FSW Chapter 1

Heavy air, the priest's prayer, the sickening scent of lilies. Against the unreality of the scene, Nishina lifted her head at last from where it had bowed toward the ground.

The sky is unmistakably, unnaturally blue. That's strange.

The Snow Empire has a saying: rain falls from a dry sky. It means—quite literally—the death of someone of imperial blood.

The imperial bloodline was said to carry the mingled blood of the water spirits, and when that blood grieved deeply enough, the sky wept with it, rain falling in return. Thus, whenever a cherished member of the imperial family—an imperial themselves—closed their eyes for the last time, rain fell even from a dry sky.

But the sun—warm, then outright hot—jabbed at her eyes. Only then did Nishina lower her stung gaze.

Beneath a light bright enough to blind, a white fist trembled, visible in full. He watched the Emperor extend a single flower with an indifferent face, and his teeth were clenched tight.

Aiden Heinrich Aren of White Snow.

The Snow Empire's prince. The only child of Empress Kiyonné, the subject of this funeral. And Nishina's half-brother.

Aiden passed the Emperor—who had not offered even a final word—and ascended the dais to lay the flower on the sleeping, closed-eyed Empress. It was lilies she had loved. Whenever Nishina had crossed paths with her in the palace, that same sickeningly fragrant scent had always followed.

He placed the lily, not a speck of dust on it, pure white, into the Empress's hands, and offered his final farewell—and the sky, gradually, began to cloud over.

No one seemed startled by the belated rain. The attendants had, from the start, stood ready with umbrellas already in hand. If anything, the moments before, when no rain had fallen, would have been the strange ones.

A drop of rain plopped against her cheek. Cold. The rain, so long in coming, was achingly cold—because its only cause was the prince's grief.

A lady-in-waiting approached without a sound and raised an umbrella over her. But her cheek, already wet, stayed damp as if she herself had been crying.

Nishina blinked, slow, her rain-wet eyelids heavy. Through the blur of her narrowing vision, she saw the prince standing alone, bolt upright.

Even the attendants had been waved off; he stood there taking the rain full on, with no shelter at all. His head, held stubbornly high—no different than it always was—and yet it looked, somehow, precarious. Or was that just her?

Nishina was watching him, helplessly, aching with pity—when without warning his blue gaze met hers.

In that instant, Nishina realized her concern had been a misreading. What stirred in his eyes was nothing so small as precariousness.

An emotion more violent than grief.

It was rage.

She stepped back on reflex, a chill crawling through her. Even as confusion sent her eyes wandering, unmoored, Aiden’s eyes kept bearing down on her, relentlessly, projecting that feeling.

Her breath, caught without her meaning it to be, lost its rhythm and scattered. She couldn't breathe. The rain's sound grated against her ears. And above all else, her head was spinning—far too much.

A dreadful, nameless sense of having lived this before.

Nishina staggered a step back, her face twisting.

Rain soaking into her shoes. People dressed in black. The dizzying scent of lilies. And a fury like a beast's—as if it would tear everything to pieces.

"…—!…"

Her lips parted at the images stabbing into her mind. The pain-soaked memory was not hers—and yet, at the same time, it was.

At the far edge of the memory flickering past like film, in the moment she finally read the ending of it all, Nishina's body crumbled.

After that, darkness.

A biting season—breath misting the air. In a dark forest thick with falling snow, Nishina looked up at the figure looming over her. Red eyes—vivid contrast to her own—gazed down at her, blank.

Her brother had sent this hunter for one purpose only: to kill the prey that had become a nuisance.

Soon, that blade shining in the man's hand would slice through her throat.

She could feel death coming, and yet—why did no fear rise in her at all?

Maybe it was because she had always sensed, somewhere, that a day like this would come.

Her brother, despite carrying the Empress's own blood, had had even his rightful place as Crown Prince threatened, all because he had been born without love. And she, though only carrying the Imperial Consort's blood, had been born of love—and had spent his whole life being weighed against her, forced to endure it alone.

Behind every peaceful moment of her own childhood had lain, always, his misfortune.

How bitterly she had come to regret it, once she was finally named Crown Princess.

She had never once imagined that the healing power of the water spirit, awakened in her so late, would become such powerful support. If she had known it would end with the people praising her, and her brother's place taken from him at last, she would have kept it secret for the rest of her life.

Only once things had deteriorated past any hope of undoing did Nishina come to regret it, bitterly and completely.

Herself—nothing but his enemy all along.

Every moment she had flinched away, frightened of his hatred.

Would something have changed, if she had found the courage not to give up, even in the face of his cold refusals?

But regret always comes too late. What-ifs are always empty, that's just how it goes.

Her brother, returning victorious from the war, had turned the point of his sword toward the palace as though it were only natural. With the Empress's homeland and its allied forces at his back, he had nothing left to hesitate over.

She remembers it exactly—the blood and the screaming, that scene of carnage. The moment her mother's and father's heads fell. That rage-filled gaze, that gaze steeped in emptiness—she could never forget it.

In that moment, she had finally understood. The depth of the despair he had lived through.

Perhaps that was why what choked her throat was not resentment, but regret.

From that day, she thought every day of the ending that would someday come for her.

A quiet death, met deep in a vast forest. Compared to what she had braced herself for, it was not so bad an ending.

Nishina closed her eyes, calm, without the slightest tremor.

"Any last words."

The man asked in a tone as indifferent as his gaze. His low, sunken voice settled thick in her ear.

If it was a last word for that person…

When, instead of death, she had been cast out to somewhere lower than the ground itself, Nishina had settled in a shabby clinic. A place where the line between life and death was thin as a hair's breadth. Because of that, she had heard more than her share of people's last words, too.

Someone confessing love. Someone giving thanks. Someone sobbing that they did not want to die. Someone spitting resentment and curses.

