RAMHM Chapter 4

My Funeral

Who in the world could attend their own funeral? My real body was right there ahead.

My corpse, beautifully arranged, would be displayed for one hundred days. Most imperial family members and their spouses held funerals in that manner. Daughters and sons of God. Whether to plant fantasies in people's minds or out of a sense of exceptionalism that royalty couldn't hold the same funerals as nobility, I didn't know.

I remembered the funeral of Her Majesty Empress Letina, who'd passed away in my childhood. Back then, she too had been beautifully arranged. Surrounded by flowers, laid in a glass casket, her funeral lasted one hundred days. That sorrowful, beautiful scene still vivid in my mind—and now it was my body in that casket.

The closer I got to the glass casket, the more I found myself pulling the veil attached to my hat down to the tip of my nose. Not many nobles knew my face unless they'd been close to me. It was my husband Novian's fault for rushing into marriage almost as soon as I'd made my debut. Having Bliea's fresh, healthy body was all well and good, but it wasn't until I came to this solemn, grand funeral that the reality began to sink in.

This is God's cruel joke.

This dreamlike reality wasn't something I should simply be happy about. This was God's joke. A terribly vicious one.

Ah—!

Among the people singing hymns and praying, surrounded by flowers of every kind, I saw me up close—eyes closed in the glass casket. A pale corpse with only the face exposed, covered in beautiful things. Exactly like Empress Letina's funeral.

I really am dead. I truly died.

The black dress I wore. The black hat. The black veil covering my face. But the truly black thing wasn't any of those—it was my heart. My heart felt as though it were literally burning black.

"By the law of Ronteaux, royalty and their spouses receive a one-hundred-day funeral."

"Glory to the Lord."

"Honor to the departed."

People prayed, wishing honor on someone to whom honor meant nothing once dead. With blurring vision, I frantically searched for my husband. Novian stood towering before the glass casket, staring down at it blankly.

"Noe—!"

Reflexively about to call his name, I met his eyes head-on as he looked up. His name stopped in my mouth. He must have seen 'Bliea's' face clearly, yet Novian immediately turned his gaze back to me inside the glass casket.

Foolish.

What had I hoped to confirm by calling him? Even though I'd dismissed the servants' foolish delusion, I couldn't let go of that thin thread of doubt remaining in my chest. Meeting those cold eyes—eyes I'd never once received as Adrienne—my mind went white with shock. And then suddenly—

"Ngh..."

Novian began to cry. It was the first time I'd seen him display such emotion. I, having slipped among the noblewomen, stared at him blankly. Until the priest's long, long prayer ended. Until the others opened their tightly shut eyes. As nobles bowed deeply and offered condolences to Novian's grief-stricken face, I could only stand there behind them, stupidly watching who had come to my funeral. It was hard to gauge how many people visited this cemetery before boarding their carriages again.

Was I really such an important person?

I'd made my society debut, caught Novian's eye immediately, held an early wedding, constantly suffered illness confined to the estate, and died fleetingly the moment I turned twenty-two.

Most of the weeping people had never even met me. Perhaps among all those people, no one truly mourned my death. What was even more absurd—because of this mistress's body that resembled not just my face but my build, even looking at my original body in that glass casket, I couldn't quite believe it. Even knowing my death was real, accepting it took an eternity.

Novian was right there before me. And I was here, breathing. For me, this too was reality.

If only someone would call me Adrienne instead of that corpse... If I could just insist we were the Grand Duke and Duchess attending someone's funeral on one of my better days, I could have accepted it. But no one called me Adrienne.

When the Duke and Duchess of Pirreta arrived at the Trovika family cemetery, half the guests had already left. Gregory, the young duke and the deceased Grand Duchess's brother, kept collapsing, his legs giving out, while his wife Bianca held him up with all her strength. But her face too, visible through the black veil, was drenched.

"Rienne...! Ahhh—. Ahhh—!!"

"Darling!"

Gregory finally collapsed the moment he reached the glass casket. Bianca, who'd let out a low scream, also covered her mouth with her hand. Young, beautiful, pale—the sight of that corpse made more sorrowful by its beauty filled their vision, and they couldn't hold back the tears.

"You—you bastard!!"

"Darling! Ngh... Darling, stop it!"

"Bring my sister back! Bring Rienne back!!"

"Darling! You know better than anyone that he did everything he could!"

