Crown of Thorns

CHAPTER 72

Team : Cuties, WilsonWilson, Stephanie

“Evan must have figured out your purpose in the end.”

Yohan came up and stood toward me, facing me. I managed to stop looking down at the floor endlessly and raised my head, meeting his gaze to match his height, which, to me, seemed as tall as the ceiling at this moment. I found him looking at me with strange eyes.

“I wonder what that is, but I’ll bear it for now. I’ll find out soon enough.”

“This… what the hell is going on here? What… has happened?”

Painstakingly, I opened my uncomplying mouth, and stupidly asked. I could feel my lips trembling. My voice was so shaky and choked that almost no one could hear it.

Yohan spoke with a blunt face.

“Evan had already begun to serve me as his Master since a long time ago.”

“…”

“If you had planned to make Evan king and rule over the world from behind him, then you were wrong. Evan also tried to stop it…”

“That’s not it!”

When I cut him off with a roar, a slight confusion took over his face and quickly disappeared. I looked down at the floor. I caught sight of my fists that I held tightly. They were noticeably shaking.

No, that’s not what I wanted. This is not it.

“That’s not what I wanted!”

After a pause, he crouched in front of me. His hand extended towards my face and lifted my chin and forced me to face him again. With only a slight frown on his eyebrows, he opened his mouth with an indifferent expression.

“I don’t know your purpose, but what’s clear is that you tried to make Evan King just as you said before. But why? Why did you try so hard for Evan?”

“…”

“…Is it because you’re in love with Evan?”

My eyes widened. My feelings, which I had tried so hard to hide, were discovered. How does this man know so much about me? How in the world?

He then said languidly, as if my surprised expression were insignificant.

“Then this is something for you to be happy about. Evan chose to be by your side.”

I doubted my ears. I couldn’t understand what Yohan was saying, so I just blankly stared until he took his hand off my chin and straightened himself.

“What does that…?”

When Yohan opened his mouth again, he also answered in a voice tinged with emptiness.

“You’ve come a long way, to the point of being a bit pitiful. Evan was never interested in the throne to begin with. What he wanted was the witch and not the crown. It seems like he’s finally figured out a way to get her.”

My heart was in shambles. Something constantly rose, pressing down on its chest. I tried to bury it back down but to no avail. A sob broke through my lips. It grew stronger and stronger, and eventually, it came like a wave and hit me.

I burst into tears as I collapsed on the floor. The floor quickly absorbed my tears. The illusion that there would be no trace of it no matter how much I cried seized me, and I gagged. At the same time, all my pent-up emotions poured out.

“…It can’t be like this.”

“What?”

“This just can’t be. I must die by Evan’s hand. Evan has to live happily. Just as the hero in the fairy tale kills the witch and brings a happy ending, that’s how it should end. Why? What the hell happened? since when did it start going wrong? What did I do wrong? Why can’t I die? Why are things progressing like this?”

My dream wasn’t like this.

Knowing Evan’s true feelings for me was a happy and great thing, but right now, it only brought me pain. He is a man whose feelings I cannot accept and with whom I can never live happily ever after. He should have been fueled by feelings of betrayal and anger and flung his sword at me.

I made a river of many victims’ blood trying to make that happen. There was a flood of people whom I had killed in order to die, and yet, I still couldn’t die. Why must I suffer such a terrible thing?

Maybe he didn’t notice the truth. Did he not believe it? Perhaps he has turned a blind eye to the fact that I have done all this, that I am the cause of all this, and that I am the Darkness itself.

Yohan had moved on and approached the dead Emperor who still had the sword pierced through his chest. He kicked the Emperor’s body, once again checking if he was really dead, and then spat on it. No matter how much of a criminal someone was, one was to be polite to the deceased. Moreover, because Yohan was a knight, I couldn’t believe he did such a thing, but I didn’t have the energy to care.

Feeling dizzy, I fell to the floor and muttered, “The warrior should kill the witch,” incessantly until I heard Yohan’s voice.

“A fairy tale, you say?”

He smiled faintly and then began again.

“Fairy tales and reality are very different. I can tell just by looking at the witch crying in front of me right now.”

As Yohan walked towards the door, he murmured, as if he were speaking to himself.

“Oh, come to think of it, I once believed in fairy tales, too. So, in my younger days, there was a time when the fear of losing my mother, being discovered, and then killed pushed me into the forest of the witch.”

I raised my upper body in a daze. But my arms, which were touching the floor, were so weak that I could not prompt myself enough to look at Yohan’s face. I saw his feet standing near the entrance and facing my way through my clouded eyes.

