The Second Suicide (5/7)

The first meeting of her second life came to her in a shape more wretched still. Diana shut her eyes. It felt as though the terrible future were unspooling itself right before them. She flinched and looked over her shoulder. Giscard. The monster was reaching out his hand. A thick wave of blood-stink seemed to roll over her, her breath caught in her throat, and her fists clenched tight. She wanted to scream that the monster had to be thrown out this instant. No — she wanted to run.

It was as if fate itself had crept up on her, ready to throw her straight back into it. Ah — without warning, a sharp sting throbbed deep in her belly. Ah, aah! She wanted to kill him. She wanted to kill that man.

No. This isn't right. I can't do this.

Out of habit, she crushed the feelings threatening to burst free. She was certain of it now — she had returned to the age of twelve. Which meant her father, the head of House Brien, had to be made to cast him out.

Diana knew her father's temperament well. The father in her memory had always been strict; whenever she carried on like a small child, he would seize on "discipline" as a pretext to press her down harder. If she asked him to send Giscard away, it would count as a tantrum, and he would not indulge it.

This — I have to stop this. I have to stop this man.

Diana looked at the boy with the collar locked around his neck. The sight stirred the memory of her own. So that was it. The collar at my wedding — it was revenge for this. Exasperation left her breathless; she had just understood, all at once, one of the reasons she had hated him so.

Diana looked at the monster who would ruin her life. His violet eyes held no will to live at all — he already seemed to be wandering some abyss. She turned away from that gaze, squeezed her fist shut, and bit her lip. The brackish taste of blood spread across her tongue. Every hatred and every terror came surging back to life.

I want to watch you suffer like this. I want the you who tormented me to be made to suffer all over again.

So this is what caused it — so what? This is your punishment, come around again.

The whisper rang vivid in her ears. God had punished that bastard, then. Clearly, he was fated to repeat his hell all over again. Diana strained to smother the sadistic hunger rising in her. Calm yourself. Be cold. That child must be driven out at once.

"So. In the end, you would have me send the boy away because you have a bad feeling about him?"

Duke Brien spoke as he looked at Diana. She nodded. She was more than a little tense, making her case before her father — praying he would judge her answer to the Queen that morning as proof she had grown up. She could hardly sit back and do nothing, after all.

"Could you not send that boy away as a gift for my twelfth birthday?"

Duke Brien narrowed his eyes. She was careful that nothing about her should read as a mere 'tantrum' — keeping her face composed, willing her voice not to tremble. The father she had come to know again was always a difficult man to face. And Diana knew exactly how this request would look: like a child's whim.

"The boy is a slave bestowed by His Majesty."

"Then you could always send him off on the pretext that he's no use for the work."

How was she supposed to tell him that the boy was the lost prince of the Kingdom of Lodbrok, and that one day he would return here for revenge? Say such a thing and her father might well pack her off to a sanatorium for the unsettled mind. It was, after all, an utterly preposterous story. Why would the King of Farnborough send a prince down as a slave? In truth, even Diana didn't know.

"Diana, why do you go to such lengths? Over a mere bad feeling?"

At the Duke's words, Diana swallowed. The thing that mattered could not be said. Instead, she said:

"There is something wrong with his eyes."

"His eyes?"

"He looked as though he meant to kill us."

"Who — the slave?"

Duke Brien's mouth curved upward.

"And here I thought you had grown into a sensible young lady. A child still, it seems. Forget this slave business and go practice your embroidery."

With those words, Diana understood: her request had been refused.

"I have no intention whatsoever of sending that boy away."

"……."

"So do not carry on over such a thing."

The stern pronouncement landed like a sentence of death. There was even a kind of obsession in his insistence that the boy would not be sent away, and Diana found herself staring at her father as at a stranger.

Her father had been a man of the imperial faction, one who had opposed slavery. Blunt he might be, but he was fundamentally warm toward people, and the servants had loved him for it. So why take in a slave? Why show not one shred of pity for the slave he had brought home? Diana sensed, obscurely, that she would have to tread carefully around this question.

"Forgive me, Father. I only wished to act spoiled for once."

"……."

"I had no intention of interfering in your affairs."

When Diana folded her hands and bowed her head, a flicker of warmth kindled in the Duke's eyes.

"It is not that you could not — if you were to stand in your mother's place. As you are now, you are far too young."

"……."

