Children of the Rune – Winterer - Chapter 199

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 199.
Choose the Dawn (11)
“Puppets have no sense of time. A thousand years feel to them like a single year, or perhaps a single day. They must have been puzzled when their masters never returned. Yet they lack the capacity to comprehend that they will never return at all. So they repeated their tasks without doubt. Setting out their masters’ morning meals in empty bowls, spinning thread, sweeping the floors of broken buildings. I couldn’t bear the pity of it. I should have stopped them, but I was utterly powerless to do so. Rage at me if you must. When it comes to the puppets, I have no excuse whatsoever.”
“….”
Epibiono turned his gaze downward to regard the puppets. Something like a smile formed at the corners of his mouth.
He crouched down and, from among the blood, lifted the severed hand of a puppet and placed it upon the split halves of its chest.
“Ailanore.”
At that, the young girl puppet called Ailanore opened her severed lips and spoke a few words that were incomprehensible.
Epibiono answered in the language of Ganapoli. The puppet soon fell silent.
“Sleep well.”
As Epibiono rose and raised his skeletal hand to point at the ground, smoke began to rise.
Nayatrey walked into the remains of the puppets and was seen tracing some unknown figure with her hand while praying. In moments like these, she resembled a small priestess.
The smoke grew thicker, too dense for the wind to scatter. The puppet fragments burned slowly, without flame. As if the soulless puppets were now transforming into souls, dozens of acrid plumes of smoke rose toward the heavens.
Soon, silence fell upon the surroundings. Not a click, not a rustle of sound remained. For a thousand years the puppets had guarded Arcadia, and now that they had all ceased their duties, heaven and earth alike were still.

The fragments of the beasts all lay dormant.
Some were broken, yet being broken did not render them immobile. Many bore scarcely a scratch, and these too had lost their magic and reverted to mere fragments of stone.
Boris, who remembered the images the spirits had shown him—fragments that once conversed with one another, even debated—found their silence strangely unsettling.
Arcadia was vast.
The city walls that had encircled it extended to the riverbank that cut through the urban expanse. Beyond them, countless spectral buildings stretched out, their hollow shells still boasting a semblance of grandeur.
The intricate aerial bridges that gleamed in sunlight now served only as obstacles to be avoided for fear they might collapse. The mysterious flames that had burned atop the Tower had vanished, and the beautiful reliefs and sculptures lay buried in dust, their luster lost.
If one were to call it a graveyard, it would be the grandest and most magnificent graveyard in all the world. All that elaborate craftsmanship, beauty, vitality, majesty, steepness, and harmony—created for people who had left not even a trace behind.
The sound of two llamas being led by their reins echoed behind him, and more than once he turned to look, thinking someone was following. Was it the fault of the dead puppets?
The two eyes that had flowed with blood and absinthe, Ailanore’s final voice—these kept churning in his mind.
Ailanore was a puppet created by one of Epibiono’s old friends, or so he had said.
The Mages who had believed the “Origin of Annihilation” would not fail had not sought to destroy their own puppets, even as they participated in the ceremony at the Dawn Tower.
This was not because they were indifferent to their puppets, but rather because their attachment to them was strong.
Once a puppet died, it could not be revived, and even if it were somehow restored, it would never return as the same puppet it had been. Thus they were unwilling to destroy their precious creations on mere speculation.
Yet in the end, they had been left without masters for a thousand years.
Because puppets could only recognize their masters as significant, they were incapable of communicating with one another or finding comfort in each other’s presence.
Epibiono, whether wisely or foolishly, had destroyed his own puppet before departing for the Dawn Tower.
His prediction that the ceremony at the Dawn Tower might fail had proven correct, but he had survived alongside dozens of puppets wandering Arcadia—without the puppet he himself had created.
“Here.”
Epibiono, who had been walking ahead, stopped before a place enclosed by ash-gray walls.
Beyond the collapsed entrance lay a dead garden. Beyond that stood a modest manor. It might have been closer to a villa than a castle.
The walls were rough and unadorned, the entrance shattered. The garden, divided into several flowerbeds, held not a single blade of grass.
As Boris passed through the garden and entered the manor, he felt the surroundings familiar and knew at last that he had reached his destination.
Following a pale sand-colored corridor where thin sunlight scattered, he came upon a small garden. There, the well he had sought to reach stood before him.
Yet it had endured too long. The stones stacked in a circle had turned to a gray so desiccated that even moss had withered. In places it crumbled and cracked, returning to earth.
Boris moved to approach it, then hesitated and turned back to look at Epibiono.
“Is there still water in there?”
Epibiono stood with his arms crossed, leaning against a pillar in the corridor.
“It depends on your heart. Inside are things you’ve lost, things you’re searching for now, present truths, and water as well. But not everyone can see all of it.”
Boris recalled what Endymion had first said about the well.
Because “things that should never be lost but were lost anyway” lay within it, people gazed into its depths with the resolve to lose their present selves.
Nayatrey sat at the end of the corridor, braiding her hair again. Her expressionless face seemed utterly peaceful, devoid of any wandering thoughts.
I wondered why she had followed me this far. If she had intended to go to Anomarad, she should have parted ways long ago and taken a different path. Was she simply following because it was difficult to survive alone in the Land of Mortals?
