The Douglas Family’s sanatorium sat in a small town half a day from Balad, like a pale stone set beside a quiet river.

It lay far from the city. Evening bells never reached it, and the crowd’s roar thinned into mist.

It was as tranquil as the day Adelaide was sent here by the Duke and Duchess, a place fit for rest in every sense, like soft earth under a sleeping tree.

But the pastoral picture hadn’t held. The frame had cracked like dry clay.

Green thickets had withered, leaving ash-gray branches, and the birds and frogs had fallen silent. Only the evening wind whispered like a cold brush through reeds.

The flowerbeds once packed with Tamm flowers were now coils of dead vines. The proud scent that carried for miles was a memory, leaving a bleak scene that stabbed anyone who’d seen their blaze.

Not everyone mourned the Tamm flowers. Not everyone could feel the sorrow hidden in a beautiful fall, like snow melting into dirty meltwater.

A silver-haired woman in a wheelchair played at the bed’s edge with rapt delight, as if wrestling the earth itself, tugging vines with swollen fingers till the chair trembled like a skiff in chop.

“Lady Emily! I was gone for seconds, and you—!”

A petite maid in black and white rushed to Emily’s side and pried her fingers loose. She checked for cuts, while Emily wailed, spilling blurred words like marbles.

“You… bad! No… don’t let me… play?”

“Eh, but mud’s dirty, and those vines have little thorns.” The maid pushed the chair away from the bed and dabbed the drool shining at Emily’s lips. “Lady Emily, let’s go back to your room? There’s lots of fun there too.”

At the words “go back,” Emily shivered like a leaf, then cried harder.

“No, don’t! Don’t… go back! Don’t! There… there are bad people!”

Fear flooded her child-clear eyes, a light out of season. She clutched the maid like a drowning child clutching driftwood, refusing to let go.

“Bad people… no!! Don’t… go…”

“Uh… okay, okay, Lady Emily. Don’t cry, don’t cry, be good…”

Flustered, the petite maid soothed a woman twice her age. She patted her back, then promised like a warm hand in winter. “I won’t leave. I’m right here, okay? No more tears?”

“Mm… uu… Anisa… mama…”

…

At that last word against her chest, the maid’s face went chalk-blue.

Yes. She was Anisa.

Former personal maid to the Douglas Family’s eldest daughter.

In some ways, she shouldn’t still be here.

On the night Adelaide broke into the royal palace, the poor girl hid under her mistress’s blankets, head buried for half a day. Her mistress didn’t return with the breezy “I’ll be right back.” Instead came a tremor that shook the Empire. Anisa got caught feigning sleep. The stunt with the stand-in was exposed. They threw her in a cell by morning.

The Regent’s faction wanted a heavy sentence carved in stone. But the tribunal and Samir pulled strings from both sides. They shielded her from becoming an example nailed to the gate.

Even so, the punishment was public. As a co-conspirator covering for a “suspect,” she was demoted.

Not dismissed or exiled—just knocked down a rung.

She was still a personal maid to the Douglas Family. But her mistress had changed. She now served Emily, an aunt who was addled and slow. The work grew threefold, shifting from the orderly dignity of serving a gentle lady to the grind of nursery care. She wiped drool like now, and she changed diapers, and she helped with the privy, like moving water one ladle at a time.

Looking back, it felt like the Regent—or rather, the Douglas Family—had set her penalty like a stone in her path.

She held no grudge, not really.

If anything, she felt relieved. Compared to the storms in the capital and the blood-streaked winds beyond Balad, she was sheltered like a sparrow under eaves. Many had it worse.

Yes, many had it worse.

Like her unfortunate mistress.

Anisa lifted her head to the dusk-heavy sky and let out a long sigh, a breath like smoke.

When she thought of it, her mood went heavy, like rain pressing on a roof. She worried more for her mistress than for herself.

Where had the lady gone after that?

She tried asking around, tapping doors and shadows, but no word came. The silence gnawed. Her mistress wasn’t as disabled as Aunt Emily, but she needed a wheelchair to move. Without Anisa, could she live alone? Would hardship pile up like stones?

Why was her mistress’s fate always this storm-tossed? She was always so gentle to Anisa, never once raising her voice except that last night. She carried no noble airs, unlike the Duke and Duchess. She felt sent down by some god, an angel in human snow.

Anisa sighed again, heavy as a gate, let go of the handles, and closed her eyes in prayer.

Oh, my poor lady, may you still be safe. The Empire’s tides seem to be turning for the better. They say the Regent has conceded ground to His Highness Samir and His Highness Neprah. There’s even a ceremony of reconciliation today. I don’t get politics, and the rumors of Elves invading the Empire are a fog to me, but peace doesn’t feel as far as it once did. If this keeps up, maybe you can return to Balad soon. If that day comes, I hope I can serve you again, like holding a lamp in your night.

