🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Hye-jin's steps were so quick I had to start jogging to catch up to her. "Iruna?" she demanded, her hands flying in the air in exasperation. When she needed answers, she wouldn't ever stop. "I saw you get decapitated. What are you doing here, alive and well?"
The girl whirled to us, her feet never stopping their walk, just continuing backwards. " 'Alive' is a relative term," she said. "Hurry up. The Princess is waiting."
I craned my neck up at the ceiling, marveling at the intricate swirls of glass dotting the skylights. The corridor we poured into after stepping off the transport circle casted by the girl—whose name seemed to be Iruna, according to Hye-jin—was lined with nothing but glass cases, vases, and portraits of faded people. It's like a museum, except everything was free to touch, and of course, to break.
They'd probably make us pay more than ethrans if we do that, though. Say, was one soul enough?
While Hye-jin was hogging the girl who didn't seem inclined to answer her questions, I noted the carpet, the wallpaper, the murals on the ceiling—everything. Did the Central Empire's official palace look remotely like the palace in the Western Tower? Was it grander? Perhaps, judging from the polished marble floor and the sheer brightness of the halls, whiter?
I got my answer when Iruna stopped in front of a set of ornate doors. They didn't appear to be wood, but I'd digress. The girl spun on her heels, facing us with a swish of her yellow-green pigtails. After seeing her head fly off her neck courtesy of Arzo's blade, seeing her smiling and moving about had been such a relief. I thought it was another death heaped on our heads.
"Listen, you two," Iruna pointed a finger from different hands at us. "Behave in there, alright? I don't want to hear any squabbling. The Princess' time is precious. You're not to waste it. Got it?"
I bobbed my head. That's the only thing to do in this situation. Hye-jin followed suit. Iruna blew a breath and faced the door again. "Alright," she planted her hands on the door's faces. "Here we go."
She pushed the doors with ease, the panels swiveling on their hinges with ease. They gave way to a spacious room that's a library, a hotel lobby, and an observatory rolled into one. The library bit could be found on the floor-to-ceiling shelves bulging with books, going for the whole circumference of the room, as if they've decided to have a secondary wall. I didn't need to examine everything to conclude the Princess had everything about anything in those.
The hotel lobby bit could be seen from the staircase curving from the hidden corner of the room, up to the colorful cushions scattered around, the marble tables with tea sets propped on them, the thin tangles of golden installations hanging from the ceiling, and the huge-ass chandelier needing at least a hundred servants to clean and light.
Finally, the observatory bit came from the narrow arches lined with glass panes running parallel to the length, the astronomy equipments scattered over some of the work desks pushed through the spaces in between shelves, and the single pavilion standing in the middle of the room, one with its own ecosystem thriving inside it.
