Chapter 28: The Bird Garden

By the time I resumed the pursuit, the suspicious men who had fled across the rooftops had vanished without a trace.

The imperial guards conducting patrols had apparently not encountered them either, because the surroundings were silent.

From the day I began standing watch, a small elite unit of imperial guards had also been patrolling in secret.

It was impossible for me to subdue the suspicious men alone, so this time I had no choice but to request support from His Majesty.

I did not explain the full circumstances, but at my single remark that suspicious signs had been detected within the imperial palace, His Majesty readily lent me soldiers.

The imperial guards were divided into sectors across the vast palace, patrolling through the darkness.

The intruders might have avoided the demon and me, but they could not move through the palace without being discovered forever.

“…”

To erase the thought of the demon that had crossed my mind, I drew the bowstring with an arrow nocked and scanned the surroundings.

I sharpened my senses so that I would not miss even the slightest movement.

When the moon shone brightly, I hid in the shadows beneath the walls.

When clouds covered the moon, I moved swiftly along the main paths.

In the bleak night, the sound of leaves brushing against one another in the wind felt eerie.

I quickly turned and aimed my bow.

But the sound had come not from the ground, but from the sky.

A tree thick with leaves shook as flapping wings disturbed the darkness.

A rising shadow suddenly flew away.

Against the yellow moonlight, the outline of a bird spreading its wings and taking flight was black.

I lifted my head into the wind blowing toward me.

There, beneath the falling moonlight, a black bird flew across the center of the round, bright full moon.

A black bird.

The flock of dead black birds that had filled the vast court hall.

Where in this enormous palace had that bird flown from?

No—there was only one place where there could be countless birds of that size.

“…!”

Without even nocking an arrow, I began running.

The long, flexible bow swayed back and forth in my hand.

The imperial palace was enormous, and the gardens within it were neither few nor small.

Each garden had been landscaped for a different purpose, and among them was one where birds were raised.

Even though their wing tips had been cut so that they could not fly high, many species of birds lived and nested there.

It was the Bird Garden.

But even as I ran, something did not sit right with me.

The birds in the Bird Garden were rare ornamental species captured and presented from across the continent.

Their feathers were brightly colored.

Even black birds possessed an elegant, glossy shade of black—not the coarse black of crows.

And even if there were black birds, there would be only one or two.

They could not have formed the enormous flock that had filled the court hall.

Moreover, the Bird Garden and the court hall were quite far apart.

How could those birds have flown all the way to the court hall and died there?

Could the intruders have brought dead birds from outside the palace and scattered them across the court hall?

As I ran, countless possibilities crowded my mind.

But nothing was certain, and I could not find a clear answer.

From the beginning, what I had experienced was too mysterious to explain.

Then a more fundamental question came to me.

I had clearly been stabbed through the neck.

Why had I come back to life?

It was such a basic question, yet only now did it begin to trouble me.

What if the rebellion had not been a dream?

I had dismissed it as a dream because people could not die and return to life.

But the same events were repeating.

Then it was an omen disguised as a dream.

An omen was knowledge of a future that had not yet happened.

Had I witnessed a future that had not yet occurred?

Or was it something else?

What if…

I had returned through time?

“You unlucky b*tch.”

A ringing sound pierced my ears.

At the moment doubt opened a gap in my mind, the old woman’s chilling laughter mixed with the ringing, like a sudden attack exploiting that opening.

“Gasp.”

I pressed a hand to my head.

The shock shaking through my entire body made it impossible to keep running.

I staggered and leaned against something nearby.

The old woman’s voice moved farther away, then closer again.

A screeching noise like metal scraping against metal rang in my head as if it would tear my mind apart.

The trembling in the hand holding my head grew uncontrollable.

“You angered the god of fire… The god of fire threw away his chance to ascend…”

Her laughter and voice pounded inside my head like drums.

The pounding at both temples tightened around the center of my mind as if driving prey into a trap.

