Because Deharmont—
so brilliant,
so lofty—
had fallen.
Because it had been so high,
the shock was great enough that it could no longer rise.
&
The collapse of Deharmont.
When I heard the news,
I could not say anything for a long while.
I was stunned.
My mind had heard the words, but I could not accept them at all.
Deharmont?
That Deharmont?
The house that held the kingdom’s purse strings,
the house even the kingdom could not rashly make an enemy of if it set its mind to it.
It had fallen?
Aileen’s reaction was no different.
Under normal circumstances, she should have been the first to analyze the situation, but the moment she heard the news, all she did was gape.
Even her mind could not comprehend it.
We headed straight for the Kerenia territory.
The carriage ran without rest.
Day passed and night came,
and it did not stop even when the horses were breathing roughly.
Then, about a week after Deharmont had collapsed,
we arrived in Kerenia.
At first, I thought we had come to the wrong place.
It had been a territory that shone so brilliantly.
Merchant company flags had hung on every street,
and carriages and people had never ceased to fill the square.
Every shop had been brightly lit,
and the faces of the people of the territory had carried pride in living here.
But now it was different.
The light had gone out.
Shop doors were half closed,
and in the square, there were more people packing their belongings than selling goods.
Someone was loading blankets and pots onto a cart,
and someone kept looking back while holding a child’s hand.
People leaving.
People preparing to leave.
And people who could not leave, standing frozen where they were.
In the air of Kerenia was mixed the same damp smell I had smelled in the Phil territory.
I could not tear my eyes away from the scenery of the Kerenia territory visible through the carriage window.
It truly felt as if I had been struck on the head with a hammer.
Aileen said nothing either.
She was gripping the carriage window frame with her fingers.
Perhaps because she was holding on too tightly, her fingertips had turned white.
A short while later, the carriage stopped in front of the Deharmont mansion.
There, the shock came over me once more.
The mansion was unchanged.
The tall gate.
The long wall.
The well-trimmed path.
Nothing had disappeared.
And yet it was dead.
Like a space where no one lived.
There were no soldiers guarding the entrance,
and no servants came forward to check the carriage.
Dry leaves that had not been cleared away were piled before the gate.
We got down from the carriage and opened the gate ourselves.
Creak.
The sound seemed strangely loud.
When we stepped inside,
the once-spacious mansion looked oddly small.
It had certainly been so large it was suffocating when I first came.
People, light, fragrance, sound—
it had been a place filled to the brim with everything.
When we went a little farther in, the garden we saw gave the same impression.
A place where flowers of every color had once bloomed thickly.
A garden that servants had tended every day so not even a single blossom was out of place.
Now the petals drooped limply.
Withered stems were tangled together,
and dry leaves were pressed into the soil.
It seemed as if no one had watered it for several days.
The moment we walked a little farther in, the two of us stopped in surprise.
“It isn’t over yet!”
From inside the mansion burst a voice close to a shriek.
“I! Do you know how much I scattered!”
A sound that could not be distinguished as anger, desperation, or pleading.
It was a scream.
The fact that Deharmont had fallen struck me once again.
Aileen moved again with a stiff face, and I followed her.
When we entered the mansion, the servants who had once been so numerous were nowhere to be seen.
As we walked through the lobby, we found a maid in the corridor over there.
She was trudging along.
Her clothes were neat, but her eyes were unfocused.
The cloth in her hand hung so limply it was dragging along the floor.
“Where is Seraphinrie?”
When I asked, the maid raised her head a beat late.
“Probably... in the study.”
As we headed toward the study,
the family head’s screams could still be heard.
“Call them back! I told you to call them all back!”
The sound struck the corridor
and echoed throughout the mansion.
“It isn’t over yet! I said it isn’t over!”
That scream made the reality of Deharmont even clearer.
A short while later, the door to the study we arrived at was open.
Inside was Seraphinrie.
“...”
