“Anni!!”
Riersha jolted upright, arms flailing as she wrenched herself out of sleep. Her nightgown was soaked through with cold sweat.
Gasping, she lunged for the window and threw it open.
The Arachrene ducal castle stretched out beneath the dim early sky, whole and undisturbed.
“Th-thank goodness.”
It had all been a dream.
She was lifting the back of her hand to wipe the beads of cold sweat from her forehead when—
“…Huh?”
Riersha’s eyes went wide.
Her hand was small. Plump and short-fingered, nearly a full span smaller than it should have been.
And it wasn’t just her hand. Her entire body felt shrunken. The world looked different from this height — lower, wider, all wrong.
Bewildered, she scrambled to make sense of what was happening and bolted for the mirror.
She didn’t make it two steps before her feet tangled beneath her and she crashed to the floor with a loud thud.
Her center of gravity had shifted without warning. This tiny, unfamiliar body refused to cooperate.
“Wh-what is this…?”
The pain was brief. She lifted her head, looked into the mirror — and her mouth fell open.
Staring back at her was a small child with round crimson eyes, chubby cheeks framed by a short pink bob, and an expression of pure, bewildered shock.
“…I can’t b’lieve it.”
She muttered it like someone half-asleep, and the little girl in the mirror mouthed the exact same words.
She had gone back to the past. And not just a little — all the way back, to when she was barely more than a toddler.
⁂
Was any of it real?
Riersha didn’t move from in front of the mirror until daylight crept through the curtains.
A maid stopped in briefly to bring her morning meal and gave her a strange look. Riersha didn’t care.
When hunger finally caught up with her, she turned toward the breakfast tray.
…I have a nut allergy.
She let out a long, slow breath.
On the sparse, meager tray sat a single roll of bread — studded with nuts.
With practiced, instinctive fingers, she began picking them out one by one.
It was strange, really. She hadn’t known about the allergy at the time. She’d only discovered it because, around this age, she had eaten bread without a second thought and become terribly ill afterward.
She was pulling the last few pieces out when her eyes went still.
“It’s the same.”
The same situation. The same bread. The same moment, repeating itself exactly as it had before.
She couldn’t tell anymore whether this was a dream or reality. Her grip loosened, and the bread dropped from her fingers.
“It’s real. The family really did fall…”
Her memories of everything up to age ten — they were too vivid, too precise, too painful to dismiss as a dream.
But accepting all of it as truth came with questions she couldn’t answer.
How could a family this powerful collapse so suddenly — and because of me?
The Arachrene family, who had once commanded the entire empire, was destined to fall in just a few years. If she told anyone that, they would think she had lost her mind. It was the kind of thing that defied imagination even for the person who had lived through it.
They said it was my fault. They were certain of it.
That was the part she still couldn’t wrap her head around. That it was her — no one else, but her — who had brought the family to ruin.
She had spent ten years as little more than a ghost in this household. What possible influence could she have had? How could someone so utterly invisible become the cause of a dynasty’s destruction?
And if that were true — if her absence was all it would take — then could everyone else be saved?
Riersha quietly curled her small hand into a fist.
She wanted to protect them. All of them.
But I never awakened my ability, not even by the time I turned ten…
How was she supposed to protect anyone?
By custom, those of Arachrene blood who had not awakened their power by the age of four were quietly written off. No one had ever told her this directly, but she knew — because it was right around that age that she had been cut off from the family entirely.
“…Still. I have to protect them.”
Oberon had never told her the full truth about the family’s troubles, not even at the very end. But one thing was certain: her presence in this house was a poison.
“’Kay then.”
If that was the case, she simply had to leave before Oberon ever had reason to betray them.
She had always known, somewhere beneath the surface. She had always sensed how much Oberon despised her.
The weight of his gaze had been almost physical — sharp enough to prickle against her skin wherever she went. She had never imagined it would one day lead somewhere irreversible.
But now I know that it will.
Riersha glanced around the room and spotted a scrap of fabric peeking out from the corner of the wardrobe drawer. She grabbed it with both hands and tugged it free.
⁂
With her bundle neatly wrapped and tucked under her arm, Riersha crept through the corridors, careful not to make a sound.
If I can get through that forest, there has to be a way out on the other side.
When the castle had burned, Ricador had taken her in that direction. Through the trees.
That forest had to be the path that connected the grounds to the outside world.
She had wondered once — back then, as a child — why anyone would choose to live so close to such a dark and forbidding wood when there were plenty of other empty estates on Arachrene land. She had eventually concluded it was because her grandfather found her so thoroughly unpleasant that he wanted her as far from the main house as possible.
But right now, she was grateful for the proximity.
No one paid her any attention. If she was careful, she could slip out without anyone noticing she was gone.
“Nngh, it’s heavy!”
The heirs of the Arachrene family would be in their lessons at this hour — gathered in the Tower of Truth, as it was called.
Once upon a time, Riersha would have snuck in and listened from the shadows. Not today.
Today, she was leaving.
“Why is it so heavy?”
Her arms were already aching and she’d barely gone anywhere.
She looked down at her bundle with a miserable pout.
She had packed carefully — things that would sell for a decent price outside the castle walls. She’d heard, through the quiet murmuring of the maids, that toys and trinkets belonging to noble children went for surprisingly good money.
That was the kind of thing you learned when no one thought you were worth speaking to directly.
