A portal appeared in the middle of nowhere, through which Mathilda, Damian, and Aryan walked out onto a pastry plain.

"So this is here?"

"Yes, Madame Mathilda," Aryan nodded, pointing in the direction ahead.

"I see. Thank you for having taken us here. You can take your leave now, Aryan."

"But…" Aryan paused in response to Mathilda's suggestion, casting a suspicious glance at Damian, who stood beside her unbound and unrestrained.

Although he was never considered a prisoner and was never bound or chained, the man was known to most members of the aristocracy as someone whose presence was restricted to the fortress and whose actions had been constantly and closely monitored for the past few months at the order of Mathilda and the Mother .As such, Mathilda's request made Aryan raise certain reservations toward leaving her with him alone, outside, without surveillance, instead of simply acceding to her request as he normally would.

"It’s okay, Aryan. I don't think he would do anything to me. At least, I don't believe he would."

Unconvinced, Aryan threw a clear and suspicious glance at Damian before nonetheless giving in to Mathilda’s request and simply teleporting away.

"What assurance did you have that I wouldn’t do anything?" With his arms spread, Damian claimed, "I can literally run away from here; I see nothing that would be able to stop me."

"I had no assurance. As I said, I just assumed you wouldn’t run; after all, why would you? You want answers after all, don't you?"

"Truth..." he mumbled, as if struck on a tender spot. "I want answers—true answers; who is that woman you call mother, and why are she and Barbara... that way?"

"You will have your answers, which is precisely why I took you here. Come."

In the direction pointed by Aryan, the duo strode, led by Mathilda, who seemed unfamiliar with the place based on the glances she threw at her surroundings.

"What is this place?"

"A clan of bandits, outlaws, who lived by stealing and robbing caravans strolling through these rural roads once lived here."

"I don’t—"

"You wanted answers. This place is where it all began —for you."

By the time Mathilda spoke these words, the duo had arrived in front of three graves, two of which appeared to be more recent than the one in the middle.

"Whose graves are those?"

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"I've never had the courage to visit this place, but I know that these are the graves of the three brothers who founded the Eirweins Brotherhood together. On your left is Austen, the youngest brother; on my right is Schlain, the oldest brother, who was mostly known by your people in the church as the white ghost," Mathilda explained.

His focus now on the only grave she hasn't yet made mention of, Damian asked, "Who is the one in the middle?"

The truth was that Damian already knew, from the stories he heard about the Brotherhood as a paladin, to whom the grave most likely belonged, yet he still wanted to hear it from her mouth.

"David, for them, was the second and middle brother. For the church, he was the first of Eirwein's brothers to perish at the hands of Archbishop Sunnivah. For me, he was the man with whom I had you. For you, he was your father."

Damian was taken to ask questions in response to that revelation, but before he could ask them out to Mathilda, he had already figured out the answers from pieces of the puzzle he already had in his possession.

"You don’t have any questions about him or about them?" Mathilda asked at the silent Damian.

"He, David,... did he know about me?"

"He did not. At the time he and I had you, he and his brother were just done with their vengeance, or at least that’s what I thought. It was foolish of me to think that there would be an end to this madness, which they called justice. The news of his death reached me a few days before I came to understand that you would be born a child of light."

Thinking about the only question he didn’t yet have an answer for, he asked, "How did they... die? I know for sure it wasn’t by the hand of the Archbishop, as we both know you lured him and you used "him" to deal with him."

"You’re well informed. Indeed, they didn’t at the hands of the archbishop. They died by my hands and those of Ronandt’s," she revealed with a calm, that made it take Damian a couple of seconds to fully register what she just confessed to him.

"What?!"

"For yet another story of revenge, the duo became erratic and uncontrollable, their actions leading to consequences that nearly led my brother and his family to be put in dire circumstances. When I realized, as it had once been with David, that history was about to repeat itself out of petty vengeance, I took matters into my own hands and did what I deemed necessary. You must think I’m a horrible person, aren’t you?"

Finding no words to answer that question, Damian remained silent.

"If that’s what you think, I won’t even bother denying that fact, but I’d wager that I'm only so when the time calls for it. I had my flaws, and so did these three brothers, which leads me to what I brought you here for. I have seen how much of an obsession that thing called "revenge" can become for men on your father’s side of the family. I had prayed for years that you would not inherit that trait from them, just as you did not inherit their eyes, but those are things beyond my control. So as of now, the best I can do for you is warn you: don’t attempt anything that can remotely go against "the mother’s" plans. They, Princess Nia, the Young Lord are not existences for you to offend. Give up on each and every vindictive thought you may hold against them, there is nothing ahead of that path but a dead end, which is this place."

"When raising you, I did my best not to interfere with the path you came to choose in life; I did my best not to question and contest your life choices, however questionable some of them may have been in my eyes," Mathilda said, reaching for Damian's face. "I don't expect you to see me as your mother; I've made my peace with remaining in your eyes as nothing more than Mathilda, your cousin's nanny, which is why, in the name of what you used to remember me as, I beg you, do not impose the duty of burying you on me."

To these words spoken by that familiar face he remembered from his earliest memories as an often overly-caring mother-figure, Damian glanced at the grave behind which he knew were those of his uncles and father.

"About them… Besides what I already know, I want to know more, like what kind of person they were and how you and him first met. I want to know. Can you tell me?"

"Of course."