Gregory Pirreta, sobbing his heart out, was as boisterous as his reputation suggested. The remaining guests simply continued their silent prayers as though this were nothing unusual. Such unseemly behavior was forgiven at funerals. Whether noble or royal, people of all sorts wailed, laughed, and committed all manner of strange acts before the dead.

Novian Trovika's face, called the Emperor's strategist, was already soaked through, and Gregory, the Grand Duchess's brother, was no different. After a meaningless scuffle, Gregory finally embraced the silently standing Grand Duke and swallowed his tears with choking sobs.

Along with the softly echoing hymns, the elderly noblewomen's prayers grew louder.

"Oh Lord—. Grant honor to the departed!"

Those with black veils drawn before their eyes prayed thus for Grand Duchess Adrienne, whose face they'd never properly seen. Soon guests and wreaths sent from the imperial palace arrived. They placed splendid flowers before the deceased's casket and made the sign of the cross to the Lord.

Either way, a Grand Duchess was still a Grand Duchess. Aside from that, it was no different from any other funeral, but Adrienne, standing among the elderly noblewomen, struggled to hold back tears. Already weeping from Novian's wailing, she couldn't bear it any longer when Gregory and Bianca joined in.

I'd died in early winter. How many days had passed since my death?

The night wind cut sharp enough to pierce flesh. The cemetery air felt colder than anywhere else. People disappeared one by one, and Novian had gone to supervise moving my corpse in its glass casket to the Grand Ducal estate during the night. But he would return eventually. He was the type to see any task through to the end. He'd never return to the estate without checking this incompletely tidied cemetery.

My face, foolishly certain, felt numb. As though someone had slapped my cheek. The tears had frozen in the night wind on my soaked face.

Come quickly, Noah...

I moved away from my gravestone shining white, to somewhere far off. No one could easily see me, but I positioned myself where I had a clear view of the cemetery entrance. The groundskeeper guarding the entrance seemed ready to chase me away at any moment, so I stood as though hiding behind the well-tended garden shrubbery.

In the cemetery empty save for the guard at the entrance, I waited for my husband. How long did I wait? My already pale hands growing colder and colder, which I kept kneading—when miraculously the sound of fierce hoofbeats shattered that heavy silence.

I immediately straightened my frozen body and poked my head out from behind the bushes. The groundskeeper saluted someone with parade-ground precision. A figure leapt down from his horse without even properly stopping it, casting a shadow like some enormous specter from hell as he entered the cemetery.

Could it be Noah? My swelling hope gradually deflated. The silhouette, obviously some warrior, grew close to the gas lamps illuminating the gravestone area and proved overwhelmingly large even from this distance.

It wasn't Novian. Those weren't his calm footsteps but something far more savage and urgent. The figure who'd driven his horse so fiercely as to shatter the silence stood before the gravestone saying nothing at all, perfectly still. A heavier silence than when I'd been alone.

As clouds that had covered the moon drew back, light reached the man's back as well. Though I wasn't in the mood to appreciate anything, his violently glittering blond hair—almost seeming silver—stabbed at my eyes. Who could it be? Though not shivering from cold like me, the man stood frozen for a long while before the gravestone with no body.

Even seeing only his back, I had the illusion that the emotion called despair was flowing down that enormous back. And then he staggered.

"!"

I reached out without thinking, then quickly drew back. The man with a build so imposing I'd have to crane my neck back to look up at him close up soon sank down—thud—onto the bare ground, kneeling, barely managing to stay seated upright. I felt blood rushing rapidly through my body as I watched intently. The man who'd been tracing the gravestone with only my name carved on it sat as though his soul had fled, then suddenly his shoulders began to shake. Was he crying? Laughing?

Or both?

The man whose shoulders shook so strangely seemed increasingly like someone angry, or mad. And as his body trembled, his glittering hair shattered like stars. I approached him bit by bit, as though bewitched. Other than Novian and my family, no one had shown emotion before this useless gravestone.

Who are you?

I wanted to ask. Who rides so desperately through the night to this place, trembling like that... Walking as though entranced, I stopped abruptly halfway.

What would I even say if I approached?

That man knew 'me.' If he didn't, he wouldn't grieve like this. But how could I explain my current state? Rather than the curiosity that had surged up, I felt dread first—how would someone react if they saw me now? I backtracked the distance I'd come. And what stopped even those retreating steps was when the man's sobbing-like breathing cut off—thunk—and a voice so low it seemed to crawl along the ground seeped into the silence.

"...Adrienne?"