"This father has no intention of remarrying until you have become a lady in your own right."

"Yes, Father."

"Though I would like nothing more than to see you succeed me soon."

Guilt pricked at Diana for the cold eyes she had turned on her father. She had resented him — resented him for bringing Giscard, the wellspring of the calamity, into their house.

Because this man had been different. Other nobles remarried after a spouse's death so that someone would keep the household running; he had yearned for her mother until the day Diana died, and never taken another wife.

"As before, Mirva will oversee the household. You are aware of this?"

At the name she had tried to forget, Diana fought to keep her face smooth. Mirva — her mother's childhood friend, her mother's maid — was the woman who had held the estate in her grip until Diana turned fifteen. The two of them were the worst possible match.

"Father, I will see to that myself."

"It is good of you to offer. But you have never so much as studied the running of an estate, have you?"

Diana let out a small sigh. Everything stood barred and bolted against her. She had regressed to far too early a point in time, and freedom was nowhere to be found.

"My lady? Where might you be off to?"

The moment she stepped out into the grounds, Mirva appeared. Mirva hailed from an impoverished baronial house, and as if desperate to advertise her nobility she dressed in gaudy splendor that bordered on vulgar and went about drenched in heavy perfume. Ah, how I despise her. Diana's face twisted.

"Just going out for an evening stroll."

"Oh dear, oh dear. A young lady shouldn't be learning to roam about at night already."

As a child she hadn't understood what the woman meant. Now she understood perfectly — understood how long and how loathsome her entanglement with this Mirva had been. That remark, too, was unmistakably a barb. She wanted to make the insolent woman pay for it, but instead Diana widened her eyes into an innocent round and said:

"Father goes out at night too. Are you saying Father isn't an honorable man?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"When His Majesty summons him, he goes out to work even in the dead of night... I hardly think that's wrong of him."

"My lady. That is going out to work. The circumstances are entirely different."

"Father takes night strolls with His Majesty too, doesn't he?"

Diana smiled sweetly and brushed past her. There was so much to be done. This was the woman she had only managed to drive out at fifteen. She ached to throw the grating creature out this very day, but she had other business first.

She glanced back once to see whether the woman would follow — mercifully, she did not. The maids who served Diana knew of her habit of watching the stars at night and thought nothing of it.

But Mirva alone was always like this. Diana knew perfectly well it was not concern that moved her. She scanned her surroundings, then nodded to herself.

An abandoned barn. The stench rolling off it was foul beyond bearing, but she paid it no mind and pulled the door open. Moonlight spilled in at her back, laying bare the shape of something lying on the floor.

She drew the knife from her pocket.

It was a keepsake her mother had left her before she died. All she had to do was go to the crouched beast and drive it into that throat. There was nothing to it. A Slave Restraint Collar had been locked around the boy's neck; he could not resist.

Yes. I don't want you to suffer. So I'll simply kill you instead. Let the seed of ruin die before it ever sprouts.

The man who had slaughtered her family, seized her by the hair, and remade her into the same kind of dog he'd been. The man who had lusted for her body and sat watching her waste away at his side. The man who, in the end, had betrayed even her — she would be the one to sever this chain of vengeance!

Diana's eyes flashed. The blade in her grip caught the moonlight in a cold blue gleam. She drew the dagger up to strike — and stopped short.

"Help... me... please..."

"……."

"It hurts. It hurts so much..."

The sobbing monster — no, what was unmistakably a victim, a boy — lay moaning and weeping. At the sight of his wretched state, Diana raised the dagger again and again.

And each time, she lowered it. She looked at the harmless boy, and stepped backward. Her jaw clenched. This dagger — if this dagger moved, the boy would die. She would have her vengeance. Her family would not die; Alexa would not die a miserable death; she would never have to enter that dog of a marriage.

So why — why couldn't she do the one easy thing!

With eyes gone bloodshot, Diana raised the dagger once more. It dropped from her hand with a heavy thud.

The dagger was simply too heavy. That's all it was. Of course — yes. It never would have worked anyway. That's right — and what would I have done afterward, once I'd stabbed him? What if Father sent me off to a sanatorium?

Diana strained to rationalize her failed revenge — and then, before long, shook her head. She knew exactly what a hideous thing she had been about to commit. Shuddering, she broke into tears.

I — I tried to kill a person.

