RAMHM Chapter 141

The Moment the Dead Return to Life

"On this day of auspicious snow, we gather here after so long a silence to proclaim the oracle delivered to us, and to receive our saint."

Grand Prelate Telrn's voice, carried through the amplifying relic, spread to every corner of the plaza.

Before Telrn could announce who the saint was, Doris moved first.

Dressed in white, she climbed the dais slowly and took her place at its center.

Telrn's eyes wavered, fast, then flicked toward Adrienne at his side.

Adrienne returned his look without wavering.

His lips bone-dry, Telrn forced himself to look away from Doris's gently smiling face and stepped briefly aside.

From the direction Doris had emerged, a priest with red hair peeking out beneath his hood carried something up onto the dais, flanked by other priests.

It was something enormous, shaped like a box, draped in white cloth.

"What is that?"

"A holy relic?"

As the crowd's murmuring swelled, Doris's mercifully smiling brow twisted.

This was not the order of things.

"Your Eminence, what exactly is this? Have you prepared some sort of gift for me?"

Before Doris could add anything further, Telrn reacted violently to the "something" the priests had just carried up.

Standing beside him as his attendant, Adrienne whispered quietly into his ear.

"Your Eminence."

"……"

Telrn was now certain: the object Epero's priests had just brought in, wrapped in white silk, was the body of the Grand Duchess Adrienne.

Will this woman's prophecy truly come to pass? Or is he about to be swept into yet another fraud?

He forced himself to swallow against a dry throat and looked down past the edge of the dais.

Among the crowd, Canulla's eyes flashed as she fixed her gaze on Telrn.

His legs began to tremble.

In front of all these people—he's really supposed to say it? That oracle?

He'd seen it, hadn't he—Count Acacia, alive, walking around. But what if even that had been a lie from the very start?

"……If you cannot bring yourself to speak the oracle, then at least offer a prayer for the poor Grand Duchess."

At Adrienne's whisper, light as wind, Telrn's lips parted, cold sweat pouring down his face.

"Your Eminence!"

Doris's low cry, sensing something wrong, became the spark.

Telrn could not withstand Canulla's stare any longer. He pulled the white cloth away.

"What is that?"

"Looks like a member of the imperial family's corpse."

Inside the glass coffin, tilted at an angle so the crowd could see, lay a woman's body, sleeping as though peacefully at rest.

'What in the world is that doing here—?'

Doris had heard the rumor well enough: that the mad Grand Duke Novian Trovika had loved his wife so much he'd dug up her grave and kept the body.

If it had been some rotted, ruined thing, perhaps. But Adrienne's corpse, beautiful as if merely sleeping, held no interest for Doris whatsoever. She hadn't even bothered to look at it before now.

And now the corpse she hadn't bothered to view sat right in front of her.

The crowd below the dais was reacting in a way she didn't like, and for one moment all the blood rushed to Doris's head.

Her gaze went, naturally, to Rhodness.

Rhodness, who had been sitting at a careless slant, straightened all at once.

His leisurely expression went rigid, and almost at once he leaned toward Neil at his side, murmuring something—an order.

'This isn't one of Rhodness's cute little stunts, is it?'

"Your Eminence. What is the meaning of this?"

Switching targets, Doris hissed through her teeth.

Telrn did his best to ignore the glare Doris was leveling at him and raised his voice.

"Before we begin the ceremony—for one who ended her life so young, and whose grave was torn open by her husband's greed, denying her rest. For her, for Her Grace the Grand Duchess of Trovika, I would first offer a prayer."

"Your Eminence, what in the—!"

"Your Highness."

Doris yanked at the robe of the Telrn ignoring her, and in that instant followed the white hand restraining her own gaze upward.

"Your Highness, you mustn't disrupt the ceremony."

"—!"

And in that moment, her head went blank, as though she'd been struck from behind.

The damned Bliea Acacia was alive, and standing right in front of her, perfectly well.

At the Grand Prelate's gesture, the prayer for the dead Grand Duchess began, and the tens of thousands gathered in the plaza folded their hands together.

Doris, her place in the order pushed back without warning, had to grit her teeth and choke down her fury for the entire length of the prayer, the murmured words humming in her ears.

Wind seemed to slip into her ears and tear through her whole body and mind.

"I received your gift, Your Highness. The incense smelled lovely."

A woman's voice, light as wind, slipped between the murmuring prayers, and it grated against Doris's nerves with unbearable insistence.

'Nora Giusetta—that utter fool!'

That stupid woman and her maids had clearly failed to carry out her order properly!

That vulgar woman—who doesn't even know her place—Bliea Acacia, she'd obviously gone and seduced Rhodness with that blonde hair of hers!

And in this very place. The place where she was meant to be the centerpiece. The place where she was meant to become Rhodness's wife. Yet this woman had dragged the corpse out here—as if to honor Adrienne, turning it into a spectacle, scoring points off Rhodness's sympathy!

Forcing the corners of her mouth up for the sake of the watching crowd, Doris parted her lips, trembling.

There was no longer any need to wear a mask in front of that vulgar wretch.

"I gave you the gift of dying clean, and here you come crawling back, scrabbling, turning my stomach—"

"……Your Highness?"

At the woman's faintly startled voice, Doris's mouth twisted further.

"Playing the innocent—pretending you have no interest in Rhodness. Pretending to love the Grand Duke… and now that he's locked away in Rubel Tower, you go and openly imitate the Grand Duchess to seduce Rhodness? That lowborn body of yours stuffed in a priest's robe. Just look at you. I always knew you'd get in my way eventually."

