Having heard this account through,
the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia wore a look of self-mockery: "So everyone has lived well enough. In these years of my flight I have worried all the while. Whether those people would call you to account. And it turns out… well, it is good. At the least you are all living, and living well."
Aunt Wendy looked at the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia before her; she opened her mouth and hesitated several times.
"Aunt, if there is something you would ask, then ask it. You are, now, the one person in this world whom I trust."
Aunt Wendy's eyes were gentle, and she looked at the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia with pity: "These several years… where in the world have you been? I hear that Blanche, the dragon-kin princess who truly holds the Warhammer now, has all this while been looking for you. But there has never been any trace. I had… I had thought that you were already…"
"I fell into the abyss," the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia said all of a sudden.
Aunt Wendy looked at her in amazement.
And at this moment the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia suddenly lifted her coat, laying bare that savage sight upon her breast.
The sight of it startled Aunt Wendy straight to her feet, and the chair beneath her was knocked over.
"Isn't it very terrible?" the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia said, mocking herself.
"This… this… Cynthia, what in the world is this? And what is that bug in the place of your heart?" Aunt Wendy said in the greatest anxiety.
Though in the first instant of seeing it her heart had been full of horror,
now she cared more for something else.
Her own sister's daughter must have passed, in these several years, through a great many reverses that no one knew of.
The Black Wolf Princess Cynthia had already drawn her coat closed again; she turned her head aside and looked at the sea far off.
She said lightly: "What I have been through I no longer wish to speak of. I can say only that I am sunk deep in the abyss now, and can never climb out of it again. Aunt. Do you know what I have come back so suddenly for this time?"
"For what? For vengeance? But the Owl Dragon is very strong now; they have founded an Owl Dragon Interstellar Empire. You cannot beat them!"
Aunt Wendy urged her, anxious and troubled: "Let me think of a way; I can gather a little more money here. Go and live upon some remote planet. You have been gone several years; I am sure they will not look for you any longer. Hide another dozen-odd years, and by then no one will remember you at all."
"I believe they may not look for me. But there are some who will not let me go. I have become a puppet upon their strings. I… I can no longer escape." The Black Wolf Princess Cynthia raised her head and looked at that beautiful sun overhead.
"How warm it is. I remember still, when I was small, what I loved best was to climb to the very top of that statue, where there is a platform. To lie there in the sun, with the sea wind blowing. Those are the days I miss most."
Suddenly the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia looked at Aunt Wendy with cold and darkened eyes, and said in a voice that trembled: "And now, my purpose in coming back. Is that someone would have me cast a thing into our sun. I do not know what that thing is. But my own instinct tells me. That thing will destroy our world, and all of it. Everything, everything!"
"Cynthia!" Aunt Wendy sprang to her feet and gazed at the Princess Cynthia: "You… will you truly do this? Only for… for your vengeance?"
The Black Wolf Princess Cynthia raised her hand, as though she stroked the sun, and said: "Vengeance? These several years past I have thought all along that it was for vengeance that I lived. I would be revenged upon the Owl Dragon, revenged upon the White Wolf, revenged upon Charlotte. But when I came back here, in the moment I stood here. I found that all that vengeance… seems truly not to matter. Aunt… I… I truly do not know what I should do."
Aunt Wendy rose, walked up before Cynthia, and took her in her arms.
"Set vengeance down. The Black Wolf tribe is no longer the Black Wolf tribe that was. Look at everyone here; they all have new lives now. We are ruled by the Owl Dragon, it is true; but so long as our people may live happy lives, does the rest matter? If you would destroy that fixed star, if you would destroy our homeland. Then aren't you the enemy of our Black Wolf tribe? Would you destroy with your own hands all that you once guarded!"
Hearing these questions of her aunt's, coming without cease, and held in that gentle embrace.
For the first time in these years, the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia wept.
She wept aloud: "But… but I truly do not know what I should do. Father is dead… my brother is dead… my uncles… my aunts are all gone. I… there is only me left…"
The Warhammer Interstellar Federal Kingdom · the Federal Kingdom Headquarters.
This had been the dragon-kin tribe's king-world, but it was now the place where all the Warhammer Interstellar Federal Kingdom's business was dealt with.
Here interstellar warships came and went in an unbroken stream.
Within the Consul's office.
Electronic windows open one upon another, and secretary-officers gathered one upon another about her.
The Princess Blanche, no, she should be called Consul Blanche now.
From the very moment she came to work, her hands and her mind had no chance to stop.
The whole kingdom's business, endless and undealt-with, was heaped before her.
And set against the Starlight Kingdom and the Holy Radiance Kingdom,
the Warhammer Interstellar Federal Kingdom's capacity for administration was truly too backward; matters great and small alike were laid before her.
Those tribal chieftains and lords beneath her seemed unable to deal with a single thing.
"Damn it all, the whole lot of them ought to be packed off to a mining world to dig ore. They cannot settle so much as this, and yet they send it up before me and ask my opinion. Are they idiots, or were their brains simply never grown?"
So Consul Blanche dealt with this business, and her mouth did not stop either, but complained without cease.
Had Zhao Chen and the dragon-kin Princess Leona been here, they would likely not have believed that the Princess Blanche could have become such a thing.
For the Princess Blanche of old had been most gentle and refined.
And now she was a small universe that might explode at any moment.
Beep, beep, beep.
At this moment a video call came straight through.
"How many times have I said it. Do not put every chance communication through to me. Can you do nothing at all?" Consul Blanche roared.
The secretary-officer upon the other side of the window swallowed, and then said with the greatest care: "My lady… it is… it is because the Black Wolf Princess Cynthia… wishes to speak… with you."
In an instant the whole office fell silent.