“...”
The moment we saw her, we could not go in right away.
Seraphinrie was sitting in front of the desk.
Ledgers lay open on the desk,
but she was not reading them.
She was simply looking at them.
At numbers that no longer had any meaning.
The sight was shocking.
Someone who had been so dazzling.
Her red hair had always shone like flame,
and even the hem of her clothes had carried confidence.
Even when she spoke a single word, she had possessed the leisure of looking down on others,
and the fingertips that turned the ledgers had never once trembled.
And yet.
Now her red hair was dull and tangled,
dark shadows lay beneath her eyes,
and the clothes that must have once been luxurious were wrinkled as they hung on her body.
There were even dried ink stains spread across the ends of her sleeves.
More than anything, the problem was her eyes.
In Seraphinrie’s eyes, there was no anger, no arrogance.
They were simply empty.
“Seraphinrie.”
Aileen called her carefully.
There was no response.
Aileen let out a sigh and slowly approached.
Only then did Seraphinrie raise her head at the sound.
Seraphinrie, lifting her head slowly, first looked at Aileen.
Then, very slowly, her gaze turned toward me,
and the moment her eyes met mine, Seraphinrie flinched.
“Don’t look.”
Her voice was cracked.
“Don’t look...”
Those words were neither an order nor a request.
They were closer to a desperate scream.
Aileen looked back at me and nodded.
I looked at Seraphinrie for a moment, then closed the door for her.
Creak.
I was left alone outside the study.
***
“Seraphinrie.”
Aileen called her name again.
Seraphinrie laughed with her gaze fixed on the ledger.
A laugh that could not really be called laughter.
“It’s over.”
“You still have what your house sowed, don’t you?”
“We thought so too.”
Seraphinrie’s fingertips brushed the corner of the ledger.
It was paper she had turned through countless times.
The creases and ink stains caught against her fingertips.
“Even after receiving the royal decree, even then... we thought we would still have a foothold left to rise again. That Deharmont couldn’t vanish overnight. Because there were merchant companies we had saved, weaknesses we held, nobles whose breathing room we had opened up.”
The corner of her mouth twisted.
“Recovery?”
A hollow laugh escaped.
“What recovery.”
Seraphinrie slowly shook her head.
“All the things we sowed... they were meaningless.”
Her voice was low,
but sharp fragments were embedded within it.
“The leashes we believed we held were cut off by those very people as they fled, and the ones we raised up are now trying to put a rope around our necks.”
She laughed.
A laugh full of emptiness.
“I really... wondered if it was all right for them to be this cruel.”
Aileen said nothing.
Seraphinrie stared blankly at the ledger,
then very slowly closed her eyes.
“No.”
Her voice grew even smaller.
“It isn’t cruel. It’s only natural.”
Her fingertips trembled.
“We did the same.”
Only then did Aileen give a slight nod, as if in agreement.
“Because that’s the kind of world it is. I know it better than anyone.”
Seraphinrie lowered her head.
“But isn’t it funny? When it happened to me, it felt cruel.”
One drop.
A tear fell onto the ledger.
The ink spread ever so slightly,
and though Seraphinrie saw it, she could not move her hand.
Another drop.
Only then did she bite her lip.
“How humiliating. Seriously.”
Seraphinrie, whose pride had been so strong,
was crying in front of none other than Aileen.
Aileen moved as if to approach her, then stopped.
She could not comfort her carelessly.
Because she knew Seraphinrie better than anyone.
The comfort she offered might instead become poison to her now.
It was then.
“House Deharmont!”
Someone’s shout came from outside.
At that moment, Seraphinrie’s shoulders trembled beyond words.
Aileen wondered what was happening and approached the window, only to see a group that appeared to be commoners standing there.
Some seemed drunk,
and some wore expressions somewhere between anger and mockery,
but all of them looked filled with human ugliness.
“I heard you people were originally commoners!”
