CH 91

Aria stared out of the window for a moment in an empty room.

There was no one in the room that the employee who was managing this mansion showed her, and it was unnecessarily spacious.

‘It feels empty.’

Marronnier, who was always chasing after Aria like a squirrel and chattering.

Cloud, who kept silent at the back and sometimes(?) said stupid things.

Vincent, who was in pain at Cloud’s stupid words.

Sabina, who takes the time every day to teach her swordsmanship.

Tristan, who was always troubled by work and becomes a happy unemployed person and plays and eats every day.

Gabriel, who loses his reason for being involved with the saint, but when they pray together, it somehow feels at ease.

‘And…….’

Her husband, Lloyd.

‘This is a family.’

Family.

A family tied to a 10-year contract.

A temporary family who she has to break the Valentine’s curse for and then leave behind.

‘Now I have to leave in 6 years…….’

It was when,

“Huh……”

Aria, who couldn’t sleep because her thoughts kept getting deeper and deeper, heard someone groaning later. It was a small sound that had to be heard very carefully.

“…Ugh!”

Lloyd?

‘Was it an attack?’

Aria instantly forgot that Lloyd, who slaughtered people with a single knife, could be attacked.

“Emperor bastard!”

She even spit out swear words.

Without hesitation, she stormed into Lloyd’s room. Almost at the same time as the door slammed open, Lloyd raised his body.

He took a breath. Perhaps he just had a nightmare.

Aria was going to run to him right away and ask what was going on, what nightmare he had.

But,

She paused for a moment as she saw the tears running down the corners of his eyes.

‘He was….’

He was crying. Aria was very flustered. Lloyd who never shed a tear. Even when faced with unfair and terrible pain that ordinary people cannot endure. He simply faces all the misfortunes and accepts them.

That Lloyd was crying.

It looked even more pitiful and painful to see the tears dripping without expression.

‘How should I console you.’

Aria was stunned for a moment, frozen, and only after Lloyd reached out his hand did she come to her senses belatedly.

His fingertips were trembling.

‘Because Lloyd shows his fingertips, not his expression, when he’s insecure…….’

She quickly grabbed them all and held them firmly.

“Actually, my hearing is also like a rabbit.”

“……”

“It seems Lloyd is having a nightmare, so I came in at will. I’m sorry.”

She rambled on and made excuses.

Aria then recalled how he would always comfort her with plausible words when she seems to be hurt. But seeing Lloyd’s actual expression of pain, for a moment, her head went white and she didn’t know what to do.

‘Is Lloyd this way every time I cry?’

She would rather just be sick for him instead…….

“Don’t cry.”

She wiped away the tears. Just like Lloyd did. Then, he said,

“I want to live. With you.”

It was something she hadn’t thought of.

But the moment she heard those words, she could realize the true nature of the emptiness, which Aria felt when she was alone in the room.

Oh I see. Although she always thought of death and was prepared to leave them naturally 10 years later. Actually, she …….

“I also want to live…”

Before her thoughts, her mouth answered first.

I want to live.

I didn’t want to die like this.

Even after breaking the curse, she wanted to die of old age with Lloyd and Valentine.She didn’t want to be the night, she wanted to be with him and she wanted to be the moon and the stars that light up the night.

She didn’t want to be separated from him.

‘Is there any way I won’t die after I become an adult?’

For the first time, she had that thought.

“So what did you dream about?”

Lloyd looked away from her and said nothing. He wanted to dig out the memories like this.

Aria’s memories and his memories.

He wept ferociously in front of her, revealing what he had hidden inside him. The self-destructing, festering, rotten innermost thought that he had dreamed of since childhood.

“…don’t say anything.”

“Why are you crying? People can cry.”

“The crying… erase it from your memory.”

“No.”

Aria stubbornly answered.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of between us. We all know each other.”

“There must be more things that you don’t know…”

Lloyd mumbled so, and then he let out a very deep sigh.

And he talked about the ‘self-sacrifice’, which he had been thinking about since he was very young.

“I found a book by chance when I was little. I remember it being here in the mansion’s library…”

This was the moment when Lloyd decided to self-sacrifice.

‘I didn’t mean to say it at all.’

Because of Aria looking up at him with her big, open eyes as if she would listen to anything. Eyes that shine brighter than the stars even in the dark.

