Chapter 226: Silver Snow
The snow fell in soft, unhurried flakes, each one catching the pale winter light like fragnts of shattered stars. They drifted down upon the hill in a silent, endless procession, blanketing the graves in white, smoothing the sharp edges of stone and mory into sothing almost gentle.
Cecilia sat on the cold ground, her back pressed against the solid weight of a tombstone. Above her head, a simple umbrella arched like a protective wing, shielding both her and the stone from the falling snow.
Before her, half-buried in the accumulating white, sat a bottle of amber liquid and two small glasses. One was full, untouched, an offering. The other she held loosely in her gloved fingers, the warmth of the alcohol spreading through her palm.
"Can’t believe I actually found you this ti, Dr. Silver."
Her voice was soft, barely louder than the whisper of falling snow. The words hung in the cold air for a mont, then dissolved into the white, carried away on a wind that seed to co from nowhere and everywhere at once.
She tilted the bottle, pouring a careful asure into the empty glass. The liquid caught the light, glowing like captured sunlight against the grey of the winter afternoon. Then she raised it to her lips and drank.
The burn was familiar. Welco, even.
She was eighteen in this world. Or rather, her body was. Her mind, her soul, was twenty-five. Old enough to know better. Old enough to do it anyway.
Who actually started drinking at the legal age anyway?
Cecilia. She... she actually only started tasting alcohol two or three years ago.
Yes. In the real world, in her real life, she had never had the luxury of such casual rebellion. Every action, every choice, every carefully asured sip of wine at temple functions had been calculated, observed, judged.
But here, on this snow-covered hill, leaning against a tombstone that held the na she hadn’t seen written in years...
Here, she could just... be.
She poured again. Drank again.
After she left Arkai two days ago, Cecilia went to gather information.
First, she contacted Angela. The princess’s network was unparalleled, after all.
"Eastiel?" Angela’s voice had crackled through the communication crystal, tinged with amusent. "He’s on a mission far south."
Huh. Plot device, much?
This world was still trying its best to not overlap the male leads.
Then she had asked about Arkai. His family, his closest people, the landscape of his life beyond the student council president role he had in this world.
Unexpectedly, she found a discovery.
Arkai’s father was still alive.
In the real world, Arkai’s father was dead. For years and years, a loss that shaped so much of who Arkai was. But here, in this fabricated reality, the man breathed. Lived. Existed.
But because of that, her mind had gone entirely elsewhere.
"Angela, you have docunts about , right?"
"What?" The princess’s voice pitched with indignation. "Hey, best friend, you think I’m that shrewd—" A pause. "Alright, yes. I do. Why?"
"Gim a copy."
"What? Why do you want intel about yourself?"
"Co on."
She didn’t know what kind of history OG!Cecilia in this world had, after all.
Angela sighed. "...well... it’s about you. Umm, can you update the facts while you’re at it?"
"Girl."
"Co on! Update your infos for your girl!"
Cecilia had laughed at that. Even in the midst of her searching, her planning, her hoping, Angela could still pull that sound from her.
When she found out that Arkai’s closest people, those who were supposed to be dead, were still alive in this world, a question had blood in her chest.
Was her own?
Yes, she knew this world’s OG!Cecilia never left for breaks. The original version of herself, the construct that had lived this life before she arrived, had always stayed at the academy during holidays. There was no record of her visiting anywhere else.
But still.
Even though the chance was slim...
"Even though I ended up just finding your tombstone, it’s still better than nothing." Cecilia’s whisper dissolved into the falling snow.
Cecilia was an orphan. That fact was carved into her identity, known to everyone who knew her na.
The second fact about herself was that she had been raised in a clinic.
The clinic’s owner was an old, beautiful doctor. Dr. Sumr Silver.
She had taken Cecilia in when Cecilia was still a baby, a foundling left at her doorstep with nothing but a na written on a scrap of paper.
Dr. Silver had been kind. Fiercely, impossibly kind. Brave. Strong. She had a large pinkish birthmark that covered her entire body in sweeping, organic patterns, and sohow, impossibly, it made her look even more striking. More herself.
At sixty years old, she had still looked very, very young.
She was very knowledgeable, very critical. She taught Cecilia to question everything, to trust evidence over authority, to think.
But shortly after Cecilia was crowned Saintess, Dr. Sumr Silver had disappeared.
Months later, her dismbered body was found in the woods. Monsters, they said. The official report was clean, simple, convenient.
With only pieces of her recovered, her distant family, relatives who had never visited, never written, never cared, decided to cremate her. What was the point of burying pieces anyway? they said.
