict, do they?”

Adelaide tilted her head. “Oh? I find killing a very appealing way to keep secrets.”

“Dead men don’t talk, sure. But you won’t do it. Eldest daughter of the Douglas Family—you can’t kill.”

Her gaze deepened. Toniel’s ashen face flickered in her mind, and the black-cloaked man’s sneer. Pain stabbed her wrist. The blood blade slid forward an inch, nicking Toka’s throat.

“If your partner fed you that, I don’t mind proving him wrong here.”

Blood ran down his throat into his chest. His eyes never held fear.

“It’s not about him. You can’t kill.” He repeated it, calm as tea in a sunlit garden.

“After all, you must become the ‘Pure One’, mustn’t you?”

The name struck. Adelaide paused for a breath.

Pure One—beyond the simple words—was the title for those fit to fuse with the Sacred Heart. Adelaide knew two things that break the fusion: death, and the people denying the bearer’s worth as king. Truths learned in Dream. Yet Holywell Academy never wrote the requirements plain.

She knew only: “Only the Pure One can fuse with the Sacred Heart.” What the Pure One meant was a blank.

Why did Mira, in the script, fail to fuse, while Skela could? Was it temperament alone? Or a sharper rule? Adelaide had circled that question. She hadn’t expected the answer to fall now.

“You can’t kill with your own hand, or you lose the title of Pure One. So spare me the threat.”

Can’t kill... just that?

The simplicity jarred her—that such a small line kept kings across ages from the Heart. She didn’t show it. Her wrist turned, teasing the lip of his wound.

“Kindness, all the way to the Sacred Heart. Clean hands in the whirlpool of power. It does sound like a fitting trial,” her eyes narrowed; her tone flipped. “But you assume I want the Heart. And you assume I’ll swallow your claim without proof.”

“Don’t trust me. Gamble. But your sister will be very sad—especially when she wins the Sacred Heart, and finds the sister she longs for can’t fuse with it.”

“...What are you saying?”

Pain at her wrist spiked high. She hadn’t yet ‘understood’—not true. The bracelet had answered, which meant her reason already did. She simply refused it in that instant.

Toka watched the mask slip, emotion surfacing. His eyes widened.

“You... don’t know?”

His mouth stretched into a grin. He murmured, half to the air.

“She doesn’t know... she doesn’t know...! Ha, she doesn’t know. Hahahahaha—”

“—Shut up! Liar!”

Adelaide’s hand shook. “Mira lost her memories. How could she be doing it for me—”

Toka laughed on. “Lost her memories? Who told you she did?”

“Mira herself—” Adelaide’s voice snagged mid-syllable. A possibility rose. She refused to name it.

As if trying to convince herself, she shouted, her voice a cracked bell in the wind, "Skela lost her memories too—yes, a side effect of your surgery—"

"Number Thirty-One's amnesia came from a failed procedure, but Mira's surgery went perfectly..." Toka's words lay out like scalpels on a steel tray.

Toka suddenly stopped. A cold, alien pleasure curled at his lips, like frost slicking a blade.

"Let me tell you something interesting, eldest daughter of the Douglas Family," he said, his tone a whisper under stone arches.

His mouth opened and closed; each word tolled like a bell, ringing in Adelaide's skull.

"When I split open Mira's chest and carved 'Tessmi's Lament' on her blood-slick heart, what she whispered..."

—was your name, Adelaide.

Adelaide's fear hit first. She clutched her brow in the dark room and panted, pain blooming like a thunderhead.

Her head felt split like cracking ice; her wrists stung like nettles.

Every time that night's words rose, she drove the bracelet into her skin, using pain like sand to smother a fire in her soul.

But who could she blame? The thought tasted like ash.

She should've known; in one bad ending of the "script," Mira spoke of that birthday night right to the heroine, a truth bright as noon.

So how could she have truly forgotten?

She had known this; yet in that underground place, when Mira said it, she hadn't doubted for a heartbeat.

Was she that foolish? Or did her deep self refuse the truth, like roots resisting frost? In both "script" and reality, Mira remembered, always for her.

"No. No, no... none of that matters, Adelaide!"

She bit down on panic like on a bitter peel, forced the voices to ebb, and pulled a scroll from the pile to her right.

She hunted for the scroll on "Tessmi's Lament," the spell laid on Mira that turned her hair to gold like sunlit wheat.

She already knew it could alter lineage like ink seeping into paper, but the royal family's aim couldn't be that simple.

There had to be more than rewriting bloodlines; yet when she pressed Toka, he only spread his hands, ignorance flat as stone.

