“I’m sorry, I’m late for the meeting.”
Captain Claire, a handsome young man with blue eyes, was about to leave her behind.
"I had a huge blast today. Do you want to join me? The theme is Finding Your True Self."
The one who caught him was Princess Grace, whose childish temperament had been causing the King a lot of trouble at the time. Leaving the palace alone, she had escaped for the first time in her life, and the handsome, platinum-haired young man who had rescued her. To the seventeen-year-old Princess, who had always wanted to be childish, this situation felt particularly special. Everyone has moments when they fantasize about the romance and romance of novels and plays, and she was no different. The memory of gazing blankly into his eyes, thinking they were like the clear sky, faded, and the voice of reality began to ring.
"In the end, I treated you to dinner. You didn't even realize you were being pickpocketed. I didn't know you were a Princess. I only caught a glimpse of you from afar during a royal event, so I didn't recognize you. A Princess of a country wouldn't walk around alone, unassuming, without makeup, and without an escort. You looked like an ordinary, lively, and beautiful woman back then."
The Queen's lips twisted unpleasantly, as if she didn't want to hear any more.
"Bringing up the past won't change anything. Even if you try to appeal by presenting a relationship riddled with dirty infidelity and lust, the inside is just garbage."
“If that day had been the last, if I hadn’t known you were a Princess, it would have just ended up as a fragmentary memory.”
From that day on, the two continued to encounter each other, but it couldn't be called a coincidence. Since no one was listening, the Queen readily admitted it.
"Yes, I continued to sneak out of the palace alone to see you. Agnes Harrison, a maid and knight, helped me. You bribed her to carry out your plan..."
No. It was entirely her will. Agnes was having a hard time trying to dissuade her while secretly helping her. The past, twisted and distorted by resentment and hatred, was returning to its rightful place. The Queen paused, frowning. She recalled the moment in her youth when she had made an irreversible choice.
“Captain, you’re leaving in three days?”
"Yes, Miss Gracie. I've come to assist Medea. I plan to participate in a naval battle in one of the warm southern countries ruled by this place, and then return to Belford."
“Don’t go, it’s too dangerous.”
She actually hated the idea of him going back. She just wanted to be with the man she loved.
"I'm a soldier who protects people. The times we spent together were truly enjoyable. You reminded me of my sister."
“...Are you saying I was like a younger sibling to you?”
"Yes, I have a younger sibling about your age. He left the capital after marrying into a politically arranged marriage early, so we don't see each other often. When I was little, I used to read to her and play with her often."
Why was she so angry and emotional back then? She couldn't even think about whether it was the man or her younger sister who had been in an arranged marriage at an early age.
"Captain Claire, I'm ordering you not to go, as the Princess of the Medea United Kingdom. I will take responsibility for ensuring that you do so. I will instruct the commander to deploy another officer from the Union Command Headquarters in Loganfield to the naval battle in your stead. I need you by my side."
When the woman, who unfiltered the true face of authoritarian royalty, issued an overbearing order, Captain Claire's face turned pale. The Princess, who had transformed like everyone else, had unfiltered her royal manner. It was she who had pushed through, cloaking her arrogant power in the guise of love.
The young man's blue eyes wavered like waves. Looking back, he wasn't surprised at her identity and the revelation of her affection, but rather tension and fear. Did the young man, Winston Clare, have a choice? It wasn't that he didn't reveal his marriage, but perhaps he couldn't. Regardless of how his feelings might have been twisted later on.
It was merely a common feeling between a man and a woman, yet the two ultimately found themselves facing each other as the monarch and the criminal of the same nation. The admiral stepped closer to the bars, his haggard face cast a shadow from them. From another perspective, it was like the dim light of an incandescent lamp. He smiled bitterly.
"...Pure wishes and emotions, over time, degenerated into greed, desire, and resentment born of frustration. Knowing I could never reach you no matter how high I climbed, I sought to at least draw your gaze down. I longed to be acknowledged by Your Majesty, who met my gaze. I dared."
He trailed off, his mouth agape. The Queen's face was devoid of all emotion, yet she was constantly being dragged back to the past, to that moment of regret. The sight of him confessing his love, the golden autumn weather that enveloped them, the feeling of the cool breeze cooling her flushed cheeks, the overwhelming emotion, all brought back to her mind as if it were yesterday.
“I dare say, I love you, Princess. This is my true heart.”
Memories tend to fragment into various shapes as time passes. The sharp shards that pierce the heart are dismissed as wounds, while the beautiful pieces are called memories and placed in a delicate jewelry box. The only difference is that they are all the same fragments. There were certainly moments that felt as radiant as she was certain they were love.
