Renea was strange since the moment she’d been born.

Celine couldn’t help but notice. As proud as it made her, she felt some disquiet at just how fast her daughter had learned to speak.

She would never say it out loud to anyone, but it even bothered her how Renea spoke. Some children were natural charmers, yet Renea seemed born a minstrel.

The little girl spoke like she was singing, with a tone lilting yet crisp. And she possessed a penchant for people-pleasing that took social grace beyond her age.

One day, she’d found Renea sitting on Sir Fontaine’s lap talking to him about death, of all things.

“You can talk to them ‘gain,” Renea lisped in that sing-song voice of hers, her bright smile widening. “I’ve been there! It’s… a pwayce where—your houthe is always warm. And you can go up in the sky, and talk to people far away…”

“Is there, my lady?” Fontaine smiled warmly, though his eyes had just the day prior been red and stricken with tears. “It seems a wonderful place to me.”

“Yeah! I know ‘cuz…” Renea bit her lip, confused, as she lightly touched her throat. “I was there before… I fe… fewuh into water…”

Celine immediately snatched her daughter from the grieving knight, and carried her up into the lord’s chamber. Then she sat her on the bed and looked at her child gravely.

“Renea. Sir Fontaine has just lost a very important friend,” Celine said, trying to impart seriousness without sounding too stern. “I usually ignore your tall tales. But you cannot,” Celine repeated her next word louder, “cannot lie about this.”

“I’m not, mommy…” Renea pouted petulantly. “I’m not—”

“Renea, you have never been near water,” Celine said, her voice harsher. “There is nowhere to swim around here.”

“I have!” Renea yelled. She was about to throw a tantrum. “It’h not a lie! I’m not a liar!”

Celine groaned. She had no time to deal with this. What little time she had away from the northern wall couldn’t be wasted on a lying toddler.

“Stay up here,” she commanded. “And apologize to Sir Fontaine later.”

“But I’m—!”

“Renea!” Celine snapped, which made Renea flinch. “Do not… do not make me angry.”

“...O-okay,” Renea said. Her voice grew small and her eyes wide.

With a sigh, Celine left. Tomorrow, would be the start of a lengthy expedition to one of the furthest settlements along the wall. She had to make sure the provisioning was going well. As she made her way to the kitchen, guilt started to tug at Celine’s heart.

The truth was, she simply couldn’t understand Renea. They were nothing alike, and even being near her daughter caused her apprehension. Unlike…

Celine halted upon seeing her other daughter. The one who had been born of her sin.

She smiled kindly at her. It was easier at this distance—as a Saintess offering grace to a small child.

“How fare you, Miss Sophie?” Celine asked. “Are you enjoying that scone?”

The girl just nodded back at her. She looked at ease in the arms of the maid who cared for her most; if anything, she looked annoyed that Celine was interrupting her snack time.

“...Why don’t I ask the chef to bake more of those for you?” Celine asked.

“Okay.” Sophie nodded again.

Sophie was easy to understand, even though she could hardly speak. One thing was glaringly obvious: Celine’s other daughter didn’t like her.

It wasn’t an experience she’d had with any of her other children, truth be told; as the maid walked away and her daughter nibbled on a scone, blissfully unaware of her real mother, Celine found herself yearning.

The next day, as she led the knights along the northern wall, she caught sight of Aldous and offered him a warm smile. The moment she did, guilt struck her once more, reminding her of how differently she had behaved with her two daughters—and why.

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

A few years later, Celine had started trying to actively draw out Renea’s holy aura.

“I feel sick, mother,” Renea blanched. She turned her face away and covered her nose.

“The battlefield will smell of rust too, Renea,” Celine said calmly. “Keep your emotions in check.”

“Mother, please! I—hrrk…ugh…!” Renea’s face turned paler and paler, until she could no longer bear the smell, covering her mouth with both hands. She looked up at her mother, pleadingly, with tears in her eyes, her breaths coming ragged, uneven gasps.

“If you can do nothing else, Renea,” Celine said dryly, “then watch. See for yourself what sacrifices the knights make to protect this duchy.”

Should she fail to teach her anything else, Celine would at least ensure her daughter learned resilience. If Renea could not heal, then she would not be allowed to cry.

She would not let Renea turn out like Ennieux.

Their father’s pampering had ruined Celine’s younger sister, to the point that discomfort made her hysterical. She panicked from even the distant sight of danger, and when her panic prevented her from properly producing her holy aura, it would deteriorate into a full-blown nervous breakdown.

There were things Celine simply couldn’t compromise on. Renea had to control her emotions. She had to manifest her blessing.

If she were being entirely forthright, Celine knew very well she sometimes took the frustrations of bearing four children out on Renea. The knights of Varant had faced injury and death, while she’d lain idly in bed.

But those restless months, where the knights had to function without Celine there to lead them—and to save them sometimes from the brink of death—were also proof enough of the necessity of her strictness.

Varant could not suffer another era without a Saintess to lead it.