Perhaps because Anisa halted mid-step, Aunt Emily started wriggling again, restless as a pup. Anisa hurried her prayer, tapped shoulder and brow three times, and summoned an image of her lady’s hair—white as first snow.

She opened her eyes to wheel Aunt Emily back to her room.

She froze.

The imagined figure didn’t vanish when her eyes opened. It held at the courtyard gate, like a vision stepping out of mist.

“Ah… Ah-de… laide…!”

Anisa thought for a heartbeat she was seeing things. But Emily’s slurred call told her it wasn’t a mirage.

Even so, disbelief locked her knees. The woman in the chair didn’t think at all. She waved like a child spotting a long-lost kin, bright and uncomplicated.

“No… no chair… you… you stood… up!”

“Mm, Aunt Emily. I stood up~!”

As her breeze-warm voice said, the white-haired girl walked forward without a wheelchair or cane. She crouched before Aunt Emily and took her hand. After a few soft pleasantries, she turned to Anisa and smiled.

“I can’t leave out my good friend Anisa, can I? How’ve you been? I’ve missed you these years~”

“I—I—I’ve missed you too—No, wait, why is My Lady here?!”

Seeing the mistress she’d prayed for, the maid felt joy burst like a spring. Then fear surged up like a wave. Adelaide was still wanted in the Empire. Anisa didn’t even pause to ask why her mistress could walk. She craned left and right like an owl, checked the empty air, grabbed Adelaide’s sleeve, and stammered.

“It’s—it’s too dangerous, My Lady! Come with me, I know a place to hide—pfft—uh?”

A gentle pat to the head stopped her words cold. Adelaide stood and took Emily’s chair from Anisa’s hands, her mock-pout teasing like sunlight.

“Honestly, why are you so scared? A few years away and my good friend forgets who I am?”

“N-no, of course not! You’re always My Lady—”

“—the Douglas Family’s eldest daughter,” Adelaide said, tapping Anisa’s forehead lightly. “And what is this place, hmm?”

“…The Douglas Family’s sanatorium…”

“Right. I’m only home for a look. Why all the fuss? Really~”

“Uh… yes, but you…”

Anisa faltered. Words tangled like yarn. Adelaide had already started pushing Aunt Emily’s chair, walking and laughing. “Speaking of which, Father and Mother… they’re here too, yes?”

“Bad people!!!”

Aunt Emily jolted and screamed, shaking like a twig. Anisa jumped, then nodded. “Eh? Yes… the Duke and the Duchess are here as well.”

“Ah, that makes things easy~”

…?

Easy how? Anisa blinked, not catching her meaning. No time to ask. The eldest daughter soothed Aunt Emily with easy warmth and then called back, smiling, “Anisa?”

“Y-yes!”

“It’s been so long since I came home. I’ll walk my aunt for a proper stroll. As for my dear blood parents…”

She paused and hummed a laugh, thin as a blade behind silk.

“It’s been so long, after all. Would you ask if they’re free tonight, and whether they’d honor their daughter with dinner?”

Eh? Anisa froze. Adelaide didn’t wait. She wheeled Aunt Emily away, chatting and cooing, like a true family scene.

Anisa, in that instant, shivered from a raw instinct, like a dog feeling thunder through the ground.

She’d known while serving her that the eldest daughter wasn’t only water-soft kindness. The cold gleam she caught from the corner of her mistress’s eye made Anisa’s spine prickle, a frost line under the skin.

**

When the dining hall doors swung open under a firm push, the clock atop the manor pointed to VII.

It was the border between day and night. The last slant of sun hid behind hills, and the dinner bell rang like a thin silver thread. Its echo stitched the dim corridor where only a few lamps burned.

Beyond that, the manor held a strange hush, like breath drawn and held in a chapel.

The Duke of the Douglas Family and his wife stood in the dining room. His face was tight as iron. She held his arm like a textbook model of a devoted wife, a sparrow clinging to a branch.

She wasn’t usually like this. Their union, welded by politics, held no ardor. She clutched him now because she felt a threat like an icy hand and reached for shelter by reflex.

It did no good. Her husband was no better fit for the moment. He hadn’t spoken since the beginning. From neck to brow, his skin was as bloodless as the Douglas white in his hair.

They’d just seen the blood-red array circling the sanatorium, and the house cat that made a foolish dash for escape, then got shredded in a blink by the rune’s teeth.

Remembering the loops of intestine slopping from that cat’s belly, the Duke’s face shed another shade of color, like paper leaching ink.

What held him upright now wasn’t noble dignity. It was muscle locked into stone. His thighs had gone stiff as boards, and sitting felt impossible.

Even strung tight as bowstrings, their bodies still obeyed the nerves.

The dining door creaked like an old hinge, and that remembered face framed the threshold.

Their muscles shivered like reeds in a cold wind.

