SPRFG 02

Chapter 2…

Prologue (2)

To Those Who Fight

When that which is all and nothing becomes a person, And beside that whole stands one who is incomplete, Under this sky, from all that was born, He shall never be trespassed upon.

A thousand years is a passing age, its end but a heartbeat; When the beginning of the end dawns, four suns shall rise, And the woman from a distant realm shall return whence she came.

—Prophetic Poem of the Priestess Kelparnuen

The assassin who tried to take down the Crown Prince was still nowhere to be found, even after the calendar turned over to a new year.

Panicked nobles and wealthy elites beefed up security around their estates and private gardens. Meanwhile, the paupers, the day laborers living hand-to-mouth, and the colonial subjects spat toward the imperial palace’s golden dome, holding out hope that someone would finally put the Prince in the ground next time.

According to official word, the Emperor had long since washed his hands of politics and retired to the back rooms, leaving the Crown Prince to run the whole show. Naturally, that made Prince Nelchor the primary target for any prospective assassin, not his father.

There were five known attempts on his life, though if you counted the plots foiled before execution or quietly swept under the rug, the number easily topped a dozen. Loyalists swore this was concrete proof that the Seven Gods were watching over the Empire and the royal bloodline.

Honestly, even Juaiye thought the Prince had way too much luck for his own good. If gods actually existed, they were clearly playing favorites.

Juaiye was a twenty-year-old woman living in Ilgenisglar, the bustling capital of the Ilgentavita Empire. She wasn’t particularly tall or short, but there was something about her appearance that drew every eye in the room. Her wavy, rarely-seen pink hair cascaded past her shoulders down to her arms. Her face still held a touch of soft youthfulness—flawless, porcelain skin, a neat nose, and lips naturally red as flower petals, no rouge required. But starkly out of place against her delicate features were her eyes: violet as polished amethyst, forever trembling with resignation, gloom, distrust, and quiet anguish.

In the notorious slums of the Lepaute District—often called the capital’s festering appendix—a beauty like hers was practically unheard of.

Just over a year ago, right around the time the Prince’s summer villa was bombed, she had suddenly shown up in the tenement quarter of Lepaute and rented a room that required no security deposit. She had arrived dressed in a finely embroidered silk gown, but after selling it to cover six months of rent in advance, she swapped it for the rough work clothes worn by young factory girls. Even swathed in garments that looked like two tablecloths hastily stitched together, her striking features and the fierce light burning in her eyes couldn’t be hidden.

As people naturally do around a young woman living alone, everyone pried into her business. Her next-door neighbor, Violeta, had assumed Juaiye was a restaurant waitress or factory worker just like herself, only to be shocked by how pale and smooth the girl’s hands were. Still, she kept her mouth shut about it.

Violeta worked late into the night at a tavern serving booze and food—singing, dancing, carrying dishes, and scrubbing plates until dawn—before heading home to sleep through the day. Juaiye, on the other hand, left in the morning and came back before evening, turning in early. When asked what she did for a living, Juaiye had offered a shy, awkward reply:

“I do tutoring.”

“Tutoring?”

“Yes…”

Violeta blinked, thoroughly confused. Wasn’t tutoring meant for wealthy kids preparing for university or minor nobles with money to burn? What kind of tutoring could a girl this young and soft-looking possibly offer?

Deciding the girl was either crazy, lying, or a little of both, Violeta dropped it. She simply took pity on her and tried to be kind. Maybe it reminded her of fifteen years ago, when she had fled her own home barefoot to escape a stepfather trying to sell her off.

Regardless of what anyone thought, Juaiye actually did make her living by tutoring. The earnings barely covered rent and a month’s supply of dry bread, and her income was far from stable, but she genuinely taught university students mathematics. And not just basic arithmetic—she taught advanced trigonometry, a subject even university students struggled to master.

She only ever had just enough spare coin to buy a cheap bottle of wine whenever she felt the urge to sit back and contemplate how her life had ended up like this. Still, she was grateful to be standing on her own two feet. She didn’t ask for anything more, nor did she have the luxury of thinking about anything else.

Her days were grueling. She spent her mornings navigating the city streets in worn-out shoes to teach her students, snatched meals of hard bread on the go, and returned every evening to rooms where staring down a rat the size of a fist was just part of the routine. In the winter, grey rats would crawl under her covers and snuggle into her armpits while she lay in bed. Juaiye didn’t mind them much and let them sleep; she didn’t see the point in killing them. In a cold, cruel world like this, those rats were the only living things willing to keep her company without asking for a single thing in return.

Juaiye couldn’t care less about politics.

She had heard about the attempt on the Crown Prince’s life, but she didn’t even know his name was Nelchor. A mouth-filling name like Nelchorpui Nonmicento Brillar La Joventu Casion Delmio Tormento was hard enough to remember, and honestly, she had no reason to ever hear it spoken out loud.

If anyone had called her out for lacking imperial patriotism, Juaiye would have given a simple response:

‘I don’t know, and why should I care?’