They scattered her ashes in the sea. Which sea, Cecilia never learned. They hadn’t bothered to tell her. For all she knew, it could have been a random river. A lake. A ditch.
Dr. Silver’s family had never truly cared about her.
But Cecilia rembered. Cecilia knew.
Dr. Silver had told her, once, what she wanted when she died. It was a quiet conversation, late at night, when Cecilia was small.
Either preserve my body for science, Dr. Silver had said, her voice soft and certain. Or bury . Never cremation.
Why? Cecilia had asked.
The doctor had smiled.
I’m only afraid of one thing in my life.
Fire.
Even as a child, Cecilia had wondered. The pinkish marks that covered Dr. Silver’s body... were they really birthmarks she carried from creation, never hurting her? Or were they burn scars?
Adults never told her the truth.
But at least in this world, Sumr Silver was buried.
Like she had always wanted.
Cecilia downed another shot.
The alcohol burned warm down her throat, spreading through her chest. She let it settle, let it ground her, as her ears caught the sound she had been half-expecting.
Flapping wings. Many of them. Circling in the sky above.
She looked up past the edge of her tilted umbrella. Against the pure white of the falling snow, a flock of pigeons wheeled in lazy spirals, grey shapes against grey clouds, their movents too coordinated to be natural.
"Sophomore Year Sienna Dawnoro."
The words left Cecilia’s lips calmly, a statent of fact rather than a greeting.
Behind her, the footsteps stopped.
Of course she hadn’t only discovered that Arkai’s father was still alive in this world. The information had cascaded from there. Arkai’s step-mother, Ines. Still alive. And Ines’s daughter from her previous husband. Sienna. Also still alive.
Cecilia regretted, briefly, not morizing the Athenaeum’s student lists across previous scenarios. If she had, she would have seen this coming. Would have known that Sienna Dawnoro was a student here, two years behind, studying in the sa halls as her brother.
What a mirror world this was.
She stood, brushing snow from her robes, and turned to face the woman standing before her.
Ah.
The fad Snowflower.
Sienna Dawnoro was beautiful in the way that winter landscapes were beautiful. Stark, cold, impossible to look away from. Her hair fell in waves as black as a starless night, contrasting sharply with skin so pale it seed to glow against the white of the falling snow.
Her features were delicate, almost porcelain, the kind of beauty that belonged in paintings and poetry. Like the moon.
But her hand was clenched at her side. And her scowl was deep and ugly, twisting those features into sothing venomous.
"You’ve ruined my plan." The words hissed from her like steam from cracked ice.
Cecilia smiled wearily.
Ruined her plan? She had just... accidentally gotten pulled into it. She sighed, the sound long and tired. "Look. If you make those kinds of plans next ti, make sure only you can enter the door. So soone else won’t get trapped in your stead."
Sienna’s face flad, red and furious, the color spreading across her pale cheeks like blood on snow. Sha and anger and sothing darker warred behind her eyes.
And Cecilia couldn’t help it.
She despised this woman.
Girl, she corrected herself. In this world, Sienna was just a student. A sophomore. Young and wrong.
She had only guessed, at first.
Who could drug Arkai Dawnoro?
Who could sabotage the student council office without him noticing?
Who would Arkai protect, even after knowing they were the culprit?
His reaction upon seeing the pigeon, that instinct to shoot it down instead of preserving evidence, had been the final piece. Not politics. Not reputation. Family.
This wasn’t about a political scandal.
It was about a family scandal.
The target wasn’t just Arkai’s reputation. It was his future. His identity. Himself.
His sister wanted to make him a sister-fucker. She wanted to trap him, to bind him, to make him hers in a way that would destroy everything he was.
At a ti like this, Cecilia missed Eastiel. Her third husband’s problems were the most uncomplicated to solve.
In front of her, Sienna seethed.
"Did you..." The words were barely a hiss, forced through clenched teeth. "Did you do it with him...?"
Cecilia’s eyes ward.
"I did, Sister-in-law."
Sienna exploded.
"You—!"
She shrieked a pure, unfiltered fury that echoed across the snow-covered hill. Her face went from red to white to red again, veins standing out at her temples, her carefully cultivated composure shattering into a thousand jagged pieces.
Above them, the pigeons responded.
They nosedived.
The flock that had been circling in lazy spirals suddenly transford into a swarm of projectiles, wings tucked, bodies aid, all of them targeting the woman who stood calmly beside a tombstone, an umbrella still held above her head, a small smile playing at the corners of her lips.
Cecilia’s smile disappeared.
"Pathetic."
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