But there was a moment that finally forced her to fully acknowledge that it wasn't love. It was when, after the deaths of the King and Queen, she heard his true story of poisoning the ailing Crown Prince. She cried out in despair, asking him why he had done such a thing. Unable to punish him, lest he be suspected of complicity in the assassination attempt to seize the throne, the Queen's face paled as she recalled the pain and despair of that moment.
"After you killed my brother, you spewed out disgusting words, saying it was all for my sake. That you wanted to give me the queenship? That's not love. Absolutely not."
"Yes. It wasn't love. It was just a twisted, ugly desire."
"I'm glad you know, Winston Clare. Why did you take Diana, who was a newborn? If you wanted to use her to blackmail me, you would have acted long ago. If you thought it was useless, you would have killed her already. Why now, confessing to all your crimes and making a choice that's tantamount to suicide? I'm just confused."
"It was true that I intended to threaten Your Majesty. However, Your Majesty overcame the ordeal and grew stronger, possessing a cool-headedness and rationality that made all decisions based on principle. You became an ideal monarch, unwavering even with our daughter in my care. As I have confessed before, that plan became increasingly doomed to failure after the war, and it was a complete failure after Duke Noah Rotsilt took Diana away. Then, my eldest daughter, who had been my reason for living, died, leaving me with no more attachment to life."
Our daughter. The Queen recalled Diana, a girl who seemed beyond acquiescence and resignation, bordering on apathy, her face devoid of thought. Her voice trailed off, a faint slur.
“I want to hear your honest feelings one last time.”
The admiral wore a sad smile. After a moment of silence, he opened his dry lips.
“I’ve been waiting.”
His blue eyes, like that day in the past, were filled with a desperate light. Just as she was about to ask what it meant, the monarch's reason, which had been fiercely whipping her emotionally driven questions, finally silenced her. Her mind, suddenly cold, rang an alarm bell: facing a new past might just become another present, so now everything must end.
"Yes, I understand. I won't see you again, Winston Clare."
The Queen extended a beautiful, white hand toward the Admiral. His blue eyes widened in agitation as he saw the hand approaching through the bars. She brought out the conclusion she had been holding tightly to herself, as if mulling it over.
"You were my wrong choice, an irreversible mistake. I regret it. Of course, I can't erase the memories that pierce me to the core."
“Why didn’t you kill me sooner?”
The Queen didn't answer. Her slender fingers, thrust forcefully before the admiral, slowly uncurled. Something round fell from beneath the hand she'd been grasping. At first glance, it looked like a button, but it rolled two or three times on the cold stone floor of the prison.
"I regret that. So I'm going to make it seem like it never happened. As long as you live, you'll be my lifelong folly."
He bowed and made a farewell gesture.
"Finally, I'll tell you this: Frogen knows everything. I wish you good health. May God bless Your Majesty Queen Grace II, the Eternal Sun of Medea."
Queen Grace turned and left without a word. The admiral gazed calmly down at what had fallen before him. The potion she had handed him, the one that would kill his foolishness. He picked it up; his face lit up.
She was still a dishonest woman, then and now. Her blue eyes were round and round.
“That’s so typical of her.”
In the past, the admiral, convinced that his supporters would not tolerate a Princess who bore a child of an unknown father and might threaten the Princess's legacy, ordered Agnes to assassinate the Crown Prince. He rationalized that he simply wanted to protect her, help her become a worthy Queen, and gain recognition. But in return, he was met with the cold hatred of having killed her only brother.
Unable to accept the consequences, the admiral, overcome with resentment and injustice, committed another sin by bringing Diana to him and abusing her, ultimately paying the price for the loss of his beloved daughter, Celine. He acknowledged that all of this was the result of his sin of abandoning his family and pursuing greed and lust.
After Celine's funeral, he emptied himself of the waste products of his thoughts and gazed into the depths of his heart. One thing suddenly dawned on him. He loved the bold woman, Grace Spencer Mary, regardless of her royal titles or queenly titles. And the futile fact that he had lived his life in a futile struggle to reach someone unreachable.
Because he had been so intent on gaining approval from others without accepting himself, he hadn't realized it. After acknowledging all his flaws and emptying his mind of them, all that remained was a yearning to see the woman he longed for all his life, even just once. Therefore, this atonement was his way to see her one last time, and the only thing he could truly do for her.
"Celine, I've kept your will. Now I'll go see you."
