The Forgotten Field - Chapter 11

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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 11
After that day, I found myself unable to eat nearly everything. I couldn’t trust what might be hidden inside any dish.
The Nursemaid grew frustrated, unable to understand my reluctance. She simply assumed I was being difficult and picky.
Without explanation, I survived on the fruits and honey she occasionally brought as snacks, nothing more.
Loneliness and isolation had become trivial concerns. In the most opulent and luxurious place in the world, I had to wage war against hunger itself.
There were days when my hunger became so unbearable that I reluctantly reached for the food the servants brought. But without fail, I would find insects, rodents, or sometimes unidentifiable clumps of writhing fur tangled within.
After experiencing this horror several times, I reached a point where I could eat nothing at all. Within weeks, I had withered away into a pitiful shadow of myself.
By this point, even the dull-witted Nursemaid seemed to notice that something had gone terribly wrong. She rushed to find the Empress and made a fuss, insisting that her only daughter was practically dying.
Thanks to her intervention, I saw my mother’s face for the first time in months.
“How did you end up looking like this?”
It was the first time Senevir had visited the Separate Palace—she who had acted as though she’d completely forgotten her daughter’s existence.
As I gazed at my mother, radiant as a summer flower despite my own ravaged appearance, my eyes burned with tears. Her face was so innocently pure that resentment surged within me.
I had intended to rage at her, to scream about how she could be so utterly selfish. But when I opened my mouth, only sobs came pouring out.
Like an infant, I wept and confessed everything that had happened. I laid bare every cruel act the servants of the Separate Palace had committed, every torment I had endured. Throughout my entire account, Senevir sat beside my bed in silence, listening.
I believed she was holding her silence to contain her fury—that she had been left speechless by the horrors inflicted upon her only daughter.
So I shook her arm urgently and demanded:
“Mother! Please don’t let them torment me anymore! You must take action immediately so that no one can ever hurt me again!”
“Why should I?”
Senevir tilted her head with a puzzled expression.
Her unexpected response left me stunned. Her face held only pure curiosity—the expression of someone genuinely unable to comprehend why a child worn down by abuse would seek her help.
“Talia, this palace is yours, and all the servants in this castle are your possessions. You’re nine years old now. How can you come crying to your mother because you can’t properly manage your own things?”
I was completely speechless.
Senevir cupped her cheek in one hand and sighed with genuine disappointment.
“You are the Emperor’s daughter. I truly cannot understand why you allow such insignificant creatures to victimize you so completely. The fact that my daughter is this clumsy and weak is genuinely appalling to me.”
“Mother….”
Senevir gazed thoughtfully at the candle flickering on the windowsill. Her hauntingly beautiful face held no trace of anger over the abuse I had suffered—only a hint of disappointment and exasperation, along with the contemplative expression of someone pondering how to enlighten such a deficient child.
I felt as though I were facing an insect that had merely assumed human form.
After a long moment of thought, Senevir snapped her fingers and spoke.
“Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll leave you with a capable guard. He’s a man I’ve trained thoroughly over a very long time. If you handle him properly, he should prove quite useful.”
As though that resolved everything, she rose to her feet.
I desperately grasped at her sleeve.
“I don’t need such a person! I want to be with you, Mother!”
At my desperate plea, a flicker of disdain crossed Senevir’s face. I went pale with shock.
Senevir peeled away my fingers from her garment one by one, then bent toward me. With genuine pity, she clicked her tongue.
“Talia, all of this began with me. Yet do you know why people never put rats in my soup?”
I froze like a mouse before a serpent, unable to utter a single word.
Senevir continued softly.
“Why is my bathwater always warm and fragrant? Why is my table always abundant? Why would they never dare do to me what they do to you? Shall I tell you the secret, my dear?”
Her blood-red lips brushed gently against my ear.
“They fear me, so they wouldn’t dare attempt such things. Some among them even regard me with reverence. Of course, countless others feel revulsion and contempt toward me. But even those people see me as something to be wary of, not as a target for abuse. Because I am a deeply threatening presence.”
She stared intently into her daughter’s eyes, and Talia glimpsed something damp and murky coiling within Senevir’s gaze.
Senevir straightened herself and left one final piece of counsel.
“Remember this well. That which is strong and beautiful becomes the object of fear and envy. But that which is beautiful and weak becomes prey all too easily—especially within these walls of the Imperial Palace. If you have no wish to be trampled mercilessly by the countless beasts that will come to hunt you, then at the very least, you must not let them discover your weakness.”
With those words, she departed, leaving behind her daughter—fragile beyond measure—in the darkness.
That night, Talia turned her words over and over in her mind.
The weak are trampled. And Senevir seemed to harbor not the slightest intention of protecting her young daughter from such brutal destruction.
Was this how a defeated soldier felt upon losing their final refuge? Terror seized me at the thought of the horrors yet to come, and my entire body trembled uncontrollably.
Even if I were subjected to harsher treatment than now, no one would shield me. With my own mother turning away, how could His Majesty the Emperor spare a glance for a bastard child—a blemish upon his name?
I curled myself into a ball beneath the blankets and anxiously gnawed at my fingernails. The servants’ feet—those I had glimpsed when I lay prostrate on the Dining Hall floor, retching—haunted my vision.
The indifferent feet that had hurried past me as I sprawled there in such wretchedness. I could all too easily imagine those feet trampling me like some insignificant insect.
My eyes burned with heat. Mother was right. Soon I would be crushed into nothingness.
And I had brought myself to this precipice by choosing to bear the guilt of a criminal. My sense of sin had transformed me into the weak.
The moment I began to adopt a helpless attitude, as though I deserved whatever befell me, they instinctively sensed that I would not resist. In my shrunken posture, in my cowed gaze, in my faltering voice—they discerned the shape of weakness and began their cruelty in earnest.
As dawn broke, Talia understood with crystalline clarity what she must do.

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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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