She had tried to kill, with her own hands, a boy who had committed no sin yet — who was nothing more than a victim. Blinded by vengeance, dressing him up as the wellspring of the calamity, she had moved to murder that helpless creature. Just like the monster would have.

She knew the boy would bring ruin. And even so — how could she kill a child weeping and begging for her help? Diana understood now precisely how terrible a thing she had nearly done.

She had despised royals and nobles — despised the breed that killed people at a whim, sneering that 'killing' was the easiest thing of all. She had been raised on her mother's teachings.

And this woman — she of all people — had tried to kill a human being for no better reason than that it was 'easy.' Clutching the dagger, she shook uncontrollably. She looked up at the sky. O God, what am I supposed to do? How am I to stop a ruin that is already decreed?

Only the clear moonlight shone down on Diana.

Rain must have fallen in the night; puddles pocked the road. The carriage kicked through one, scattering water in every direction. The Brien ducal carriage clove through the heart of the capital and at length drew up before a quiet temple.

A ducal carriage. At the unannounced arrival, the temple's priests fluttered about in a hurry to come out and receive whoever it carried. The one who stepped down was not Duke Brien, but the eldest daughter of House Brien — Diana Brien.

Her pale gold hair glittered against the clear sky. There was sorrow on her face — not the endearing sort, like a whimpering puppy, but the kind that looked like a flower beaten down by rain, pitiable and aching to see.

She looked nothing like a girl of twelve. Taking a knight's hand, she alighted, then spoke to the priest who had come out to greet her.

"Forgive this sudden visit. I came because I wished to pray."

A child's unbroken voice, yet composed somehow all the same. Those who served the god were ever glad of the faithful. Smiling, the priest led her inside.

After losing her mother, Diana had sometimes come to the temple to pray for her mother's peaceful rest. But after Lodbrok's invasion, once she had lost her entire family, she had renounced god entirely and never set foot in a temple again — and so the place felt strangely unfamiliar, as if seen for the first time.

Dragons were carved into every pillar. The dragon, it was said, was the messenger of god, bearing the divine voice to mortals. It was a faith in decline, yet Farnborough remained kindly disposed toward it. In proof of it: unlike the benighted, barbaric Kingdom of Lodbrok, which classed dragons among the monsters to be hunted, Farnborough revered them as bearers of the divine will, precisely as the myths taught.

Diana, for her part, had always agreed with that barbarous kingdom. There is no god.

And yet this twist of fate was, unmistakably, a miracle sent down by god. But today she meant to seek god's answer. They said god sometimes lent his voice to deliver oracles. She wanted to find a way. No — she had to find one.

"May the dragon's guardianship keep you."

With that blessing, the priest withdrew from the prayer room. A silver statue — and the rounded orb symbolizing the sun was unmistakably the image of 'god.' Looking at the dragon coiled around its base, Diana gave a short, mirthless laugh, sank to her knees, and clasped her hands.

What is happening to me? Is this a dream? Or is it the heaven I came to after dying? Is this reality?

The questions came in droves. Why, of all ages, had she returned to twelve? Why not to her earliest childhood, or to the years of her adulthood? If a miracle could be granted at all, there were a hundred other miracles to choose from — why, of every possible shape, had the miracle taken the form of regression?

Diana wanted, above all else, to be rid of that monster.

That pitiful boy would slay the dragon, ascend his kingdom's throne, come here, trample this land underfoot, and take his revenge. Worse — in the midst of it all, he would seize Diana and make her his bride. He would turn her into a living corpse, and in the end he would drive her to her own death.

Midway through her prayers, Diana clutched her belly. Remembering the little life that had lodged there for so short a time, she closed her eyes. She never wanted it repeated. Never.

So she asked, desperate and fervent:

'How can I stop all of this?'

But even after a long while, no answer came. Of course not. As if god would stoop to reply. Turning to god for answers had been a mistake from the very start. Diana was just pushing herself to her feet when—

Startled by the voice boring into her skull, Diana jerked her head up and looked wildly around. But the prayer room held no one but her. What was that? Is this the oracle the priests claim to hear? Did god truly answer me? God exists—!

And then the god's voice came again.

The blood cannot be stopped? What is this—

"O God! What is the meaning of—!"

"No! Please, no!"

She screamed until her voice tore, but this was no conversation — it was prophecy, and a sentence passed down. Her body shook and shook. I will not be able to escape. Had she truly just heard an oracle? The oracle said to come only to the chosen — and she had heard it.

