Previously
As Irenia reads 'The Ugly Duckling', she falls into a vivid, terrifying nightmare where she is a rejected monster who attempts suicide by drowning, only to be forcibly held underwater by an unknown force.
Then I felt something touch my cheek. I opened my eyes at the sound of a soft smack.
“Huh?”
Caesar had kissed my cheek. For some reason, the blood rushed to my face. A moment later, his lips touched my other cheek.
“Ah… ah…”
Seeing Caesar break into a broad grin, I realized my face must have looked terribly foolish.
It had only been a peck on the cheek—the very one I had taught him before—so why had my imagination wandered elsewhere?
“Ah, ah…”
I felt so dizzy my head threatened to spin away. I wasn't even aware of the silly sounds tumbling from my mouth.
“Hehe.”
“Ha, pfft!”
Laughter burst from both of us. We kept laughing as we looked at each other’s faces. The tension drained right out of my body.
I sprawled where I was and buried my face in the pillow. My shoulders shook with laughter that refused to stop.
“Ren…”
Perhaps I looked strange, shifting from tears to laughter. Caesar lay down beside me as well, his face etched with worry.
For some reason, a streak of mischief tugged at me, and I gave his nose a gentle pinch.
“Oh.”
Caesar scrunched up his nose. It looked so adorable that I burst into laughter all over again.
Nightmares haunted me many times after that. The dreams changed each time, but they were always nightmares. Sometimes the scenes were completely unfamiliar, and other times they repeated over and over.
Yet the one thing I learned from those dreams was this: I had become a candidate for the imperial throne, only to be murdered by someone.
“Hah, hah…”
My breath came in ragged gasps. My sweat-soaked nightgown twisted around my neck like a choking noose. It was a suffocating, terrible sensation.
“Are you all right?”
“Ah, yes, I’m all right.”
As always, the one who woke me was Caesar. His red eyes swam into my field of vision. I didn't know why, but whenever I looked into his eyes, reality seemed to snap back instantly.
Those crimson eyes whispered to me, again and again, that what I had seen was merely a dream, and that this was where I truly belonged.
Whenever I was trapped in a nightmare, he always came to wake me. Perhaps that was why I had begun to feel at ease in these quarters.
“Thank you.”
“Mmh.”
After I woke, he would always pull me into a tight embrace. Nor was that all. Something warm would brush against my cheek. He seemed to have misunderstood the peck on the cheek I had taught him.
Perhaps because it started off on the wrong foot, he had come to believe this ritual had to follow waking me up. I tried to correct him several times, but it wasn't easy.
His behavior was somewhat embarrassing, yet the moment his lips touched my cheek, all the dark, lingering feelings melted away.
“Thank you, I feel a little calmer now.”
Caesar, however, seemed to have no intention of letting me go.
In the end, I had no choice but to lie back in his arms, powerless to resist. The thought crossed my mind that I might smell unpleasant from the sweat, but it dissolved into our mingling breaths. My breathing steadied, and my wildly pounding heart gradually slowed.
“…Why do I keep having these dreams?”
The thought struck me out of nowhere, and I murmured it aloud. Did these dreams mean something real? Or were they just hallucinations conjured by my own mind?
Yet that wasn't the only question. How did Caesar know every single time that I was having a nightmare, waking me up without fail?
“How do you always know?”
I shifted around in his embrace. Our eyes met.
“Huh? How do you know I’m having a nightmare and come to wake me?”
Had I been screaming in my sleep? But Caesar only smiled innocently. A moment later, he said:
“Just know.”
“Just?”
When I asked, he nodded with a confident smile. How could he ‘just know’?
As usual, Caesar’s words were difficult to parse. Gazing at him, I felt like the only one taking it seriously, and I let out a sigh.
“Right… maybe you just know.”
Giving up on trying to understand, I closed my eyes. The moment they shut, a heavy wave of accumulated exhaustion washed over me. Lately, I had grown terrified of even sleeping.
Because of the recurring nightmares, I could no longer sleep deeply and was perpetually exhausted. During the day, whenever an opportunity presented itself, I would doze off. But the nightmares made no distinction between night and day; if anything, they grew more frequent over time. Even so, having him beside me brought comfort. Knowing he would wake me gave me a measure of peace.