Winston Clare, his expression serene, saw a childhood vision of Celine, smiling and reaching out to him. Only then did he abandon all worldly attachments and set out in search of his dead daughter.
Queen Grace straightened her back and walked proudly down the hallway, her graceful demeanor intact. Baroness Mason and her maids, waiting outside, followed her quietly, their footsteps muffled.
Why did you name her Diana?
The legend of the evening primrose, about a nymph who, supposedly adoring the stars, fell in love with the moon goddess Diana, ultimately incurring the god's wrath and being cast out, waiting for her until her death, was a tale he had told beneath the star-filled night sky. Even if the admiral died, every mention of Diana's name or sight of her face would haunt her, and she would never be able to erase her presence from her mind. This would have been the case regardless of whether the admiral or Diana lived or died.
"Captain, why did the nymph wait for the goddess Diana? Without going to see her first?"
“Because the place where the moon goddess is is so high and far away that no matter how hard I try, I can’t reach it.”
The Queen's footsteps suddenly stopped as she realized something.
"Yes, I see. That's why you showed up now, and why you revealed the truth."
And it was all to protect me, after all. How funny.
She stood frozen in place, then walked back to her destination as if nothing had happened. Leaving the incident behind, she headed to her seat in the palace, to the monarch's throne.
A few days later, on a rainy afternoon, Queen Grace sipped her tea and scanned the headlines on the front page of Medea.
"Admiral Winston Claire has died in custody. Investigations have revealed the presence of potassium cyanide, a substance used by prisoners to commit suicide, and it is believed to have been poisoned..."
She turned the newspaper to the next page without any hesitation.
"The false Princess of the Kingdom of Medea has been sentenced to death in the first trial. The Medea government has revealed the possibility that the Grandis and Winters families, high in the line of succession to the throne, were involved in the case, as they had repeatedly raised questions about the Princess's qualifications as Queen, using her mental illness as an excuse."
“I guess I should start now.”
After the Queen's soliloquy, rain pounded against the window. After a moment of focused gaze on the edge of the newspaper, the Queen slowly raised her head and called out to Baroness Mason.
"Zelda, we're holding a top-secret meeting regarding the next heir to the throne. Summon the Prime Minister."
Captain Claire, a handsome young man with blue eyes, was about to leave her behind.
"I had a huge blast today. Do you want to join me? The theme is Finding Your True Self."
The one who caught him was Princess Grace, whose childish temperament had been causing the King a lot of trouble at the time. Leaving the palace alone, she had escaped for the first time in her life, and the handsome, platinum-haired young man who had rescued her. To the seventeen-year-old Princess, who had always wanted to be childish, this situation felt particularly special. Everyone has moments when they fantasize about the romance and romance of novels and plays, and she was no different. The memory of gazing blankly into his eyes, thinking they were like the clear sky, faded, and the voice of reality began to ring.
"In the end, I treated you to dinner. You didn't even realize you were being pickpocketed. I didn't know you were a Princess. I only caught a glimpse of you from afar during a royal event, so I didn't recognize you. A Princess of a country wouldn't walk around alone, unassuming, without makeup, and without an escort. You looked like an ordinary, lively, and beautiful woman back then."
The Queen's lips twisted unpleasantly, as if she didn't want to hear any more.
"Bringing up the past won't change anything. Even if you try to appeal by presenting a relationship riddled with dirty infidelity and lust, the inside is just garbage."
“If that day had been the last, if I hadn’t known you were a Princess, it would have just ended up as a fragmentary memory.”
From that day on, the two continued to encounter each other, but it couldn't be called a coincidence. Since no one was listening, the Queen readily admitted it.
"Yes, I continued to sneak out of the palace alone to see you. Agnes Harrison, a maid and knight, helped me. You bribed her to carry out your plan..."
No. It was entirely her will. Agnes was having a hard time trying to dissuade her while secretly helping her. The past, twisted and distorted by resentment and hatred, was returning to its rightful place. The Queen paused, frowning. She recalled the moment in her youth when she had made an irreversible choice.
“Captain, you’re leaving in three days?”
"Yes, Miss Gracie. I've come to assist Medea. I plan to participate in a naval battle in one of the warm southern countries ruled by this place, and then return to Belford."
“Don’t go, it’s too dangerous.”
She actually hated the idea of him going back. She just wanted to be with the man she loved.
"I'm a soldier who protects people. The times we spent together were truly enjoyable. You reminded me of my sister."
“...Are you saying I was like a younger sibling to you?”