Diana's heart began to pound. If this was no dream, she had thought, then god might yet give her some answer — and she had been precisely right. This was no 'dream.' It was the reality of her second life. And god had said she could not stop it.

Who is the murderer cloaked in a million bloods?

She thought it through, trembling from head to foot. She didn't know who it was. But one thing was certain—

The Dragonslayer.

The Dragonslayer was Giscard. Giscard, who had fled the estate as a child, was said to have overthrown Fafnir — the wicked evil dragon whose name had risen in Farnborough's Dragon Valley, a creature of deadly venom — and to have inherited the throne of Lodbrok.

And he will look upon me?

She shook.

"This is too cruel!"

Diana's cry rang out through the temple — and only a hollow echo answered her. Then came a voice like a single shaft of light.

It cannot be changed, and yet it will change? What did that mean? Diana's face twisted in anguish. She could feel fate striding closer with every breath.

"What do you mean, change?! You just said it cannot be changed!"

…….

It felt as though a blood-drenched Giscard stood at her back. Outside the temple, rain had begun to fall, though she couldn't say when.

Was that... encouragement? The god's dispassionate voice seemed to take on warmth at its edges. Diana's heart, steeped in despair, found a measure of stillness again.

"Then tell me, O God — what will happen, will happen regardless?"

"But within it — am I meant to change something?"

"When you say I am right — does that mean I may go where I wish?"

God gave no answer. But no less a being than 'god' had deigned to speak to her. And in truth, what god had said was only self-evident. Diana knew the future. That was precisely why it could change.

The voice felt, somehow, warm. Diana could not feel it.

The right path.

Diana murmured the words blankly. Ever since leaving the temple, her eyes had gone hollow and distant. If fate could not be changed, why had she been sent back at all? What did it mean — it cannot be changed, and yet it changes?

The prophecies of god are absolute. She had read any number of foolish fables about souls who spurned a prophecy only to walk it through to the letter. The king who cast out his son at the words "your son will kill you" died by that son's hand. The woman told that marriage would make her wretched fled marriage, and became wretched still.

Now she, too, had received an 'oracle.' God's prophecy fulfills itself one way or another — and the more cruelly you try to bar its road, the more cruelly it coils around you.

Diana rose to her feet. It seemed she would have to face the young monster. Giscard. She wanted to run from it; she had to walk into it. Her fists clenched hard.

If he could not be found in the main house, it meant he was somewhere else entirely. When the maids pleaded ignorance, a cold unease crawled up her spine on instinct.

Her father was away from the estate, and Emil had gone to play at another noble's house. She didn't want to keep track of her, but Mirva, too, was out. Which meant there was no one left under that roof to stop her.

She went hunting for Giscard — the front garden, the rear garden, even the stables. The servants went ashen and tried to hold the young lady back.

"The slave wouldn't mind his betters, so he's being broken in."

"What?"

"Slaves are meant to be broken in, by nature. Why would you go looking for a creature like that?"

She found him in the end. Giscard hung in a storeroom beside the weapons depot.

How steep was the price of turning away. Of course, her facing it now changed nothing — there was nothing she could actually do. Even so, helplessness closed over her like water. Shirtless, his hands bound, Giscard hung from the ceiling. The body beneath was skin stretched over bone.

"Aigoo, my lady! This is no sight for you! You should only ever look at what is lovely and fair—"

"What is this? A slave brand?"

"Pardon? Y-yes..."

Across his bared back was seared a brand, its edges still fresh. At his throat, the magic-bound restraint collar; between his teeth, a gag — and the gag had been dyed dark with blood.

Diana closed her eyes.

When she had first met Giscard in her past life, he had already been 'broken in' to some degree. She had simply never known that violence this savage existed.

Having just lost her mother, she had been drowning in her own grief. A delicately raised princess of twelve would never have stumbled into filth like this unless she went looking for it. Of course she wouldn't. The world shows only beautiful things to a girl it has decided is its flower.

She had half expected that seeing him reduced to such a wretched state might stir some flicker of elation. But no elation came of that hollow vengeance. She had no taste for such sadism. Diana bit her lip.

I know, Giscard. Of course you had to take your revenge.

The perpetrator's family squeezed her eyes shut before her victim. But she had chosen to change.

"Treat him."

"...Pardon?"

Fate cannot be changed — and yet it changes. Diana chose to walk the right path.