There was a time when the only living female eum-Creid lay helpless in bed, her body unmoving from grievous injury, barely even capable of bestowing the divine blessing.

That was Celine’s grandmother, the late Saintess Marianne. For three years, Celine’s father Duke Aaron was the very last eum-Creid on the battlefield. He had two sons, who were swift to stand beside him, desperately fighting to ensure the survival of the bloodline.

It was as if they had all waited for Celine before they could die.

Celine’s oldest brother Lawrence was only eighteen when he passed, just after Celine’s birth.

Marianne held on until Celine was three, dying but a week before Celine manifested the divine blessing.

Gardner, nineteen at death, stayed until she was seven—old enough to march to the battlefield.

Those were the dire times when knights truly prayed. With no one to heal their injuries, they only had their faith to fortify their courage—and consequently their holy aura. If Marianne passed any sooner, then even their prayers couldn’t save them.

Varant had truly teetered on extinction.

Stolen novel; please report.

That’s why Celine knew she needed a female heir. But like the generation before, she had unfortunately borne two sons first.

Sigurd was exceptional, yet a male heir would only needlessly repeat the struggles her father had endured. Her second son Ailn was weak, and incapable of joining the battlefield.

When Celine had Sophie, it filled her with mixed feelings. The child was born of her sin, and Celine felt quiet relief when she saw Sophie’s brown hair and gray eyes. Yet it also meant that Sophie likely lacked the divine blessing.

She’d have to bear another daughter.

Renea’s birth, and the miracle of her survival, had filled Celine with joy. She admitted it to herself, if not freely: a great deal of that joy had been sheer relief.

That relief turned to disappointment the longer Renea failed to manifest her blessing.

From her perspective, she was being lenient.

For this duchy to survive, she always had to look ahead just as her forebears had. That was the only way Varant ever made it through dire, desperate times: by remembering their sacrifices were the stones in the wall that protected the future.

So much had been sacrificed. So many had given… everything.

Celine’s heart simply wasn’t big enough for those who failed to bear the onus they’d been given. There was no reason her children should be an exception.

She was a perfect Saintess, and that made her an imperfect mother. She was a woman genuinely committed to the protection of the duchy, a true eum-Creid who would sacrifice everything to fulfill her duties.

And eventually, she did.

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

A few years later, when Renea was nine, Celine and Renea sat alone in the council room.

“Renea,” Celine said. She knew very well how poor a job she was doing of hiding her frustration. “Tell me honestly. Why can you not produce your holy aura right now?”

“I need Sophie, mother,” Renea squirmed. “Her emotional aid is necessary for me.”

Celine was not daft. The premise of her daughter’s trick had indeed crossed her mind.

She had always assumed that Sophie’s brown hair and gray eyes were proof enough that she lacked the divine blessing. But the more Celine observed Renea’s skittish behavior, and Sophie’s relative ease with the battlefield, the more her intuition told her who the true bearer of the blessing was.

Yet the precision this ruse would require seemed almost unimaginable. Wherever Renea so much as lifted a finger, a white glow would effortlessly follow; whenever she waved her hands, the holy aura flowed without the slightest lapse in time.

Whenever Celine separated her daughters discreetly to draw out the truth, Renea would stutter and stammer for the safety blanket of her sister, while Sophie would stare at her expressionlessly, as if Celine were an imbecile.

“Enough. Just… go,” Celine said. She gave an aggravated sigh, but knew this was the best way to keep from snapping at Renea.

“Then… I will see you later,” Renea said. She bowed and left, doing an excellent job of keeping her expression clear. “Tomorrow then, mother.”

“Yes,” Celine said tiredly. “Rise early.”

Alone in the council room, Celine pondered the mess of lies she and her daughters were tangled in. The quandaries of succession and her secret infidelity only made Celine even more hesitant to force the truth into the open.

For now, it seemed, Renea and Sophie would have to come as a pair.

Idly, Celine found herself wondering: had she courted this situation herself? Lying about possessing the blessing was abominable; yet the fact that both of her daughters had conspired to lie gave Celine pause.

“Perhaps if I’d tried harder to understand her…” Celine muttered. She began an aimless walk through the castle, giving gentle and distant smiles to the knights and servants she passed.

Both her daughters had only grown more distant, in different ways. Celine thought that Sophie’s natural dislike of her had finally reached its peak after she’d learned the truth of her parentage. But recently it seemed Celine’s mere presence was enough to sear a scowl upon her eldest daughter’s face—a transparency of emotion that Sophie had reserved solely for her mother.

Renea, meanwhile, only ever withdrew.

Celine’s deepest regret was realizing she’d browbeaten the cheerfulness which used to so define that child.

If there was anything she truly felt ashamed of, it was how long she'd been convinced that something was fundamentally wrong with her daughter. Even now, the strange circumstances of Renea’s birth unnerved her.

She’d learned not to fixate on it. Celine was not the type of person to let herself be unduly influenced by her fears, and her harsh childrearing had nothing to do with her quiet suspicions.

But she’d been cold toward her younger daughter—her youngest child.