“I believed it would be all over once I met the witch. So I recklessly entered the Witch’s Forest, but in the end, I could not find the Witch’s Tower. No, maybe I gave up on finding it halfway. I wasn’t as pure as Evan to push myself to keep looking, believing that the Witch’s Tower was sure to be somewhere inside the deep and wide forest. That’s right. I knew too much. I wasn’t as clean as Evan was.”

“…”

“So I came back, telling myself that there were no witches in the world. That’s how far the fairy tale went.”

Yohan’s leg headed for the door again. Then there was the sound of the doorknob turning. He opened the door and murmured in a whisper.

“But I regret it now. I should have looked more if I had known that this would happen. If I had known that there really was a witch. If I had known that the witch in the fairy tale was this kind of witch. If I had, I would have found her first. I should have trusted my innocence of childhood more and went into the tower.”

*

The rebels were defeated. When Evan used his strength, they lost all their fighting spirit and knelt down. They were not wielding their swords to protect anyone in the first place. So, threatened with their lives, the rebels collapsed to the floor.

Evan’s Light healed the wounded, and at the same time, mended their broken hearts. They praised the Light that appeared through the dark, shedding tears at its warmth.

Meanwhile, Count Phyletto, blinded by greed, was caught trying to resist until the end. He kept calling for me. He looked for the witch who he fully trusted and believed to be unconditionally on his side.

But I couldn’t go there, because Evan had also held me with my hands tied. The object holding my hand was glistening faintly. I was already aware of what the delicately carved seal was. It had bound my strength, and I had become a witch who could not use any powers.

“All the rebels were captured. They gave up without resistance. Are you still going to rebel until the end, Phyletto?”

“You, you dare! How dare you call me by my name? The Emperor is dead! And I am worthy of being the master of this palace with all the land and all the soldiers! Won’t you let me go right now?”

“This insolent fellow…”

“It’s fine. Let it go.”

Yohan couldn’t overcome his anger. He approached Count Phyletto, with bloodshot eyes, brimming with rage and whispered something to him.

“Do you know what this is?”

Count Phyletto looked distant and could not even see the object in front of him. Yohan said after clicking his tongue.

“Then I’ll ask you this. Now that the Emperor is dead, if there was only one person who inherited the imperial blood other than the princess, would you recognize him as the Emperor?”

Count Phyletto’s face was firm. The same was true for me and all those around me. Only Evan, holding me by his side as if he were hugging me, had a nonchalant expression. By the time the people gradually became noisy, making their exclamations of disbelief, the voice of a gentle yet powerful woman was heard.

“What are you doing? How dare you not honor the Emperor? Are you out of your mind?”

“P, princess!”

The woman, walking with her rich blonde hair, was none other than Princess Heleina. Those who saw her hurriedly cleared the way. Heleina, who crossed through the crowd in gentle steps, stood before Yohan, greeted him lightly, and then raised herself.

“Your Majesty, everything is ready.”

“Princess Heleina, I think the title of Your Majesty is too much.”

“If we hold the coronation ceremony soon, everything will be sorted out, so why is the order of things so important?”

“Really? But isn’t there much left to settle before the coronation? Anyway, you’re all set. It must not have been easy, but you’ve had a hard time preparing things by yourself.”

“It was a great help to have the sorcerer Neriano by my side.”

The relationship between the two was unusual. I’ve never seen Yohan and Princess Heleina meet, but they’ve exchanged stories that I didn’t know anything about at all. Even though I was attentively listening to what they said, I couldn’t understand a word because my head was so complicated. I just felt more tangled in the thread of an unknown end.

“Your Highness the Princess?”

“Your… Your Majesty?”

Everyone muttered in an incredible voice. But there was no time to think for long because Yohan gave orders to Evan.

“You take care of the witch and the rest of her party. I’ll leave it entirely up to you!”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Evan led me just as I was and started heading for an unknown location. The rest of the men followed Yohan to the end of the hall. I realized that there was so much I didn’t know and that something very unusual had been going on. So I stopped walking and asked Evan, who looked at me in wonder.

“Evan, what do you mean a party? What the hell does that mean?”

Evan smiled. It was a very twisted and cold smile.

“You, you can’t mean… don’t tell me the others have…”

“Was Ruadhan his name? His name, I mean… he kept inquiring about you until the end. To the point of persistence.”

I realized what it felt like to have the hair stand on point all over my body. Goosebumps ran all over my back. The world of the witch, all the dreams she wanted, instantly fell apart.

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TN : I do not know how to react to this sudden change of mood in the story… Share your thoughts in the comments/discord channel and let me know what you think of it ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