“Sleep well, my little princess… Sleep deeply. Don’t wake until the moon has climbed high and awakened your pure heart… Sleep tight, baby girl. You are our light of salvation…”
Who is it?
Who is singing?
“Rise… Rise, good girl… My precious daughter, remember this well: never shed a tear, and above all, never speak without good reason. Forget who you are until the right time comes…”
Rise… Is that me?
Why do I have to do that?
Who are you?
BOOM!!!
The corridor shook violently beneath the devastating force of the magical blast.
“Go, Lucia! I entrust the baby to you. Go—don’t look back!”
Go? Where? What about you?
Why is the smell of blood so thick and sharp?
What in the world is happening?
GRAAAH!!!
“Catch that bitch! Cut her throat and take the baby alive!”
“Shh… My princess… Please don’t cry. Just endure a little longer. Lucia will take you somewhere safe.”
Lucia is bleeding so much…
Lucia! Don’t run that way! Come back! We can hide together!
Lucia!
THUD!
The smell of fresh blood sprayed across the rocky corner, swallowing an entire strip of her long dress.
“Aaaa!!!”
Franziska jolted awake.
A violent spasm clenched around her heart, accompanied by the clammy chill of sweat spilling down the back of her neck. She lay pressed against the stone mattress, her chest heaving in broken rhythms, her breath coming in frantic gasps like someone who had just surfaced from the bottom of a deep abyss.
“Ha… It’s that… strange dream again…”
She let out a long, dry breath and raised a trembling hand to gently clutch her aching forehead, as though thousands of nails had been driven into it. The dizziness and bitter aftertaste still lingered in her throat, but all she could do was bite her lip and patiently wait for them to subside.
This had been happening repeatedly for years, ever since Franziska turned eight.
It was familiar enough to be painful. She could almost predict every person who would appear, every word they would whisper, and even the merciless events that would follow. She knew she would once again stand there, helplessly watching Lucia—the head maid who carried her away to escape—have her throat bitten through by a magical beast, again and again, hundreds of thousands of times in the darkness.
In that endlessly repeating nightmare, Franziska was nothing more than an invisible observer.
After witnessing it countless times, she knew that Lucia had been her family’s loyal head maid; she knew that the child sleeping soundly in that tightly wrapped diaper was herself. She had also realized a bitter truth: she had never been an abandoned child, unloved by everyone as the rumors claimed.
Her true family had been attacked and brutally slaughtered on a single blood-soaked night. While her father and brothers risked their lives to fight back and prolong each passing breath, her gravely wounded mother had been forced to entrust her month-old daughter to the maid, placing in her hands a hope of survival as fragile as a spider’s thread.
For years, Franziska had been forced to watch her father, mother, and brothers struggle one by one amid a sea of fire until their final drops of blood ran dry and they collapsed. She could do nothing. Even their faces were always hidden behind a thick veil of black mist.
“Who am I, really?
What was the attack in my dream? Why didn’t the Royal Palace of Sneica send reinforcements?”
Those questions rose again and again, like a curse clinging to Franziska’s heart and slowly burrowing into every fiber of her flesh, blood, and bone.
She stared fixedly at the exquisitely carved iris branch on the ceiling. Only an empty, nameless loneliness remained in her chest.
Compared to the years of her childhood, when she had yearned for love, hungered for the warmth of a family, and deceived herself, the blood-and-fire-ravaged ruins that appeared in that dream were her true home.
Not this luxurious, magnificent, yet cruel mansion.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
The harsh, grating sound of someone pounding on the door made Franziska’s heart give a slight jump, decisively pulling her from her drifting thoughts. Immediately afterward, a cold, mechanical maid’s voice came from outside:
“Miss Franziska, it’s almost time for morning prayers. You have fifteen minutes to bathe and prepare properly. Duchess Rebecca cannot wait too long.”
Franziska did not answer. She paid no attention to the servant’s contemptuous, disrespectful attitude outside and simply stepped down from the bed, even though her mind was still spinning with dizziness.
After leaving her curt reminder, the maid said nothing more. Her dry footsteps quickly faded into the distance.
In truth, it wasn’t just that maid. None of the servants in this mansion needed to truly respect Franziska as a genuine mistress.
Franziska was merely the child adopted from an orphanage by Lady Catrina Damaris Crozier, the legal wife of Duke Crozier, the true master of this fortress.
This mansion was home to the legitimate-blooded members of the direct line of House Crozier—those who possessed the proud Black leopard bloodline. That blood had endured for hundreds of years, from the founding of the Kingdom of Sneica to the present day.
Throughout the entire Crozier domain, even the residents living within the fortress carried the blood of leopards.
Except for her.
An unknown fawn, not even old enough to have fully grown its antlers, living among a pride of savage leopards and still growing up safely—it was an exceedingly strange thing.
If Franziska herself had not possessed something of value to the Duke and Duchess’s only biological daughter, she would have become food for these wild beasts long ago.