Mad Rosetta - Chapter 123

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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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Rosette Gone Mad
Chapter 123
Child of Confession (6)
* * *
“Tell Julia that urgent state matters have arisen.”
“Pardon? But….”
“…Do you dare question my command?”
As I glared with menacing intensity, the Captain of Imperial Guard who had accompanied me to the inn’s doorway froze as if his voice had been stolen.
Jeremiah, displeased with him, seemed to be seething with barely contained fury.
Ignoring the bewilderment etched across his face, I shut the door behind Sing, allowing only him inside.
‘Tea—no…. Should I first ask if things have gone wrong between me and the Princess? Or perhaps inquire about her well-being….’
Jeremiah was on the verge of madness from anxiety.
He hadn’t yet realized that he hadn’t even ordered tea to be brought.
His mind held only one concern: how to ease his own dread.
Yet finding no answer, his palms had grown slick with sweat at some point.
No matter how many times I retraced the context, there was nothing I could ask.
I couldn’t ask if she knew what I had said when I killed Sing, nor could I ask if she was the one who had conveyed those strange words to the Princess. It was all perfectly obvious.
“Have you given up drinking entirely?”
“…What did you say?”
Jeremiah, who couldn’t even tell if he was breathing properly, slowly turned around.
Sing, as if he had merely stepped out for a stroll, stood with his hands clasped behind his back in the inn’s room, gazing up at the high ceiling as he continued.
“I’ve been suspicious all along….”
“….”
“It’s been several days since you arrived, yet nothing was prepared, so I asked.”
Then, slowly, he met Jeremiah’s eyes once more.
“Back then, you came again and pleaded so desperately for me to kill you…. Well, there it is.”
“…Ah, ah. Ah…!”
“How is it, brother?”
Jeremiah’s mouth gaped open and closed like a mute struggling to cry out, and he staggered backward.
As he retreated, his hand caught a table, but he soon collapsed to the floor regardless.
“Does the throne I’ve taken in your stead suit your taste?”
This was surely hell itself.
I was certain of it.
* * *
Where had it all gone wrong?
I had spent a long time anguishing over this.
Yet with each passing moment, I arrived at the conclusion that it would have been better never to be born, and eventually, I ceased to wonder at all.
Nothing would change, so there was no point in thinking.
– “Why?”
– “….”
– “Why do you grow more and more like that vulgar man with each passing day?”
My earliest memory after birth was the Duchess’s indignant face.
She had appeared suddenly and asked me this question when I could barely babble, then left just as quickly.
– “It is a blessing that the Imperial Prince resembles His Majesty so closely.”
– “You must feel as though you are gazing upon the very incarnation of Arkanis, Jeremiah.”
As my mind grew, I came to understand who the “vulgar man” the Duchess had spoken of truly was.
Brilliant platinum hair—the symbol of abundance—and eyes deep as the abyss, an unfathomable embrace.
There was only one person in the Empire who could be described in such terms.
Despising this so intensely, I began to grow my hair longer, hoping to appear different in some way.
– “J-Jeremiah…”
The embrace of the greatest man in this nation had not been prepared for me.
Neither the dazzling golden hair nor the deep blue eyes that concealed their depths.
Yet despite possessing neither, that child appeared utterly fulfilled.
Calastian Theo.
In a world where hatred itself becomes sin, my half-brother bloomed beautifully.
– “…Truly, have you already progressed that far in the comprehensive texts of medicine and military strategy?”
– “Hehe, Marquis Palacil even said it was rewarding to teach me. So I was very happy.”
– “…I see.”
– “…I thought you would praise me too, brother.”
The child twisted his lips and drank his milk, as though my reaction was not what he had imagined.
No one could know how grotesque that expression appeared to me.
– ‘I… I only just started this material last week…’
It was a subject where I could barely grasp a single word at once, constantly flipping through dense dictionaries.
Yet that child had even earned praise from the exacting military strategy tutor.
When I hastily offered praise, saying how hard he had worked and how proud I felt, the smile that crumbled so quickly filled me with such dread.
Theo was only four years old at the time.
– “I have always asked that you not visit so abruptly like this…”
– “Ah…”
– “How am I to regard an Imperial Prince who cannot even follow such trivial instructions?”
The Duchess terrified me.