Nayatrey finished braiding her hair, tied the ribbon tightly, and looked up at Boris.
“I’m ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“For the journey.”
Epibiono pushed off from the pillar and approached them. He spoke to Boris.
“The Myo Tribe have been nomads wandering the boundaries of many lands since the days when Ganapoli flourished. They know far more about this land than you do. I imagine you already understand what you intend to do, having come searching for the Old Man’s Well. I don’t know why, but it seems the Myo Tribe lady has decided to go with you.”
Epibiono then glanced back at Nayatrey once, smiled faintly, and added:
“Well, we both know well enough that even if you asked for her reasons, you wouldn’t get an answer, wouldn’t we?”
So Epibiono was already thinking this way.
“…Perhaps so.”
“Then, it seems the time for us to part has come.”
Epibiono held up his skeletal hand cheerfully. Boris, who had been gazing toward the well, hesitated before speaking.
“Epibiono, before I go—there’s one thing I’ve wanted to ask for a while. It may be rude, but….”
Epibiono replied lightly.
“What is it?”
“Long ago, during the calamity of Arcadia, when you resolved to die—didn’t you feel some lingering regret? Something like a pressing reason you shouldn’t die yet, something you desperately needed to live for…. Didn’t you have such a problem?”
“Me? Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Well, you… it’s strange to say, but you can’t quite be called a living body, yet you’re not dead either, and if I had to put it into words, you’re caught somewhere in between…. I have a dead elder brother, and long ago someone told me that he’s caught between life and death because of his lingering affection and obsession with me. Might you also have had someone you desperately wanted to protect, or…perhaps a doll?”
Epibiono’s jade-colored eyes widened slightly, then settled. His gaze was so transparent it seemed to reflect the very depths of his mind.
“I did.”
His voice had changed entirely. No longer the playful tone deliberately mimicking modern speech, but a clear, innocent voice—one he must have possessed in his true youth, before the fall.
“Ha, well. I never thought you’d ask me such a question. Of course it wasn’t a doll. Haha, haha….”
“Was she perhaps the owner of Ailanore? Your friend was probably…a lady, wasn’t she?”
I didn’t fully understand when I had begun to read people’s hearts so deeply. Epibiono nodded honestly. An awkward smile hung at the corner of his mouth.
“Yes, that’s right. I deliberately said she was my friend’s doll, but you saw right through it. Good. Then let me ask you once more—do you think you know who that lady was?”
Boris drew in a breath and opened his mouth carefully.
“I believe…she must have been a noble princess.”
“….”
In the garden where neither birdsong nor insect sounds existed, only sand swirled in the wind. Between the two silent figures, the sun that shines everywhere in the world cast only long shadows.
“…I’ve grown reluctant to part with you.”
Epibiono raised his skeletal fingers and traced a line through the empty air. A luminous line appeared and connected along the path of his fingertips. Moments later, a vivid image materialized within the outline drawn in light.
A lady with chestnut hair flowing to her waist, her head adorned not with a crown but with a long ribbon.
Though she was merely a drawing, her eyes were alive like those of a living person, gleaming as if they held the sky itself. An ancient princess—cautious yet free, serious yet beloved, gentle yet bold.
There was something familiar about that face, and Boris soon retrieved the memory. It was Endymion.
“Evbzenis was a noble princess befitting her name, but she was born under a prophecy that she would kill her father by her own hand. And in the end, she fulfilled that prophecy. Since we studied together from childhood, we knew each other better than anyone. We promised each other a future, but we didn’t see each other for seven years. When the princess came of age and learned the contents of that cursed prophecy, she left the side of the king she had believed to be her true father in order to defy it.”
Evbzenis left Arcadia and wandered throughout the kingdom, he said. When she returned, a powerful mage organization called the Round Table of Truth was already following her.
“I spent all that time in my homeland living in seclusion, concealing my talents. People occasionally gossiped about me, the one who made a name for himself in my youth, but they had largely forgotten my existence.”
Boris suddenly widened his eyes and spoke.
“Then the princess’s biological father is….”
“You can guess, can’t you? Yes. Gitisi, the head of the Mage Council and called a sage—he was Evbzenis’s true father.”
Evbzenis was the only child of Gitisi, who had once been king of Ganapoli, and thus the legitimate heir to the throne.
But when the cursed prophecy was handed down, Gitisi transferred the throne to his younger brother to thwart the prophecy, severed his blood ties with Evbzenis, and had her adopted by his brother.
However, he made one condition: he extracted an oath that even if the younger brother had children afterward, the right of succession would belong to Evbzenis.
But as time passed, the new king’s authority grew higher than Gitisi’s, and the king made Prince Tisiajo, his own biological son, the heir to the throne instead of Evbzenis.
Gitisi was furious, but there was nothing he could do. He loved the kingdom, and above all, having lived as the head of the Mage Council for so long as a representative of goodwill, he could not bring himself to allow personal resentment to bind him and damage the peace.
It was from that point onward that Gitisi began peering into the world within the well, and even found joy in aiding the forces of evil within it.
Even ordinary people sometimes enjoy wearing the mask of a villain and playing the part, but in Gitisi’s case, his suppressed anger only further fanned the hidden desire to become wicked.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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