"Yes, I have a younger sibling about your age. He left the capital after marrying into a politically arranged marriage early, so we don't see each other often. When I was little, I used to read to her and play with her often."
Why was she so angry and emotional back then? She couldn't even think about whether it was the man or her younger sister who had been in an arranged marriage at an early age.
"Captain Claire, I'm ordering you not to go, as the Princess of the Medea United Kingdom. I will take responsibility for ensuring that you do so. I will instruct the commander to deploy another officer from the Union Command Headquarters in Loganfield to the naval battle in your stead. I need you by my side."
When the woman, who unfiltered the true face of authoritarian royalty, issued an overbearing order, Captain Claire's face turned pale. The Princess, who had transformed like everyone else, had unfiltered her royal manner. It was she who had pushed through, cloaking her arrogant power in the guise of love.
The young man's blue eyes wavered like waves. Looking back, he wasn't surprised at her identity and the revelation of her affection, but rather tension and fear. Did the young man, Winston Clare, have a choice? It wasn't that he didn't reveal his marriage, but perhaps he couldn't. Regardless of how his feelings might have been twisted later on.
Later, the naval officer Belford, whom Agnes Harrison loved and who was the biological father of the Groenendaal brothers, went to sea in place of Captain Claire and was killed in battle. This was also the reason Agnes Harrison came to assist Captain Claire. At the time, Queen Grace did not know that this man was the children's biological father. Neither Agnes nor her mother, the Queen, had revealed the children's true father. After leaving Belford, she married the Duke of Groenendaal, who publicly declared the two children his own, so she believed that to be the truth. It was a cruel fate.
"...Pure wishes and emotions, over time, degenerated into greed, desire, and resentment born of frustration. Knowing I could never reach you no matter how high I climbed, I sought to at least draw your gaze down. I longed to be acknowledged by Your Majesty, who met my gaze. I dared."
He trailed off, his mouth agape. The Queen's face was devoid of all emotion, yet she was constantly being dragged back to the past, to that moment of regret. The sight of him confessing his love, the golden autumn weather that enveloped them, the feeling of the cool breeze cooling her flushed cheeks, the overwhelming emotion, all brought back to her mind as if it were yesterday.
“I dare say, I love you, Princess. This is my true heart.”
Memories tend to fragment into various shapes as time passes. The sharp shards that pierce the heart are dismissed as wounds, while the beautiful pieces are called memories and placed in a delicate jewelry box. The only difference is that they are all the same fragments. There were certainly moments that felt as radiant as she was certain they were love.
But there was a moment that finally forced her to fully acknowledge that it wasn't love. It was when, after the deaths of the King and Queen, she heard his true story of poisoning the ailing Crown Prince. She cried out in despair, asking him why he had done such a thing. Unable to punish him, lest he be suspected of complicity in the assassination attempt to seize the throne, the Queen's face paled as she recalled the pain and despair of that moment.
"After you killed my brother, you spewed out disgusting words, saying it was all for my sake. That you wanted to give me the queenship? That's not love. Absolutely not."
"Yes. It wasn't love. It was just a twisted, ugly desire."
"I'm glad you know, Winston Clare. Why did you take Diana, who was a newborn? If you wanted to use her to blackmail me, you would have acted long ago. If you thought it was useless, you would have killed her already. Why now, confessing to all your crimes and making a choice that's tantamount to suicide? I'm just confused."
"It was true that I intended to threaten Your Majesty. However, Your Majesty overcame the ordeal and grew stronger, possessing a cool-headedness and rationality that made all decisions based on principle. You became an ideal monarch, unwavering even with our daughter in my care. As I have confessed before, that plan became increasingly doomed to failure after the war, and it was a complete failure after Duke Noah Rotsilt took Diana away. Then, my eldest daughter, who had been my reason for living, died, leaving me with no more attachment to life."
Our daughter. The Queen recalled Diana, a girl who seemed beyond acquiescence and resignation, bordering on apathy, her face devoid of thought. Her voice trailed off, a faint slur.
“I want to hear your honest feelings one last time.”
The admiral wore a sad smile. After a moment of silence, he opened his dry lips.
“I’ve been waiting.”
His blue eyes, like that day in the past, were filled with a desperate light. Just as she was about to ask what it meant, the monarch's reason, which had been fiercely whipping her emotionally driven questions, finally silenced her. Her mind, suddenly cold, rang an alarm bell: facing a new past might just become another present, so now everything must end.
"Yes, I understand. I won't see you again, Winston Clare."