"I'm a doctor. Whatever the royals want isn't my concern. I just perform the procedure, do my best to make it succeed," Toka said, his voice dry as gauze.

He looked at Adelaide with a flicker of surprise, like a match in fog. "You, though—I thought you'd know more than me. That scroll was decoded by you, wasn't it?"

Those words were the nail that kept her in the basement all week, rust biting like rain.

Toka said the experiments on "Tessmi's Lament" began decades ago; lacking records, they groped forward like blind men at a cliff.

Most subjects died before the first stage, bodies snuffed like candles; the second stage failed near one hundred percent, with only Skela left breathing.

The stalemate held until some years back, when the royals sent a document that laid out every step to cast "Tessmi's Lament," clean as a river map.

The timing matched when Adelaide began working with the men in black, so Toka assumed it was her result, a shadow stitched to her name.

Rationally, the conclusion held like a straight line.

"Tessmi's Lament" was the work of a Follower of Pleasure named Crus, a Blood Mage born to the craft like a wolf to snow.

Only two ways could undo the seal on his scroll—his own hand, or someone whose Blood Magic ran stronger than his.

Crus had been executed centuries ago by the High Tribunal's Spear of Judgment, a lightning bolt that ended his storm.

In this generation, only Adelaide's aptitude was known to surpass his; among Blood Mages, her blood burned brightest.

So if Crus hadn't clawed from his grave, that scroll must have passed through Adelaide's hands.

It was clean logic, simple as a blade, and it even convinced Adelaide—though she couldn't recall ever decoding a spell by that name.

Her hands moved on their own: smear blood, tear the seal, read the title, toss it aside—the motions turning like a mill wheel.

Not this one; it passed like rain.

Not this one either; only dry ink and dust.

It was fine; even if memory failed, she'd left hand-copied duplicates, breadcrumbs on the path of every Blood Magic she'd decoded.

Find that, and she'd learn what "Tessmi's Lament" truly did, truth sharp as dawn.

Thump, thump.

A knock reached her through shelves and stone, a drumbeat that meant the visitor was pounding at her door.

Irritation rose first, hot as steam; Adelaide kept drawing new scrolls and flicked a switch by the desk.

"Please don't disturb me. I'm not hungry," she said to the transmission array blooming like a pale flower, her eyes still nailed to the scroll.

Another wide-eyed new maid, no doubt, bringing "concern" like stale sweets.

She had no time to play lady-and-good-maid today; her hours were arrows.

"My lady, it's the Duke and Duchess of the Douglas Family. They wish to see you!"

Anisa's anxious voice spilled from the array like water, and Adelaide's hands went still.

She stared at the array, blank as frost; her runaway mind felt doused with a pail of ice, chill sinking from crown to heel.

Fifteen minutes later, Adelaide opened the door; the earlier disarray had vanished like mist.

She sat in her wheelchair, clothing neat, face as calm as ever; only her clenched left hand looked stiff, a knuckle of stone.

"My lady..." Anisa watched her, worry pooling in her eyes. "The Duke and Duchess..."

She trailed off, the words drying like leaves.

Adelaide's lips bent into a faint curve; she forced her week-stiff features to look natural, a mask smoothed like lacquer. "They're waiting for us. Let's go."

Anisa bit her lip, then silently moved behind the chair and pushed her toward the Douglas Family's council hall, wheels whispering like reeds.

Along the way, Adelaide rehearsed her opening, lines stacked like tiles.

The last time she'd seen her parents was at Holywell Academy's graduation; they hadn't come for her, a truth as cold as shade.

They hadn't spoken a word; after the ceremony, they went straight to the royals, their desire to climb obvious as a ladder leaned in daylight.

They'd always hated her; Adelaide had long accepted it, a splinter she stopped touching.

She didn't feel sad about that; if anything, today's summons surprised her more, a thorn under the nail.

What could make them want to see her alone—what wind was about to change?

"Pack your things," they said the moment they saw her, voices flat as iron.

"The carriage to the family sanatorium will arrive tomorrow morning," they added, the promise steady as rain.

Adelaide stared at her parents on the dais, their faces drowned in shadow; the lines she'd prepared scattered like birds.

"...Why?"

"Because you failed to become queen consort, Adelaide."

Her mouth opened; panic surfaced at last, quick as a flash flood.

"No, no, I can still—"

"You've already failed, Adelaide."

Her pupils trembled, not at the cold in their voices but at the message buried inside like a blade in velvet.

Mira and Samir's wedding would be held in one week, a date hammered like a nail.