Once upon a time… there was a tiny infant girl named Renea, who never quite managed to open her eyes.

It was a cold day. And it was a painful one. So painful, that even the angels began to cry.

You see, these angels who watched over Varant had forgotten how to cry. They’d lived for so long in its dismal skies, on top of clouds so gray they looked like a knight’s blanket. They were the guardians of such fragile lives, and the chilly days had left them with hearts so frostbitten. They forgot how to cry… because they never dared to cherish.

But when they peered into the baby Renea’s eyes they remembered what their home looked like. Her eyes were as wide and blue as the sky in heaven, and all of them wept because they knew the little girl would never get the chance to open them. She would never share them with the world. She would never get to see the world herself.

It was when the day had reached its coldest hour, when their hearts had melted into tears. A miracle happened. The kind of miracle that could only happen in Varant.

The angels’ tears turned into snowflakes. Varant’s dreary winter, which had never earned a kind word from anyone sensible, had done something wonderful. The snowflakes fell upon the infant girl’s body…

And for the very first time, she opened her blue eyes to the joy of the angels, and every living soul in Varant.

Of course, this isn’t what actually happened.

The girl named Renea eum-Creid had certainly been reborn. That was the truth, if only it had been left at that.

But it wasn’t that the stillborn child had been revived. She’d merely been replaced. The original Renea eum-Creid was gone, her corpse shamelessly stolen by a girl from another world.

Just like a fairy tale, the original was conveniently forgotten.

The girl from another world also forgot, at first. Even as an infant, she couldn’t explain what was always there in her head, infesting the shadows of her mind. And it was only when she got older that the picture which had faded started to come back into view. The blurry visions and fuzzy voices began to coalesce.

‘Renea’ remembered who she really was.

And the unpleasant truth was, she’d been a fake in her past life too. Her real ‘once upon a time’ was about a girl obsessed with appearances.

That girl’s family had already fallen apart.

Long after the money and affection had dwindled away, she kept bragging about the nice places her mom would take her, and the nice things her dad would buy her. The only reason they never showed up for parents’ day was because they were working so hard.

And when a classmate caught her skipping school, singing karaoke alone, she just kept on lying. She couldn’t help herself.

She was practicing her singing since she’d been scouted. She smelled like smoke because of all the prime beef cuts she was grilling.

She wasn’t having a hard time at all.

Pity was the only look anyone ever gave her from then on. The girl hated that look. So she skipped school more and more. She could, because her grades were still good.

It was the last thing she could cling to. The one thing left she could be proud of, while everything else crumbled away.

Her grades were the only real thing about her.

But the work kept piling on, and her classes kept getting harder. She started falling behind, when she’d only ever been ahead. Every day, lying in her own bed, she found herself asking if she needed the day off.

The day came for a test she couldn’t miss, and the girl realized she couldn’t answer any of it. Her pencil stopped moving right after she wrote her name.

Like usual, she lied about it. She let everyone know she was sure she got first place, and sold it by fearlessly resuming her daily attendance—taking the time in the morning to perfect the look of a girl who’d made a serious comeback.

She’d never be there when the results were posted, of course. The girl planned to stay at home and beg her mother to find her a way to transfer schools, so she’d never have to see her friends again.

If only she’d remembered that the results always leaked early, she wouldn’t have had to run past all those looks of pity. She could’ve been anywhere else but near a cold river in the dead of winter. She wouldn’t have had her accident.

Maybe then, things would’ve been different.

If she had just resolved herself then and there, and stopped her lying… could she have turned her life around? She couldn’t stop herself from wondering. But it was just vain and idle wishing, because none of that mattered now.

Drifting through the cold water, the girl she used to be swore she’d live her next life with honesty, and closed her eyes for the very last time on that snowy day.

Then, on a day just as cold but with much gentler snow, Renea eum-Creid opened hers, innocent and oblivious to her irises which looked like flames, and unaware of the gift she’d never been given: the divine blessing.

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“Heal him, Renea,” Celine said coolly. “It will never be this simple when you’re fighting shadow beasts.”

