After the council ended, I walked out of the hall. My pace neither quickened nor slowed.
My body understood perfectly: a princess does not need to process. She only needs to return to her place.
Susan followed behind me. Her steps were light, her distance precise—like a shadow trained into obedience.
At the corner of the corridor, I suddenly understood something—not guessed it, but had it approved by memory.
She was not a maid assigned to me temporarily.
She was my personal attendant.
She was meant to follow me. To know when I would fall silent, when I needed a shawl, when I should lower my eyes.
That certainty—this sense of she was always supposed to be here—sent cold up my spine.
Because it was not persuasion.
It was a conclusion already written, turning my thoughts into something unnecessary.
When we passed through the temple courtyard, I saw Sophia’s statue again.
It was still solemn. Still silent.
It was not looking at me, yet it never avoided anyone’s gaze—like a permitted authority of silence.
I stopped for a moment, not out of reverence, but because I could not treat it as just a statue.
Susan noticed my pause and immediately assumed it was hesitation before prayer.
“Your Highness… are you thinking of Sophia?” she asked softly, her tone naturally meek, as if speaking of something everyone understood.
“Our people have always been under her protection. Without her, the elves would have long since…”
She didn’t finish the sentence.
As if leaving words half-spoken was itself part of proper awe.
I looked at the statue and did not respond.
So Susan continued, as though supplying me with the correct understanding.
“And as for the Rose—” her tone became suddenly more careful, voice pressed deep into her throat. “The Rose is the god who created the entire Fantasia Realm.”
In that instant, a deeper fear rose in me.
Not because the Rose was called a god—
but because a response immediately formed in my mind:
Yes. I was supposed to believe this.
It was not agreement.
It was implanted reasonableness, like a rule tying a knot in my chest.
I wanted to ask—Created? By what right? By which history?
But those questions did not even finish forming before the same prohibition erased them.
No pain.
Just a clean deletion.
I remained standing.
Still looking at the statue.
Still a princess raised within faith.
Susan did not sense the internal fracture. She only saw a silent Highness, and so she spoke more gently, more fully, as if guiding my thoughts back into the correct slot.
“She is not a god who needs to be loved,” Susan said.
“She is the kind that must not be questioned.”
After she said it, she seemed to exhale, relieved—as if speaking that line restored stability to the world.
I felt colder.
Must not be questioned.
That was not the language of faith.
That was the language of a system.
We kept walking. The corridor light was cut by pillar shadows, dividing time into segments permitted to exist.
I did not look back at the statue again, because I understood clearly: looking back would not change anything.
And here, cannot be changed does not even need to be spoken aloud.
Back in my sleeping chambers, the attendants removed my outer robe, unfastened my hair ornaments, and dressed me in soft inner garments.
My body cooperated with flawless obedience, like someone long accustomed to being cared for.
When I sat on the edge of the bed, I did not even feel the thought of sleep.
I simply—lost consciousness.
Like a process reaching its endpoint and shutting itself down.
In the dream, I returned to the statue.
But the statue was no longer a statue.
Sophia stood there. No halo, no towering height of an idol. She looked like someone you could approach—yet she clearly belonged to no race.
Her gaze was still calm—calm enough to make whatever hunted her look frantic, almost pathetic.
I could not see the pursuer’s face.
Only shadows moving, like a will growing out of walls.
Sophia turned and left.
She did not run. She simply chose not to fight—not surrender, but refusing to let herself be defined by the thing pursuing her.
In the next instant, the shadow caught her.
She fell. No blood. No scream.
Like a lamp being pinched out.
I didn’t even have time to shout.
But the dream did not end.
I saw her stand again in the darkness.
Not the drama of resurrection—something more frightening: inevitability.
It was as if a deeper rule pushed her back into existence. Not because anyone saved her, but because she still carried an unyielding will.
Death on her was only a brief interruption.
Rebirth was not victory. Only continuation.
I did not understand why anyone hunted her.
Why she had to flee.
What she insisted on.
But I could feel that stubbornness.
Not a hot-blooded belief.
The kind where you know the price and still refuse to hand yourself over—like I once stood before the Rose Court, like Silence once told the world no.
In the dream, I thought: was she “right”?
The word made me immediately uncomfortable.
Because “right” sounded like the Rose’s language.
Like system language.
Like the language that forces the living into process.
So I replaced it with something weaker—and more honest:
She wasn’t trying to convince anyone.
She was simply bearing the direction she had chosen.
At the end of the dream, she looked back at me once.
There was no comfort. No guidance.
Only a confirmation: I was still standing here. I had not run.
Then I woke.
The room smelled the same.
The rose banners were still there.
The ring was still on my hand.
Everything was stable enough to suffocate.
I sat up and understood:
Sophia’s unyielding nature felt like something in the real world—no matter how the modern world changes, there are always people in the twenty-first century who insist on truth, goodness, and beauty.
And in this memory, I am not permitted to overturn faith.
I can only watch how faith makes people “reasonable,” and how “reasonable” becomes “must not be questioned.”
What frightened me most was not that the Rose was called a god.
It was realizing—
I almost would have truly treated it as one.
But Sessanna does not need to understand these things.
Because understanding would be process violation.27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsv51gU0t86
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzXRTE6LsbG
27Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ4Bqekkiqwj
ebook
Apple Books：
https://books.apple.com/us/book/id6758163704
Book 127Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7Q1Jr3X9uw
https://www.penana.com/story/198727/the-veil-s-mark-a-vampire-s-thousand-year-dark-romance/issue/0
Book 2
https://www.penana.com/story/203014/the-veil-s-mark-ii-beauty-in-an-age-of-chaos/issue/0
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.