“Acting so high and mighty when you came from the same place as us!?”
“Ha! Aren’t you commoners now too? That makes us the same as Deharmont!”
Laughter burst out.
“Then can we become Deharmont too? Wahahaha!”
“Come to think of it, isn’t the name Deharmont tacky too? It sounds like a name made by people desperate to look noble somehow!”
“That’s right! It is! Hahaha! Commoners trying somehow to look even more noble, ahahaha!”
The secret Deharmont had hidden so thoroughly.
Commoners.
They had originally been of common birth.
The previous family head, Seraphinrie’s grandfather, had bought the title of baron and obtained the name of nobility.
But that fact had been buried so deeply that no one but the royal family could have known.
Only now did Aileen understand that this was what Baron had intended to do when he had threatened Seraphinrie.
At those shouts, Aileen’s eyes widened, and she looked at Seraphinrie.
Seraphinrie wrapped her arms around herself and trembled violently.
As if she did not want to hear because of fear and shame, she even covered her ears.
Commoner.
She could lose money, authority, even the mansion.
But blood.
The fact that traces of commoner blood were mixed into her own—
that was the one thing she had wanted to deny all her life.
“Isn’t it enough...”
Seraphinrie barely muttered.
“It’s already enough.”
She covered her ears even more, trembling with fear and shame.
“Did they really... have to drag me down that far?”
At that moment, Seraphinrie nearly collapsed from her chair, and Aileen approached and caught her.
“Seraphinrie!”
Seraphinrie raised her head and looked at Aileen.
Her eyes had lost their light.
“Don’t touch me.”
Her voice was hollow.
“Don’t touch someone with filthy blood flowing through her, Lady Aileen Belmardian.”
Aileen’s hand froze in place.
“Seraphinrie...”
What those words held was self-abasement.
The pride she had built all her life by looking down on others—
she had turned it on herself, driving it into her own heart.
Aileen lost her words.
Even she could no longer gauge just how great a shock and pain Seraphinrie was experiencing.
And so Aileen was afraid now.
For the first time, she felt fear toward someone.
Toward the existence called the Old Dynasty.
Just how extraordinary were they?
To bring down Deharmont, which had been so great, like this.
And so thoroughly at that.
So miserably.
They had even thrown it down before everyone’s eyes so that nothing remained.
So that it could never rise again,
so that it could not even lift its head.
***
It had fallen?
Deharmont?
Why?
I could not understand.
Even in my past life, there had been an incident involving Deharmont.
There had certainly been a problem,
and it had wavered.
But it had not fallen.
At least, that was how it had gone in the flow I knew.
And yet for it to fall so suddenly like this.
It was utterly bewildering.
Then Aileen came out of the study.
She looked at me, said nothing in particular,
and let out a small sigh.
That sigh alone told me a little of what had happened inside.
“I need to return now.”
“...”
“Because of this incident, we’ll probably be extremely busy for a while as well.”
That would be true.
There was no law saying that what had happened to Deharmont could not happen to Belmardian.
All the nobles were likely in a state of emergency now.
And that was not all.
Deharmont.
There was no one who did not know how large the void left behind by its disappearance would be.
Military provisions, promissory notes, taxes, collateral, and so on.
An invisible war would begin over that empty space from now on.
And Belmardian was not a house that would merely watch that war from the sidelines.
Even knowing that, Aileen had rushed here in a single breath for Seraphinrie’s sake.
That alone showed how much she had acted for Seraphinrie.
But she could not delay any longer.
It was cruel, but there was no helping it.
Because that was the world of nobles.
On the other hand,
I stayed in Kerenia for a few more days.
It was not because I wanted to meet Seraphinrie or because I thought I had to comfort her.
To begin with, there was no help I could give her, nor would I be of any help.
Deharmont, which originally should not have fallen.
For some reason, I felt as if this was my fault.
The shock of it made it impossible for me to leave right away.