The Queen extended a beautiful, white hand toward the Admiral. His blue eyes widened in agitation as he saw the hand approaching through the bars. She brought out the conclusion she had been holding tightly to herself, as if mulling it over.
"You were my wrong choice, an irreversible mistake. I regret it. Of course, I can't erase the memories that pierce me to the core."
“Why didn’t you kill me sooner?”
The Queen didn't answer. Her slender fingers, thrust forcefully before the admiral, slowly uncurled. Something round fell from beneath the hand she'd been grasping. At first glance, it looked like a button, but it rolled two or three times on the cold stone floor of the prison.
"I regret that. So I'm going to make it seem like it never happened. As long as you live, you'll be my lifelong folly."
He bowed and made a farewell gesture.
"Finally, I'll tell you this: Frogen knows everything. I wish you good health. May God bless Your Majesty Queen Grace II, the Eternal Sun of Medea."
Queen Grace turned and left without a word. The admiral gazed calmly down at what had fallen before him. The potion she had handed him, the one that would kill his foolishness. He picked it up; his face lit up.
She was still a dishonest woman, then and now. Her blue eyes were round and round.
“That’s so typical of her.”
In the past, the admiral, convinced that his supporters would not tolerate a Princess who bore a child of an unknown father and might threaten the Princess's legacy, ordered Agnes to assassinate the Crown Prince. He rationalized that he simply wanted to protect her, help her become a worthy Queen, and gain recognition. But in return, he was met with the cold hatred of having killed her only brother.
Unable to accept the consequences, the admiral, overcome with resentment and injustice, committed another sin by bringing Diana to him and abusing her, ultimately paying the price for the loss of his beloved daughter, Celine. He acknowledged that all of this was the result of his sin of abandoning his family and pursuing greed and lust.
After Celine's funeral, he emptied himself of the waste products of his thoughts and gazed into the depths of his heart. One thing suddenly dawned on him. He loved the bold woman, Grace Spencer Mary, regardless of her royal titles or queenly titles. And the futile fact that he had lived his life in a futile struggle to reach someone unreachable.
Because he had been so intent on gaining approval from others without accepting himself, he hadn't realized it. After acknowledging all his flaws and emptying his mind of them, all that remained was a yearning to see the woman he longed for all his life, even just once. Therefore, this atonement was his way to see her one last time, and the only thing he could truly do for her.
"Celine, I've kept your will. Now I'll go see you."
Winston Clare, his expression serene, saw a childhood vision of Celine, smiling and reaching out to him. Only then did he abandon all worldly attachments and set out in search of his dead daughter.
***
Queen Grace straightened her back and walked proudly down the hallway, her graceful demeanor intact. Baroness Mason and her maids, waiting outside, followed her quietly, their footsteps muffled.
Why did you name her Diana?
The legend of the evening primrose, about a nymph who, supposedly adoring the stars, fell in love with the moon goddess Diana, ultimately incurring the god's wrath and being cast out, waiting for her until her death, was a tale he had told beneath the star-filled night sky. Even if the admiral died, every mention of Diana's name or sight of her face would haunt her, and she would never be able to erase her presence from her mind. This would have been the case regardless of whether the admiral or Diana lived or died.
"Captain, why did the nymph wait for the goddess Diana? Without going to see her first?"
“Because the place where the moon goddess is is so high and far away that no matter how hard I try, I can’t reach it.”
The Queen's footsteps suddenly stopped as she realized something.
"Yes, I see. That's why you showed up now, and why you revealed the truth."
And it was all to protect me, after all. How funny.
She stood frozen in place, then walked back to her destination as if nothing had happened. Leaving the incident behind, she headed to her seat in the palace, to the monarch's throne.
***
A few days later, on a rainy afternoon, Queen Grace sipped her tea and scanned the headlines on the front page of Medea.
"Admiral Winston Claire has died in custody. Investigations have revealed the presence of potassium cyanide, a substance used by prisoners to commit suicide, and it is believed to have been poisoned..."
She turned the newspaper to the next page without any hesitation.
"The false Princess of the Kingdom of Medea has been sentenced to death in the first trial. The Medea government has revealed the possibility that the Grandis and Winters families, high in the line of succession to the throne, were involved in the case, as they had repeatedly raised questions about the Princess's qualifications as Queen, using her mental illness as an excuse."
“I guess I should start now.”
After the Queen's soliloquy, rain pounded against the window. After a moment of focused gaze on the edge of the newspaper, the Queen slowly raised her head and called out to Baroness Mason.
"Zelda, we're holding a top-secret meeting regarding the next heir to the throne. Summon the Prime Minister."
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