When he came to his senses, Lloyd had revealed all of his secrets.

“In the dream, when the time came and I uttered that spell, the power in my body suddenly went wild. All living things in Valentine’s Castle evaporated.”

Without a trace.

“And you too…”

“……Me?”

“You don’t evaporate, you die bleeding.”

Lloyd, after a long absence, had a red face up to his ears, turned his head away, and mumbled. He never imagined that the day would come when he , like a child, would confide in his nightmares.

But when Aria heard about it, instead of laughing at him, she made a very serious expression on her face.

“Then what was the reason for the outburst?”

It wasn’t serious, yet she listened to it as if it had actually happened.

Lloyd replied with a frown.

“Well. It’s just a guess, but since I was trying to harm the body that contains the devil’s malice, it didn’t want the malice to go away, so I think it went crazy.”

“There is a possibility. I hadn’t thought of that.”

But why was she taking this seriously?

‘It’s just a dream anyway.’

Lloyd was puzzled, but as Aria raised her head and stared at him, he avoided her gaze again.

“Are you going to die?”

“My childhood plans…”

“I don’t think so.”

“… now I have no intention of doing that anymore.”

I said I wanted to live. Lloyd added a little.

Aria was heartbroken again that Lloyd had been living with those thoughts since he was a child.

But she was determined not to let him fall. In fact, the reason why Aria herself was so resolute about her death was because she was no different from him.

‘It’s very shocking that Lloyd was thinking of self-destruction.’

Once she put that shock aside.

‘It…… Isn’t it Valentine’s incident?’

Aria was almost convinced. Lloyd’s dream was telling him how the Valentine’s Incident happened.

‘Because Lloyd has inherited most of the devil’s malice now.’

Perhaps the time to inherit all the malice coincides with winter, the time when Valentine’s Incident takes place.

It was shocking.

‘Until now, I thought that the incident was caused by manipulation from the outside.’

But it wasn’t. It happened because of the spell that Lloyd had chanted to sacrifice himself, the devil’s malice ran rampant.

Then.

How did Lloyd survive the last life alone?

‘He tried to save everyone by sacrificing himself, but his power ran rampant and he killed all of his people with his own hands.’

It wasn’t his fault.

Of course, it cannot be said that it was not entirely not Lloyd’s fault, but his purpose was to self-sacrifice with the malice.

But that was the result.

‘Then the fact that the future Lloyd attended a depraved meeting that he had no interest in, and suddenly came to listen to the Siren’s songs and started working on drugs…….’

She thought he was trying to kill himself.

‘He had killed everyone he’d been with his whole life, so he was weighed down with guilt.’

But he couldn’t try to die any longer. He couldn’t die, so he had no choice but to live. If he tries to die, another outburst will occur, or the malice in his body will come out and destroy the world.

‘So, Lloyd would rather go crazy at the crossroads of that choice.’

That’s the story of Valentine’s Incident.

Aria bit her lip to hold back the tears, until she finally let the tears fall.

“No, you’re not going to die…”

When Aria suddenly started crying, he panicked, this time it was Lloyd who was flustered.

“Don’t cry. Stop.”

“I’m crying Lloyd’s tears.”

“Yes, I was wrong.”

He thought that Aria was crying because he was about to die. So he reassured her that he would never do that again in the future. But even though he said that, Aria did not stop her tears.

He then wiped away all the tears that ran down her cheeks with his hands.

“Rather than self-sacrifice, let’s just destroy the world. Let’s live together in a destroyed world.”

And he started to say everything to stop the tears.

How can this be comforting? Aria couldn’t cry, so she let out a small laugh.

“I will live to be a hundred years old.”

“It’s not Lloyd’s fault.”

“Huh?”

“Never.”

These were the words she wanted to tell Llord not only for today, but also for Lloyd in the future. A future that has not happened yet, and will never happen in the future.

Saying so, Aria opened her arms wide and hugged her husband tightly.

‘Heartbeat…… It’s loud.’

Perhaps Lloyd was scared too.

Aria thought as she buried her face in the arms of the young man who had stiffened.

‘But why was I dead?’

If his previous life had appeared in a dream, there wouldn’t be Aria there. Then it will be a prophetic dream that will happen in the future. Or a silly dream.

‘All living things evaporated and disappeared, but why is it that only I am left with a corpse?’

As expected, was it a silly dream?