And over time Renea’s animated and imaginative tales had simply faded away; no longer did she have stories of metallic carriages that ran on explosions, or boxes with whirlpools that washed garments. Where she once believed she'd glimpsed heaven, now the thought of judgment and the afterlife seemed to fill Renea with anxiety and dread.

Had Renea sensed her disquiet? Was that why she’d started to grow bafflingly upset when she heard the story of her birth?

There was even a time when the mere sight of infants would make her cry.

The truth was, Celine didn’t fully understand how Renea’s burgeoning neuroses had developed—she only knew that her own distant behavior had fed them. And now she had no idea how to reach her retreating daughter, already so used to hiding herself she’d rather perform this grandiose deceit.

“This has to be rectified…” Celine mumbled. It was inevitable that the family’s crows would eventually come home to roost. There were too many lies. “If not, then the duchy will—”

Her voice faltered as she glanced up.

She’d wandered into the Great Hall without realizing it, drawn to the portraits of her children. There was Sigurd, looking grimmer at twelve than his grandfather Duke Aaron. And Ailn, at the same age, with empty eyes that didn’t expect anything of her.

It was as if the way she’d failed her two sons had been sealed in paint.

But her daughters… Sophie didn’t even have a portrait. And Renea, only six in hers, was still pleading with her smile.

“If I don’t do anything…” Celine’s voice quieted in realization. “...They’ll get hurt.”

The day would come when Sophie and Renea were caught separated in a terrible situation. Celine knew that.

But she didn’t realize it would happen on a simple trip to the capital.

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

When the Blancs’ knights attacked, Renea was essentially of no help, trembling in the carriage.

But Celine had expected that.

She hadn’t expected to be ambushed, nor had she expected just how flagrantly the Blanc family would act.

Celine had been strong-armed by the imperial family, invited specifically to stay at a palace usually reserved for royalty. It was out of the question for Sophie to come.

By now she had killed most of them. It would have been facile enough if they’d all been wielding swords, but…

An arrow flew by her head, piercing the carriage’s window. As the fragments of glass spilled inside, Renea started to shriek.

“Renea!” Celine shouted, ripping open the carriage door.

The glass had left cuts across her back; she’d thankfully protected her ears and scalp, but at the expense of her hands.

Brushing the glass off, Celine healed her daughter. But the distraction had been enough for the archer to notch another arrow—and when Celine heard Renea screaming again, she’d hardly had the time to react before she’d been struck.

Twisting herself around, she caught sight of the archer past the snow, on the horizon, and cast down her aura. Like a hammer of light, it crushed the man and killed him instantly.

It was purely on adrenaline that Celine managed to kill the last four swordsmen.

Renea scrambled out of the carriage, falling into the snow. And when Celine fell back against the carriage, and tried to reassure her, she realized she could no longer speak.

Her daughter was still trying to heal her. It was an act of futile kindness that was almost comical. But in this tiny world with only mother and daughter, on a deathbed of snow, Celine treasured this last, quiet warmth.

Celine already understood she’d been lied to by her daughters. She’d long seen such an end hovering on the horizon.

And she forgave Renea, even as she was bleeding out. If she’d lived her life as a less stringent person, she might have told her daughter she loved her when she had the chance. But now she couldn’t even hear what Renea was saying.

Then, one last time, Celine was caught off guard.

Blearily she peered through what felt like a graying veil, her vision losing its focus as her life was coming to its end.

Yet her daughter’s face became a little clearer…

And so did Renea’s effulgent ruby eyes.

Celine hardly had the time to consider the implications. Her mind raced through all of her doubts, leapt to the superstitions of red eyes and demons, and fell back down through the well of remembrance, as she thought of her daughter’s strange behaviors, and her absent divine blessing.

And most of all, the peculiar miracle of Renea’s birth.

Staring into those ruby eyes, a shock ran through Celine’s body. But it was followed by an unexpected sense of relief.

The truth was, Celine had no idea what it all meant. Unsure of what to think, she let out a dry chuckle. She had neither the strength, nor the time for anything more.

Yet somehow, this was enough for her. All those misgivings she’d never been able to clear away felt so utterly ridiculous now, as she looked into her daughter’s eyes.

There were no tears in them. Renea looked stricken. But she wasn’t crying.

The irony wasn’t lost on Celine. She was painfully aware of how she’d diminished her daughter’s feelings. Now that all Renea had left for her was an empty expression, Celine realized she wished she could see her bright smile one more time.

Her youngest child’s arms were trembling so uncontrollably. When was the last time she’d held her hand?

The world had fallen to silence, but the clarity of death brought to memory the sound of Renea’s little sing-song voice. She would’ve liked to hear one more story.

She felt sorry for all the things she’d taken away from her strange, dreamy child, and knew she’d run out of time to give them back.

So, before she passed, she tried to give Renea a smile. It was all she had left.

She lacked the strength to say it, but in the very last moment of her life, this was the truth: she really did think her daughter’s eyes were pretty.