“Oh, Aunt Emily, don’t joke. You’re my kin. How could you not join us for dinner?

Say something that distant again and I’ll get mad~”

“B-but… but… they’ll… s-scold me…”

Her stammer snapped when the newcomer locked eyes with the Duke and Duchess.

Air iced over like a winter pond.

Fear bloomed in both gazes, but it reached for different shadows.

Aunt Emily feared the couple.

The couple feared the warm-sun smile of the girl standing behind her.

“Oh come on, why’s everyone standing? If there’s something to say, sit and say it~”

Her voice rippled like a silver bell in still water.

As if blind to the elephant in the room, Adelaide’s face stayed calm, spring-light at the corners.

She alone kept smiling—she alone could still speak.

“Well, what an awkward reunion. I must have dropped in like summer thunder.”

No one answered, so she continued like soft rain.

“It’s fine. Blood runs thicker than rain.

If Mom and Dad can’t find words yet, I understand.

Please, you two, sit~”

She smiled as she guided them, and Duke Douglas and the Duchess stood slick with cold sweat.

She pressed their shoulders with velvet-soft hands, and their knees folded onto the chairs like weary travelers.

Years apart, they had imagined her after losing noble privileges.

Fallen and self-ruined; beauty stained by ugly despair; the fire in her eyes snuffed out.

A shell, a walking corpse with no dream—truth be told, that was the future they wanted for Adelaide.

They wished exile to be a pit with no ladder.

Prostitution, gambling, powder—every vice clinging like tar.

Shuttling between brothels and dice halls, never to return.

Only then would their dirty work be safe as a locked chest.

But Adelaide’s presence shattered that porcelain fantasy on stone.

She was still a petal-perfect noble daughter.

No stain of ruin clung to her.

Elegance remained dust-free, and the old frailty had burned away.

Her steps were wind-light; her calm was deep water.

Just standing there was a mirror held to the Douglas Family’s grime-streaked ledger, and fear crawled up their spines.

Looking at her, they found no anchor of the familiar.

As if the daughter once under their thumb had vanished behind the moon.

In her place stood something wearing the same face, a mask with its own weather.

What had happened to her?

They didn’t know.

One thing was clear as a knife edge.

They knew why she had returned, like a drumbeat in their bones.

So when Adelaide sat at the head seat, as natural as a river finding its course, they clenched pale lips and kept silent.

“Wow, my good Anisa—reliable as dawn.

I showed up last minute, gave one line, and she still set a feast for me~”

Adelaide lifted the cloche; steam curled up like white snakes, and her eyes sparkled like stars over a lake.

She made a small gesture of prayer, folded like a lotus.

Then she began spooning soup for Aunt Emily, tender as midsummer shade.

Even if her aunt shrank from the kindness, Adelaide cared for her slow-backed body with patient hands.

She turned her head and chatted with the couple, as if this were only a family supper.

“Dad, Mom, how’ve you been?

I heard you moved back here recently.

Is that true?”

“…”

The Duke and Duchess stayed frozen, puppets in a quiet theater.

Adelaide tapped her fork, tick-tick like a metronome, and asked why they weren’t eating.

The Duke flinched awake at the sound.

He began slicing his steak with shaking hands; his mouth opened and closed like a catfish stranded on sand.

“We… recently moved here…”

“Why? This place is so far from Balad.

Handling affairs must be a bother, right?”

“That’s because… there’s nothing we have to handle over there anymore…”

His voice sagged like wet paper.

“Eh? No way.

Don’t we have a cigarette supply contract with the Tommis Family?

Dad, you used to go to their city-center warehouse every few days.

You only trusted the tobacco after inspecting it yourself, didn’t you?”

“That contract… is canceled now…”

“Canceled?

What about the luxury goods with Lady Matilda?

The Yingmail Trade Association’s headquarters sits in the capital’s heart.

A round trip from here eats almost a whole day.

Can you really make those meetings?”

“It’s fine… Our contract with the Yingmail Trade Association expired two years ago.

We didn’t renew…”

“Ah, so that’s how it is~”

Adelaide nodded, thoughtful as dusk light, as if she couldn’t read the shame and fear on her father’s face.

She continued, soft and smooth.

“But we still hold seats in the cabinet, right?

I heard they’ve been meeting often.

If our family keeps missing sessions, won’t that cause—”

“Screee— enough! Enough!!!”

A rasping shriek, sharp as a ghost’s cry, cut Adelaide off.

The Duchess, silent until now, threw up her face and cracked under the pressure like ice in spring.

The Duke lunged to stop her, but madness had already taken the reins.

She clawed at her scalp; bloodshot eyes burned like coals.

She howled at Adelaide and hurled cutlery that flashed like thrown knives.

“You unlucky crow!

A ghost in human skin!

You know everything!

It’s all your fault! It’s all your fault!

We have nothing left!

Why don’t you die—

Why don’t you die!!!”