Ancient Sin

A flash of silver. A pool of crimson. The feeling of wind rushing past her cheeks.

Ugh... This dream again...? But... What was everything before that? Were those... my memories?

Medrauta’s eyes fluttered as she attempted to push herself up groggily. Her head still throbbed with a dull ache as if someone had smashed a battering ram against it, and putting strength in her limbs was an exercise in futility as they felt numb and sluggish. Through her bleary vision, she managed to make out Viviane’s face above her. The noblewoman’s eyes were closed, and her soft breathing was the only sound that filled the room.

“You must’ve been worried, huh...?” Medrauta murmured as she slowly reached a hand upward, resting it tenderly against Viviane’s soft cheek. Although the knight was overjoyed to be gifted the sight of her beloved Viviane’s face as the first thing she saw after waking up, Medrauta knew Viviane had to be exhausted. In the first place, falling asleep in her current position couldn’t possibly be comfortable.

Mustering all the strength she could, Medrauta managed to push herself off Viviane’s lap and sit up, slowly maneuvering herself beside the noblewoman. The knight released a sigh as she settled herself against the bookshelf, leaning against it in an effort to recover the energy she’d spent. Medrauta could feel her strength slowly returning, but she remained drained for the meantime.

With Viviane still remaining asleep next to her, Medrauta decided it was probably best to let her lady rest for a bit longer. Normally, it would’ve been impossible for the knight to tell exactly how long had passed since they’d entered the tower as the first floor had no windows, but she had other ways of obtaining an answer, albeit an approximate one.

Closing her eyes, Medrauta focused all her effort on bolstering her auditory perception. Thanks to the nature of the witchspawn, they should still be rampaging while the sun was up. With their enormous numbers running past the tower, it would be easy for Medrauta to hear their thunderous stampede despite the thick walls enclosed around her. Should she hear nothing but silence coming from outside, then it’d be easy to assume that night had already fallen.

Looks like things still haven’t settled down out there, Medrauta thought as the sounds of rampant scurrying from outside the tower continued to reach her ears. With what little information she could glean from her surroundings, Medrauta surmised that they’d been here for a couple hours at the very least, meaning that sunset was coming soon.

Finally found a moment to be alone with Vivi, and I’d been unconscious for most of it. How regrettable. Medrauta sighed.

Now that a portion of her strength had returned to her and her eyesight no longer seemed so blurry, Medrauta took a moment to inspect her lady. Gently, she brushed aside a lock of Viviane’s golden hair, tucking it behind the noblewoman’s ear to get a better view of Viviane’s face. A pained look flashed in Medrauta’s eyes as she noticed the deep furrow between her lady’s eyebrows.

Despite her lack of physical exertion during the past couple hours, Viviane’s expression was stressed and exhausted. Medrauta’s heartbeat quickened with concern as a lance of pain shot through her chest upon realizing how much her sudden seizure must’ve worried Viviane. As much as she wanted to apologize, Medrauta knew that wasn’t what Viviane would’ve liked to hear. After all, the seizure had been out of her control.

More importantly, she couldn’t bring herself to wake Viviane after seeing the exhaustion on her lady’s face. Left with no other options, Medrauta focused her attention to the room instead. Other than the bookshelves, the room was rather plain. The floor consisted of neatly arranged stone tiles, a choice that was mirrored by the ceiling. Most of the walls were obscured by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but the gaps that peeked out between them revealed a plain stone wall.

There’s really nothing too special about this place, huh? I wonder where the hell they hid the stairs. Medrauta sighed, allowing her gaze to linger on the ceiling. The tiles on top were arranged in a spiral pattern as opposed to the tiles on the floor which were arranged in a vertical pattern instead. As interesting as the patterns were, appreciating them wasn’t exactly on the top of Medrauta’s priority list.

With a grunt, Medrauta pushed herself off the ground at last, shuffling around Viviane as silently as she could before gently positioning the noblewoman in a more comfortable position. Medrauta wanted to lay Viviane down so that she could rest on her back, but the knight didn’t want to risk waking her. Instead, Medrauta left Viviane leaning against the bookshelf, albeit in a much less cramped position than before.

After a couple more seconds of watching her lady rest, Medrauta planted a quick kiss on Viviane’s cheek before moving to a nearby bookshelf and picking out a random book. Flipping through the pages, she found the ancient writing just as inscrutable as before, though the illustrations in the book told her that it was some sort of treatise on history.