The old woman from the slums pushed her snake-like tongue into my ear and whispered:

“You did it before. You died before.”

“Stop.”

I barely forced the word out.

As if mocking my trembling voice, the old woman cackled.

“A vicious b*tch… A b*tch who tangles her own fate… A foolish b*tch…”

Her laughter circled around me, fading and returning as though taunting me.

My knees slowly began to give way.

The more I pressed my shoulder against the wall to hold myself up, the sharper her mockery became, ringing like drums and gongs while performing a blade dance.

“He burned away all that long time and erased it completely. He is an idiot too, driven mad over some woman…”

“Stop…!”

I shouted and swung my bow.

But the old woman’s laughter, struck by the bow, only scattered like smoke.

It did not disappear.

Her phlegmy voice repeated like a refrain, cackling over and over.

“He burned away all that long time and erased it completely.”

“He burned away all that long time and erased it completely.”

“He burned away all that long time and erased it completely.”

“Stop!”

I swung my bow wildly toward the rising mockery.

But no matter how hard I swung, the bow cut only through empty air.

The laughter did not disappear.

My knees buckled as I chased after the sound.

The bow cutting through the air became slower and slower.

Grinding my teeth, I swung down at the old woman hiding in the darkness and laughing at me.

But once again, the bow struck empty darkness, lost its balance, and swayed.

I fell forward and hit the ground.

Grains of dirt lodged beneath the nails scraping against the floor in frustration.

As if mocking my state, the laughter rang sharply through the air.

The grotesque, twisted sound swept over me as I lay on the ground, scattering like smoke.

The old woman’s final repeated words gradually faded and disappeared into the wind.

“You threw away your chance to ascend…”

“Shut up!”

The old woman’s mocking laughter vanished.

The surroundings became quiet as if it had all been a lie.

As though everything had been an illusion, all that remained was my pale face, cold sweat, ragged breathing, and the chill at the back of my neck.

In the midst of overwhelming agitation, coldness flowed down my neck.

My vision, blurred from the hallucination, cleared.

There was a pair of feet in front of me.

The cold metal supporting my jaw forced me to raise my head.

Following the blade gleaming blue beneath the moonlight, I found a masked intruder dressed in black holding a sword to my throat.

The Bird Garden was denser with trees than an ordinary garden.

The closely packed trees made the darkness between their thick leaves feel deeper, making the garden seem unusually large.

And from within that darkness came occasional sounds.

The restless rustling of leaves came from birds hiding among the shadows.

The faint smell of bird droppings drifted from every direction.

It was a harsh, pungent smell.

The species selected as ornamental offerings to the imperial palace shared one trait: they had been castrated.

Their wing tips had been cut as well.

Unable to sleep, those creatures glowed with blue eyes in the darkness.

Thud.

A bow was thrown in front of me as I knelt with my hands and feet bound.

The bow taken by the intruders had been snapped in half before being returned to me.

The wood grain had been torn apart brutally, as though it had been broken by force.

I stared at the ruined bow and asked:

“…Why here of all places?”

The intruder answered as though I had asked something obvious.

“Because it is the closest place.”

“…”

For a moment, I forgot the situation and laughed hollowly.

Yes.

The nearest garden to where I had been captured was this one.

Because I had been running toward this garden.

Once the laughter began, it did not stop easily.

I could feel someone looking down at me as though I had gone mad.

Even then, I could not stop laughing.

“Heh… heh heh… ha…”

I did not know whether the chicken came first or the egg.

I had come here believing in an omen, but in truth, it was almost as though I had created the omen myself.

I had wandered around stirring things up and causing trouble for no reason.

Foolish.

As the old woman said, I truly was a foolish woman.

The manic laughter that had shaken my upper body stopped unexpectedly in an instant.

As though my laughter from moments ago had never happened, I looked around with a blank expression.

Besides the intruder who had captured me, there were three more people wearing black masks.

There was something I needed to confirm.

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