Yet the chill creeping up my spine had not faded. Perhaps because the dreams themselves were so unbearable. The only truth I had gleaned from those recurring nightmares was this:
“They were murdered…”
If I hadn't lost my mind. If these dreams, like the one that revealed the thief, reflected the truth…
Then perhaps all four previous candidates for the imperial throne had been murdered by someone.
And these dreams were showing me how it happened. Hands pressing a pillow over their faces, a hand shoving one brutally, another forcing a head down into a pond, or offering poisoned food.
Death. So many deaths, unspeakably agonizing. Inescapable deaths, without a moment to flee.
“…Who could have done such a thing?”
They were all my age. In similar circumstances. They had dreams and hopes. Yet their lives ended in the prime of youth with such tragic fates.
I felt their agony, and it tormented me. They had wanted to live. But a single wicked hand had stolen their lives away. Who was it? Who committed these crimes? And why?
“The evidence must be gone by now…”
The deaths had taken place inside the Imperial Palace. If there had been any evidence, the culprit would have been uncovered long ago.
“Yet everyone brushed it aside, calling it a curse…”
Even I had believed that. No action had ever been taken beyond muttering the word ‘curse.’ And so the truth remained buried.
“If only there were a single witness…”
At that very moment, a flash struck my mind. There was a witness. Right before my eyes.
I lifted my head sharply and looked at Caesar. He was gazing back at me placidly.
“Caesar?”
“Mmh?”
“Do you remember?”
He tilted his head in silence, as though my words made no sense to him. Realizing I had spoken too abruptly without context, I adjusted my question.
“I mean… the previous candidates for the throne.”
He merely kept up a gentle smile, offering no answer.
Yet if my dreams held any truth, the person who had been beside them at the moment of their deaths… had been none other than Caesar.
“I mean… someone died here. People you knew, the candidates for the imperial throne.”
Then his lips parted slowly:
“Women?”
Suddenly, an indescribable chill swept over me, prickling down my spine. I nodded cautiously and asked again:
“Yes, that's right. Women. Do you remember?”
“Died?”
The way he spoke was hardly different from his usual habit of echoing my words. But having found my very first thread, I couldn't back down now, so I pressed on.
“That's right, they were killed by a wicked person.”
“Wicked?”
“Yes, someone very bad.”
And before disappointment could set in, he spoke:
“Splash, splash, in the water.”
At that moment, a faint shiver crawled up the back of my neck.
“Yes, in the water!”
I couldn't stop my voice from rising. Perhaps Caesar had seen the girl who drowned in the pond.
“Splash, splash.”
His eyes curved into a smile. Maybe, just maybe, he had witnessed the moment of death. My nerves tightening, I grabbed his arm and began shaking it, urging him to go on.
“The ducklings flapping in the water followed their mother, crying quack, quack.”
“…Huh?”
The sentence Caesar had just uttered wasn't unfamiliar to me at all. It was a passage from the fairy tale I had read to him over and over.
“Quack, quack.”
Then a broad smile broke across his face, brimming with confidence and pride. He looked as though he had achieved something magnificent. Helpless, a hollow laugh slipped past my lips.
“Haha… ducklings.”
How great my hopes had been, and how staggering the disappointment. A tremble crept into my voice without my realizing it.
“So… it was just the story of the ducks, nothing more.”
What a fool I was. What on earth had I been expecting?
Yet in stark contrast to my disappointment, Caesar went right on reciting other passages from the same story without a pause.
“The Ugly Duckling looked at its reflection in the water and sighed sorrowfully.”
Just a moment ago he had been reciting from the very beginning of the book, and now he was in the middle of it. He didn't even care about the order.
Looking at this, it became painfully clear that expecting a coherent answer from him had been nothing more than an illusion.
Suddenly, Caesar buried his head into my chest, nuzzling against me like a young child.
“What did I do wrong, to be born so ugly?”
His voice was muffled, lost in the folds of my clothes and coming out indistinct. Though he was merely echoing words from a children's story, I felt as if something from his true depths had seeped into me. A heavy ache settled over my heart.
And so, I couldn't help but answer him…
FADE OUT