She couldn’t bother memorizing the long, bloated name of a prince she’d never meet. The one thing she did recall from gossip was that he was apparently drop-dead gorgeous—so handsome, supposedly, that women passed out just watching him smile.

Even with her exhausted schedule, a few recent local events had managed to stick in her mind.

First, there was the raging rumor that Lady Aiolia da Almadelcore, daughter of the Duke of Almadelcore, had run away from home. Most people guessed she had eloped with a low-born man.

It wasn’t uncommon for a fresh-faced noble girl of twenty to run off, convinced that love was eternal and the harsh realities of the world were just a passing phase, only to learn the hard way that the exact opposite was true. Usually, once the money ran out, the man abandoned them, and the girls faded into tragic obscurity.

Word was that Lady Aiolia hadn’t even packed many jewels or fine dresses when she left, leading locals to gossip that her downfall would come even faster. Whenever Violeta brought up the latest rumors about the missing noblewoman, Juaiye neither agreed nor argued; she just offered a vague smile and waited for the talk to die down.

Then, about three months after Aiolia vanished, three imperial university students were arrested for scattering handbills in the city center.

Ever since movable metal type hit the scene, printed paper had flooded every corner of the continent. It was completely normal for students to hand out flyers recruiting for campus clubs, buy and sell textbooks, or post notices looking for roommates to split rent.

Had they been normal flyers, nobody would have blinked. But the leaflets these three printed told a different story: one side boldly read ‘Down with the Emperor,’ while the back was packed with dense text demanding independence for all colonial territories, freedom to publish in languages other than the imperial tongue, massive cuts to noble pensions, and guaranteed commoner seats in the assembly. When the students flipped their bags inside out from restaurant balconies or public parks, the papers spilled out like a flock of cream-colored doves taking flight.

Yet the ink stamped onto those pages didn’t fly anywhere; it ended up stomped into the dirt. Despite the public outrage decrying it as the work of devils, the suspects arrested on a campus guard’s tip were just ordinary college kids.

When the authorities read out the staggering number of confiscated flyers—nearly every single copy they had painstakingly printed—the students sank into total despair as they were dragged away. No one ever found out what became of them, and nobody asked. They were swallowed whole by collective oblivion.

Exactly one year after the bombing of the Prince’s villa and Aiolia’s disappearance, another massive scandal rocked the capital.

Lady Ritorna da Vinkitur, daughter of the prominent Duke of Vinkitur, murdered her own housemaid. Juaiye first read about it in a discarded gazette left on a park bench. Because the victim was a servant, people dubbed it the ‘Maid Murder Incident’—mostly because no one had the guts to call it ‘The Time Lady Ritorna Brutally Stabbed Her Maid to Death in Broad Daylight.’

According to the report, plenty of witnesses saw Ritorna lunging at her maid with a letter opener in the conservatory of the Vinkitur estate. Ritorna had probably assumed they were alone, but large noble manors were always crawling with busy maidservants and footmen standing about like pillars.

Other servants who overheard the initial shouting dismissed it as a simple quarrel between women. Even when Ritorna pulled out the blade, no one stepped in, figuring it was just a typical harsh reprimand from a noble lady to an unruly servant. By the time someone finally kicked the conservatory door open and disarmed her, the maid’s body was already going cold. To make matters worse, none of the staff dared lay a hand on the Duke’s daughter.

Panicked and clueless, they resorted to locking the conservatory door from the outside. They couldn’t just call the imperial guards or palace officials—who only stepped in for disputes between nobles—nor could they bring in the common city watch or local patrols. After frantic hushed arguments, they summoned the Duke. By the time a doctor arrived, the maid was long dead.

It was a shocker that shattered the old stereotype that a woman’s best weapons were her beauty or poison. The impact was so massive that hardly anyone talked about the dead girl herself; instead, the whole city got worked up debating what kind of punishment Ritorna deserved.

Some radicals argued she should face murder charges, though most shut their mouths the second someone accused them of trying to dismantle the class system. Since a noble had killed a commoner, whether it constituted a crime under the penal code depended entirely on the motive. If the maid had been plotting treason, for instance, Ritorna would be completely cleared.

Still, even for a noble, letting a killer walk without any punishment was a tough pill for the common folk to swallow. There was an old customary law stating that anyone who tarnished a noble’s honor could be executed on the spot, but people had long forgotten it. Public opinion boiled over, arguing that such an archaic rule shouldn’t apply in the 17th year of the Imperial Calendar. As if anticipating the public mood, the High Court signaled that the law only applied strictly to cases like a knight striking down an esquire, making it clear Ritorna wouldn’t get a free pass.

Juaiye hated wasting her candle stub re-reading a gazette she’d already finished. She blew out the flame and settled into bed. She felt sorry for the poor maid, but she had to get to sleep if she wanted to teach her students tomorrow.

Her knee joints ached like they were about to shatter, and the guy next door was snoring loudly enough to rattle the thin plywood wall. As she shifted in bed, the rats huddled near her feet squeaked and scurried off into the dark.

She was just drifting off when heavy footsteps echoed up the stairs.

And judging by the sound, there were three people coming up.