“I—can’t,” Renea’s voice shook. “Please heal him, mother…”

Renea was five the first time her mother scared her.

Celine had dragged her in front of an injured knight. It wasn't a grave injury. Her mother would never play with someone’s life like that. Especially not one of the knights.

But Renea had never smelt such a foul odor, or seen flesh which crumbled like that. The knight’s skin was clammy and the way he kept groaning in pain even while he tried to smile kindly at her was so incongruous it distressed her even more.

The wound was jagged and messy, and she realized she could actually see a little bit of one of his ribs.

“I can’t heal him mother, please!” Renea begged.

After half an hour of Renea crying, praying, and trying to heal him, her mother finally sighed angrily and sent her away.

Even at five, Renea understood how much pressure there was on her to manifest the divine blessing and carry on the duty of the Saintess.

For the next two years, at least once a week, Celine would bring Renea before knights of increasingly grievous injury, forcing her to try and heal them. She seemed to believe that with enough stimulus of emotion Renea might finally awaken her blessing.

At seven years old, Renea started to realize she never would.

She had just gone through a particularly traumatizing session with her mother. The knight had lost his right arm. The assault of the shadow beast upon his person had been brutal, his face severely marred by the attack.

Sitting alone on her bed in the solar, clutching a handful of mint leaves, the memory began to upset a nausea that had already been lingering.

"Huuk...hrk!" Renea started to dry heave. She couldn’t stop thinking about the knight’s left leg which had been bent at such an unnatural angle.

Desperately trying to control her retching, Renea held her hand against her face, soothing herself with the scent of mint. She’d just rinsed her mouth. It would be a nightmare to clean the linens.

She caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror, unhappy to see her own haggard appearance and sickly pallor.

No one else was in the room.

Slowly, she let her eyes manifest. At times like this, it brought a peculiar comfort—a feeling like they’d been refreshed with a warm bath after being out in the cold.

Renea walked up to the mirror to look at her burning eyes. She gently placed her hand against their reflection, as if doing so would remove them.

“I wonder… what my name was,” Renea whispered to herself.

The thought had occurred to her one day, as she was thinking about her past life. What if the reason she couldn’t use her holy aura was because she never had it at all?

What if she never received the divine blessing because she wasn’t truly a part of this world?

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Until now, she truly believed she was simply a late bloomer. Both her brothers could use theirs since the age of three, even if Ailn’s was weak.

To the eum-Creids, it was as natural as speaking. It should’ve just come to her one day, when she was an toddler, the same way a baby suddenly mixes words into their babble.

Yet Renea had still not manifested it.

She lifted her hand from the mirror, and found herself with a vicious expression. It was such an absurd thing—she was glaring at her own eyes.

The sight of them had always corroded Renea’s spirit. They labeled her as a demon. They were the proof she was foreign to this world. And now that she realized they were intimately linked to her absent divine blessing, she couldn’t stand them at all.

They were hideous.

And when the girl in the mirror looked back at her with disgust, Renea flinched, her anger giving way to hurt. What if she… simply didn’t belong here?

“Renea? Are you well?” Sophie’s voice came from the ducal study.

In a panic, Renea dispelled her eyes as Sophie entered the room. Sophie, seeing her sister’s pitiful appearance, knitted her brows, and frowned unhappily.

“Duchess Celine is awful,” Sophie said. Her tone was cold. “The way she treats you is the worst.”

“She’s your mom too, Sophie,” Renea said. There was a hint of sadness in her voice. “I-I’m okay, anyway.”

Sophie turned her face away, ignoring the assertion that they were family.

“...She is a bad person,” Sophie said quietly.

“Don’t say that,” Renea said, biting her lip and blinking a little fast. Thinking about their mother right now made her sad. “She’s… just a little mean sometimes.”

Renea didn’t want to say it, but she’d always noticed how much more kindly Celine seemed to treat Sophie. Then again, it wasn’t as if Renea was the only one who suffered under the rigidity of her beliefs.

Ailn was hidden away in a cottage because his holy aura was too weak. Sigurd became a bully and tyrant because he worked himself to the bone trying to live up to her stringent standards.