However, looking at the illustrations more closely revealed that the book was more than just a normal history book. While most of the empire’s history was adequately recorded, Soleil’s rule was one that only received brief summaries despite its importance, and though there were books that detailed Soleil’s biography, they didn’t expand much on Soleil’s life after slaying the Witch Queen. In fact, the end of Soleil’s rule had become a hotly debated topic by scholars over the years.

There were countless theories being thrown around in academia, and while Medrauta wasn’t aware of any of them, the book she held in her hands provided more than an adequate answer to various questions. Despite being unable to read any of the text, the pictures were more than enough for the knight to glean some useful knowledge about its contents.

“What the hell is this...?” Medrauta frowned as she stared at one of the illustrations. “The Witch Queen... survived? No... She was spared.”

As impossible as it sounded, there was no other way Medrauta could have interpreted the illustration in front of her. In fact, this portrait was so important and detailed that it took up two pages, creating a colored double-spread image that displayed not a simple scene, but a sequence of events that only served to strengthen the knight’s interpretation despite her lack of textual context.

Consisting of four portraits strung in a sequence, the first portrait depicted the defeat of the Witch Queen at Soleil’s hands. This was something that Medrauta had seen before in various books detailing Soleil’s life, usually placed at or near the end to wrap things up. Naturally, that meant there was never a continuation of the emperor’s story, and the scant information about Soleil’s rule certainly gave no implications of the rather blasphemous events in the next three portraits.

As the traditional story went, Emperor Soleil decapitated the Witch Queen with one fell swoop of his blade, Caliburn. From there, he split his Sigil into four, creating the Four Colored Swords. Outside of that, there wasn’t much else to say about the rest of Soleil’s story. His rule was known to be a very average one. It was not an era of prosperity as there was still much of the Witch Queen’s influence to purge, but neither was it an era of extreme poverty thanks to the morale provided by humanity’s long-awaited victory against the witches.

However, this second portrait painted a much different version of history than Medrauta knew. Instead of decapitating the Witch Queen, Soleil was shown extending their hand toward the fallen villain instead. Had the church seen this book, it would have been put to flame immediately, and though Medrauta knew this, she was never really devout in the first place. Instead, she pressed on, continuing to analyze the illustration as a whole.

The third portrait was even more blasphemous, bringing a frown to Medrauta’s face as she stared at it in confusion. Although the image was pretty explicit in what it was trying to show, the knight still took a closer look to see if she was missing anything. After all, what it depicted just didn’t make any sense.

“Why the hell is...” Medrauta shook her head, the crease between her brows only deepening. “Why’s Soleil hugging the Witch Queen...!? And what’s with these cutesy looking hearts around them!? Gross!”

Sure enough, the third portrait was a rather detailed illustration of Soleil embracing the supposed Witch Queen with a cluster of pink and red hearts surrounding them. It was obvious that the image was supposed to convey some sort of romance between the two, something that made absolutely no sense to Medrauta seeing as they were supposed to be mortal enemies.

Initially, Medrauta theorized that the image could mean that Soleil was somehow charmed instead, but there were none of the usual colored lines that were supposed to denote the use of magic. The only thing that stood out in the rest of the image was a large set of black gates in the background.

If I remember correctly, Vivi said gates like these symbolized something forbidden. So... forbidden love? Medrauta pursed her lips, moving on to the next portrait. This one was much more palatable as it depicted a ray from the heavens striking Soleil in the absence of the Witch Queen. A large caption was written under the portrait. This was a word that Medrauta could read, surprisingly.

Its form remained the same in both the modern and ancient glyphs, and it read “Shame.” While there were a few other words in the empire’s language that withstood the changes of the ages, most of them were commonly used words, and “shame” certainly wasn’t one of them. Finding the word here was strange, especially after the three portraits before it detailed what seemed to be a forbidden love story, but even that couldn’t compare to what Medrauta had noticed.

Throughout the entire double-spread illustration, Soleil had been depicted as a woman, just like in the first book Viviane had selected when she and Medrauta first entered the tower and began perusing its library. To Medrauta, the apparent sapphic relationship between Soleil and the Witch Queen in the sequence was shocking not because of its nature, but because of its origin. Never did she think there would be an ancient text depicting such things in the only nation on the continent that refused to officiate same-sex marriages.

“Shame, huh...? What is this supposed to be? Emperor—No. Empress Soleil’s greatest shame?”

Although the phrase no longer made Medrauta’s head scream in pain, her strange seizures and unfamiliar flashbacks were the least of her concerns at the moment. The second those words left her lips, the tower shook violently, as if something was waking up.

Viviane’s eyes fluttered in response to the tremors even as Medrauta dashed toward her lady, seeking to shield her from whatever unknown event was about to happen.

“M-Medrauta!?”