But to him—someone she could spit neither resentment nor love at—what words could she possibly leave?

She did not have to think long. The one lingering attachment left in her chest—just this.

"…May you become a sun that shines upon even the lowest places of the empire."

The moment the cold snowflake that had landed on her cheek melted and streamed down, Nishina finally woke from the dream.

She felt the dry, crackling feeling in her mouth as she slowly pushed her eyelids open. A headache like her skull was splitting, and a thirst as though she'd been thrown into a desert for days, drew her brows together on their own.

Once her vision finally found its focus, the familiar ceiling came into view. It was her own room's ceiling.

"The Princess is finally awake!"

"Shina!"

She turned her head, weak, toward the woman clinging over her. Whether she'd been crying, her damp eyes searched Nishina's face with desperate longing.

"…Mo… ther…"

At the rasping call, the woman burst into tears all over again. Worrying her mother was regrettable, but the sound of her weeping only made the headache worse.

The physician, noticing her color worsening, gestured to the maids.

"Shall I help you sit up?"

At her nod, Joy carefully supported her body. Only after a few sips of the water Joy offered did her voice finally come back to her.

"Mother, I'm all right, so please, no more tears."

"But—but you didn't wake for days! This mother thought something had truly gone wrong with you—!"

Once, long ago, after a serious illness, her mother had grown terrified even of the mildest cold. She had likely gone days without eating or resting, staying at her side the whole time.

Spoiled thing to think, probably. But moments like this—maybe being loved a little less wouldn't kill her. As she smiled, awkward, the physician stepped in to soothe the Imperial Consort in her place.

"She should be all right now, but Her Highness still needs rest. You haven't rested in days yourself, Your Grace—it might be best to withdraw for now."

"…All right, then."

The Imperial Consort swallowed her tears and nodded. She promised to return the next morning, and only then, reluctantly, did she leave—the physician following after her, leaving behind a few instructions.

Joy insisted on staying, but at Nishina's quiet request to be allowed to sleep, she turned and left too, though reluctance dripped off every line of her retreating back.

Only once the room had finally gone quiet did she let out a slow, steady breath. She hadn't been able to show it with her mother's eyes on her the instant she'd woken, but her mind had been past crowded—nearly ready to split open.

She had dreamed. No—not a dream. A memory. On a day when snow fell, she had been killed by her brother's own knight.

That wasn't all. Everything up to now, and everything still to come, she remembered.

Looking back, she had felt that same strange sense of déjà vu often, even as a small child. When she'd received the rose garden as a surprise gift on her seventh birthday. When her nanny Michelle had left the palace for personal reasons. Both times, it had felt uncannily familiar, as though she were living through something she'd already lived through once.

By that point, feeling instant familiarity with a stranger, or knowing, faintly, how an unfamiliar situation would unfold—none of it seemed strange anymore.

She had let all those unexplainable sensations pass, telling herself there must have been some similar situation once before. But the memories that had struck her the moment her eyes met Aiden's—those were not déjà vu. Not by any measure.

This wasn't something she had lived through. She had seen it.

His rage would cut down the Emperor and the Imperial Consort, would run countless retainers through with the sword, and would, in the end, fell her own head too. She had seen that horrifying future.

'I'—someone who lived in another world. Had read it. In a book.

Nothing concrete came to her about the 'I' or the 'world' of that other place. Only one book she'd read there stayed with her. The title was For the White Snow—a work depicting the life story of a single protagonist.

The novel traced, roughly, how a protagonist who had grown up unloved, through trial after trial, became Emperor. A common enough plot—a female lead, raised drowning in love, brings peace of mind at last to an Emperor gone bloodless and without tears.

If there was anything unusual about this otherwise unremarkable novel, it was that the author had pulled off a considerable bait-and-switch at the start of the story.

The early chapters make the princess look like the protagonist. The narration describes her using the black hair and white skin that stand for "white snow," over and over.

But as the story goes on, it's revealed that the true protagonist—the "White Snow"—isn't the princess at all. It's the prince. Skin white as snow, and beautiful—that description belongs not only to her, but to the prince as well.

The twist had hit her like a blow to the back of the head when she'd first read it, but by now, who the true protagonist was hardly mattered.

What truly mattered was that the protagonist—the prince, meaning her own brother—would overturn the palace by force, and seize the blood-soaked throne.

Nishina recalled her own death, as it had appeared in the memory.

Cast out alone, the princess lived quietly, healing the sick in the shadows—but her faction still existed, and, unintentionally, her fame as a saint grew and grew, until Aiden finally sent his own knight to kill her.

A wretched death. Made worse by the fact that, against everything the princess truly felt, she had died as his enemy to the end.

She had held no resentment, not even at the moment of her death. The 'I' of that other world had clicked her tongue at the princess for it—but now that it was her own situation—yeah, she got it.

Because even knowing this cruel future now, no hostility toward him rose in her at all.

Even if the same circumstances came again, even if the moment his sword fell across her throat came again—she doubted she could ever hate him.

But yeah. Not happening. Not this life. Hard pass on that ending.

She had no wish to witness her family's deaths, no wish to lose everyone she loved. And she had no wish, either, to watch him seize a blood-soaked throne and grind his way down a road of thorns.

To begin with, she hadn’t the slightest—not a speck—of interest in fighting him for the throne.

So if she could safely hand him the crown before things went wrong, then Aiden would have no need to walk a road soaked in blood just to inherit it—and she would have no need to lose everything, either.

Of course, to manage that, she'd need to make the Emperor recognize that the prince was more suited to rule than she was, and, at the very least, not earn Aiden's hatred.

And above all—she needed that knight, the one who would one day cut her throat, to pity her.

The way the hunter, unable to kill White Snow, had helped her flee instead.