Sophie, though, was an illegitimate child and had no obligation to her lineage; she somehow floated in a blind spot, untouched by Celine’s expectations.

“Do you intend to fight tomorrow?” Sophie asked, worriedly. “Duchess Celine is taking you to the wall.”

“I am…” Renea said. “Mother will protect me.”

Sophie's face subtly pinched, as if catching the scent of something repulsive.

“Take me too.” Sophie gazed at Renea, her face mostly expressionless.

“...To the wall? No, I—”

“Take me,” Sophie said, interrupting her.

“There’s no reas—”

“Take me,” Sophie said again, a little scowl now appearing.

Perplexed, but realizing she wouldn’t be able to stop Sophie herself, Renea just nodded.

----------------------------------------

The coach of state waited outside the castle. Typically, Celine would have simply ridden a horse. But neither Renea nor Sophie knew how to.

“You wish to come to the battlefield?” Celine looked at Sophie with skepticism. Yet, a hint of worry colored her tone, causing a twinge in Renea's heart.

“Yes,” Sophie said. She didn’t say anything more.

Had Renea ever received such concern from their mother? Struggling with a surge of jealousy that was unbecoming, she remained in the carriage, her gaze fixed on the castle’s gate visible beyond the window.

If she walked out the gate right now, and went through the forest, she could see Ailn. It had been a year since he’d been banished away.

It was probably because Ailn was always coddling her. Celine seemed to believe that incapability was contagious.

She’d heard her mother openly call her aunt a coddled derelict; an incompetent coward. Renea knew how much her mother hated the idea of her turning out the same.

“Then I suppose I shall protect the both of you,” Celine said, giving a thoughtful and pragmatic glance to both of her daughters. “Come along, then.”

Her mother always possessed the confidence of the strong. A lesser woman would have fretted endlessly over the prospect of putting her own daughters in danger. Celine, however, took it in stride.

Because shadow beasts appeared only infrequently at the citadel, they were headed east two watchtowers over. It was a long ride to the northern wall, and it passed mostly in silence.

“Have you been eating well, Sophie?” Celine asked. “The servants… are treating you properly, yes?”

“I eat fine,” Sophie said, without turning to face her mother. “Ask Renea.”

“...Yes. You’re right,” Celine said. She’d gazed at Sophie for a moment thoughtfully, but if she felt any guilt she didn’t show it on her face. She turned toward Renea. “Did you manage to eat dinner?”

“No,” Renea said. “I felt too sick.”

Celine’s face hardened.

“You will have to overcome your squeamishness, Renea,” Celine said firmly. “That will hardly be the most gruesome sight you’ll ever see.“

“...Yes.” Renea’s head drooped.

That was the brunt of their conversation on the way to the northern wall.

Truthfully, Renea didn’t feel like talking today, anyway. She was scared.

As the wall began to come into view, so did something else: the miasma. From this far off, it could only be seen as a thin line above the horizon, as if someone had inked the top of the wall.

It was freezing outside, and her throat hurt so badly from it that she could hardly breathe. Varant was always cold, but today it felt like ice water seeping into Renea’s fur cloak.

When they finally ascended the ramparts, the sight knotted her stomach.

The miasma looked like death itself. There was something fundamentally disgusting about it, the way it billowed through the mountains, and spilled out onto the plains like slimy smoke.

“It’s cold out here…” Renea huddled with her sister. The ugliness of the miasma made her shivering worse, and she wanted her sister’s comfort and warmth. “Sophie?”

Sophie remained silent but passively accepted Renea’s need for closeness. Her gaze dropped to the plains.

There were knights battling shadow beasts.

The battle looked more like individual skirmishes that happened to share a field; many knights each fought a beast in single combat. The smaller wolves seemed to be enough for one knight to take on.

Yet there were a trio of beasts which resembled tigers, half a dozen knights surrounding each one.

There was something enchanting about their holy auras. They flashed bright, their brilliance an expression of their confidence in themselves. Sophie pulled away from Renea to peer over the chest-high walls and watch the battle more intently, and the cold that swept Renea felt inexplicably lonely.