Hiding behind Telrn's back, Doris pulled affectionately at the arm of the woman obstructing her.

Beneath that outwardly gentle touch, her sharpened nails sank slowly into soft flesh.

Aware of eyes around her, her lips, pulled up again into a smile, kept up a venomous stream of words.

"Stupid wretch. Adrienne's ghost is useless to you now. Without me, Rhodness can't become Crown Prince, let alone Emperor. We're going to be bound to the same fate."

Her gaze flicking between the body and the woman, Doris's eyes glinted, sinister.

"I'll be the one to light Rhodness—that darkness incarnate—with a saint's bright radiance. In a way a vulgar wretch like you could never help him."

The force at the tips of Doris's nails, buried in flesh, slowly slackened.

"Either way, if it weren't for Bardenaldo or me, you'd have been nothing at all. Not even nobility, and yet you've enjoyed riches far beyond your station for far too long."

Doris released the wrist she'd been holding, throwing it aside.

"……Mm."

Adjusting her momentarily disheveled clothes, Doris slowly regained her composure, the corners of her mouth lifting.

"You should've died back when I was kind enough to kill you cleanly."

When the prayer for the damned Adrienne Pirreta finally ended, Doris drifted, at her leisure, to the center of the dais.

Now it was her turn to be the centerpiece.

Telrn's gaze, after lingering on Doris's triumphant back, fell to the Grand Duchess Adrienne's glass coffin.

'This can't be.'

How long had it been since the Grand Duchess died—a hundred days and then some?

Even granting that it was winter, could a body remain like this, as if merely sleeping?

The corpse hadn't rotted at all—it looked, if anything, freshly asleep, beautiful and full of life.

"Did you hear what that woman just said to me, Your Eminence?"

Adrienne's voice, brushing past like wind.

Canulla Winster's gaze, sharp enough to pierce him.

"Will you let this woman become the saint and stain the face of our God—or will you make the true will of God known to the world? Decide."

His fists clenched tight enough to sweat, Telrn suddenly felt another gaze and turned his head toward the high seats.

Empress Grace—always frightened, always wearing grief on her face—sat with her hands clasped tightly together, watching him with desperate intensity.

It was the very same look she'd worn each time she folded her hands before the god's statue and wept, beating her chest, every time another of her sons had died.

Telrn stood now at the most important crossroads of his life.

The proclamation that a new sun would shine bright on Ronteaux—so political a statement—was more than he felt he could bear.

'But at least the oracle that the Grand Duchess Adrienne will rise again…'

The image of Count Acacia, whom everyone had believed dead, walking around perfectly alive, churned through his mind.

So did the strange confidence on the face of this noblewoman—who lacked for nothing—disguised as a priest, standing behind him.

And, as if that weren't enough, there was the relentless stare of Canulla Winster, who had been like a god to him, who had carried him through his impoverished childhood.

When he looked at Empress Grace, watching him as though he were the god who would save her, Telrn's throat bobbed hard.

When the voice she'd been waiting for failed to come from Telrn, Doris, who had been holding herself back, took one more step forward to seize the moment herself.

"As the saint going forward, I will pray for His Late Imperial Highness Crown Prince Bardenaldo, the saint of Ronteaux, and—"

"Wait."

Telrn, his decision made, stepped in front of Doris and came forward to the edge of the dais.

"There is… one more oracle."

He opened the eyes he had closed and spoke quietly.

"The dead Grand Duchess. Adrienne Trovika will soon awaken."

At Telrn's trembling voice, Doris's face, certain of her victory until that moment, flooded with horror.

Telrn's trembling eyes turned to Adrienne, her hood pulled low.

Adrienne smiled gently and nodded.

Doris, who had stepped forward, turned her stiffened head to look at them.

Behind Doris, whose face had gone bone-white, the murmuring of the tens of thousands gathered in the plaza surged like a wave.

Adrienne led Telrn to stand before the coffin where Bliea lay.

Catching Rotsy's eye for a moment among the crowd below the dais, Adrienne laid her hand upon the glass.

All that training—every grueling hour of it—had been for this single moment.

As she woke the mana flowing quietly within her and let it pour into the coffin—like a sponge drinking in water—she felt the stone beneath the coffin absorb it all.

Cold sweat pouring down his face, Telrn followed Adrienne's lead and pressed his hand to the glass.

The instant the coffin opened with a soft click, Telrn's eyes went round as saucers.

The light of something unnamed began, slowly, to surface in eyes that had been filled with nothing but dread.

The sweat dripping from his shaking hand left its mark right there on the coffin's surface.

And then Telrn and Adrienne both saw it clearly.

A finger, twitching, on Bliea's body.

Telrn's eyes, grown wider than seemed possible, did not lose the sight for a single instant.

Adrienne's lips parted, quiet.

"I told you—"

"The, the Grand Duchess—"

"—it was the will of God."

At Adrienne's low murmur, the trembling in Telrn's body stopped.

'The dead have risen!'

A light began to burn in Telrn's eyes.

"The dead Grand Duchess, Adrienne Trovika, will awaken!"

Like a man possessed by a spirit, his eyes rolled back, and he began to shout in a voice like thunder.

"The true saint, blessed by God—Adrienne Trovika—will return from Abadhelia, bearing God's will!!"