No matter how young a child might be, they instinctively sense when someone despises them.
Perhaps all the more so because I was a child.
And when what fell before my eyes was my own mother’s contempt, it naturally became terror.
No matter how hard I tried, whenever I stood before the Duchess, everything about me became worthless and inadequate.
– “What business do you have at the Crown Prince’s Palace?”
I first heard the name Sing that summer, in the year the Duchess departed for the West.
At the stern voice of the person I encountered in the middle of the corridor, I quickly lowered my head.
I still could not remember His Majesty’s face.
I had always been forced to keep my eyes downcast.
– “Did you perhaps come to see Sing?”
His sharp voice seemed ready to burst into a reprimand at any moment.
My body trembled involuntarily, yet despite this, bewilderment churned through my mind.
– ‘Sing?’
That unfamiliar name—if it could be called that—lingered persistently in my thoughts.
When His Majesty rebuked me for wandering about as the eldest son while the Crown Prince devoted himself to his studies, a sense of injustice had indeed tainted my heart.
He had suggested we drink tea and play chess. I hadn’t come seeking him of my own volition…
That day, when I asked my tutor upon returning, he said it was something like a pet name.
A name bestowed by one who, unable to contain their affection, wishes to give the world itself to another.
– “It suits him rather well…”
Even amid such thoughts, I realized that Theo’s love was inscribed through affection itself.
I harbored such fleeting musings.
Whether in scholarship or martial prowess. Whether in birth or circumstance.
Since there was nothing in which I surpassed Theo, resignation came naturally.
His subtle smile always carried an air of composure.
Even when facing somewhat troubling obstacles, Theo never lost his equanimity—and I found that admirable.
My own envy felt so contemptible that I believed my half-brother truly deserved the throne.
– “Did I not honor Theo’s command to grant me convenience?”
– “….”
– “…Why? How so?”
– “….”
– “Why do you speak such words, Mother?”
And so, on the day I received Mother’s cruel command, I failed to realize I had contradicted her for the first time in my life.
To kill Theo, who had ascended to the throne—no…
The Emperor—Mother’s audacious declaration of her ambition to assassinate him was precisely that shocking.
– “Theo…? Ha! It seems you and your brother have built quite the bond without this mother’s knowledge, Imperial Prince.”
– “….”
– “Did keeping those cast out from Imperial Authority at your side for surveillance feel so comforting?”
– “That is not—Theo, His Majesty has done this for us—”
– “Jeremiah.”
Mother rarely called me by name.
It was absurd.
My words caught in my throat at merely hearing my name spoken once.
– “Do you truly not understand that only you can repay this mother’s humiliation?”
– “….”
– “It is also for Beatrice, who carries your child, and for the child yet to be born.”
– “…What did you just say? With child?”
– “Surely you do not intend to let your unborn child live as though dead?”
Nearly two decades of accumulated terror coexisted with the ugly desire to be acknowledged by my master.
Yet in that moment, all else fell away, and only helplessness pressed down upon my mind.
Before one who reigned with overwhelming dominance, I lowered my tail in submission—the pitiful acquiescence of a cowardly and inadequate loser.
The Duchess smiled, assuring me there was indeed a way to clear myself from suspicion.
I couldn’t even remember how long it had been since I’d seen her smile.
– ‘Should I close your eyes for you?’
I hesitated for a moment, meeting Sing’s gaze as he stared at me with unblinking eyes.
You lay there drenched in blood, not breathing, as if you belonged to no world at all.
…Not as if—you simply didn’t.
Yet I couldn’t bring myself to touch your body, so I never did close your eyelids.
When you were later placed in the sarcophagus, you mercifully appeared to be sleeping peacefully—like someone who would one day awaken again.
– “…Issue the edict announcing the Former Emperor’s passing, and designate his final resting place….”
After that day, everything blurred past like an arrow.
Sometimes I lost my memories; other days my vision would fail me from the weight of despair.
I couldn’t tell if it was dream, hallucination, or reality—perhaps from drinking endlessly without pause.
Whenever you appeared, I would weep pathetically, begging you to take me with you.
I was shameless, and too cowardly to even hang myself.
So all I could do was prostrate myself at your feet and weep like a dog.
Just as the Duchess said, I was a vulgar creature.

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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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