“That tiger’s not dead yet,” Sophie whispered.

“The tiger?” Renea asked.

“The knights think it’s dead. But it’s not.”

One group of knights did seem on the verge of killing their tiger. But then miasma began to billow out of it like smoke.

Suddenly, that miasma seemed to solidify again, splitting into whips. The whips lashed at the knights with enough force to throw one to the ground, and one of the whips even seized a knight’s sword.

The knights recoiled, realizing they’d been complacent, and their holy auras dimmed with their shock.

Celine raised a single hand.

A white circle manifested in the air twenty feet above the tiger—as high as the northern wall itself—and produced a solid pillar of light.

It truly sounded like thunder.

When the light vanished, nothing remained of the shadow beast except a thin, wide wisp of dissipating miasma.

The knights who had been saved glanced back at the wall, realizing their Saintess was there. They gave happy grins as they waved up at the wall; Celine just sighed at their carelessness.

“That is the strength of our divine blessing, Renea,” Celine said. Then she swept her hand slowly across the wide plains, as if she were casting a net over the knights fighting down below. “...And these are the knights you’ll protect.”

Renea was stunned by the sight of her mother’s holy aura.

“...It’s strong,” Sophie said. Her expression was hard to read.

From the miasma in the distance, a number of shadow beasts that looked like vultures started to appear. There were almost two dozen of them, all heading toward the top of the walls.

“Today of all days…” Celine gave a tsk, glancing for a moment at her daughters, before concentrating.

Though they were smaller and at myriad angles, circles like before appeared all through the sky, summoning spears of light which pierced most of the vultures.

Celine didn’t always strike the vultures with her first attempt; and a few made erratic movements through the air which made them tricky to hit.

But before they came even close to the top of the wall, they had all been vanquished. Except for one.

A vulture which had seemingly been killed by Celine’s aura, and was in the midst of dissipating, solidified again.

What was left of it was something like a melting hummingbird, which zipped from one spot to the next. Small flashes of light followed the creature, Celine manifesting her holy aura and continually missing it by a bare amount. It was coming closer and closer, growing smaller and harder to hit all the while.

It was such a small creature, but Renea started to hyperventilate, frantically tugging at her mother’s sleeve.

Celine dragged her two daughter’s behind her, her brows clenching and lips drawing together in concentration.

As if the nimble creature sensed what she was afraid of, it zipped up, and then to the left, dodging her little flashes of light, and flanking Celine even as she tried to spin and cover her daughters.

Shooting at Renea from the side, by now it was sharp like a needle, and faster than a falcon.

“Renea—” Celine shouted.

Renea covered up her face and shrieked in fear. But the sound of her voice was covered up by a bright flash, and a resonant hum.

Peeking through her fingers, Renea realized the creature was gone. She couldn’t understand what had just happened; did she just manifest her divine blessing?

The flash was so bright, it caught the attention of all the knights below.

For a moment, a smile began to burst across Renea's face.

But then another flash lit up the plains. And another. The flashes kept going, each accompanied by a resonant hum, all of them aiding the knights who had foolishly let themselves become distracted.

Renea didn’t feel anything.

With each flash and hum, it was becoming increasingly clear to Renea that she had nothing to do with them, and her hands dropped limply.

Before she could say anything, Renea shuddered as she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder. Celine was kneeling, looking at her with a face between awe and worry.

“Renea… did you do that?” Celine asked. “Did you manifest your divine blessing?”

“M-mother, I—” Renea’s heart sank. Expectation was written all over Celine’s face. “I-it was—”

Sophie quietly grabbed one of Renea’s hands. And with that gesture alone, Renea understood.

“I finally did it!” Renea nodded, giving Celine an obliging smile. “I’m…”

Celine gave Renea a hug.

“I’m proud of you, Renea,” Celine said. “...I’m happy.”

“Me too…” Renea said. Her mother’s voice and hug were warm. She’d felt all alone on top of the wall. Now her mother was hugging her, and her sister was holding her hand. “I’m really happy,” she choked out.

It really did make her happy.

But she wished her mother had asked if she was alright first.