[2] Chapter 1. Reversing the Pendulum of Time (1)
The king spoke.
“Is that love?”
Then the fairy knelt, shedding tears. Fairies do not have tears, so the king realized it was something learned from humans.
“Can you not live without it?”
The fairy looks at the king with a tear-stained face. The king, seeing those eyes filled with fairy tears he had never witnessed before, nodded his head.
Thus, to create a space connecting the human realm and the fairy realm, the king opened relations with the empire’s first emperor. The emperor gave land for the fairies and established an inviolable treaty. As a token of that promise, the fairy king gave the emperor the Emerald Tabula.
Thereafter, it is said the Emerald Tabula was passed down through generations in the imperial family, protecting the emperors.
– From an unknown side story in “Compendium of Mysterious Legends of the World”
Fernciana slowly blinked her eyes. Bird sounds could be heard from afar. The familiar scent of grass brushing her nose, the chirping of distant birds – Fernciana slowly rolled over and sprang up as if bouncing.
Following her violent movement, her loosely let-down hair swayed like waves. The basket set beside her toppled over, spilling all the wild strawberries she had painstakingly gathered.
“Oh…”
In her last memory, lightning was definitely striking. Thunder and lightning flashed, making her dizzy. At the same time, the man before her, with a face identical to hers, had reached out his hand.
Fernciana hastily unfolded her clothes to check, but she was wearing a linen dress soaked with water. Clothes in her memory. Many years ago, right before she left Ronen where she had briefly stayed…
“What…huh?”
The wind caressing her cheeks, the birds now chirping up close, and the sound of a babbling brook echoing from a distance were neither false nor a dream. Fernciana touched her cheek and then slapped her face with both hands. The birds twittering nearby were startled and fluttered up.
The stinging pain was intense. Looking around, Fernciana confirmed her hair was long enough to almost touch her feet, and quickly acknowledged this was reality.
‘A dream…? Really?’
Wasn’t that reality?
Miserable and horrific memories flash through her mind. Fernciana quickly wiped away the hot tears flowing down her cheeks.
She cried out of sadness, cried out of pain, cried because it was hard and tiring but she couldn’t give up. Unable to show her tears to anyone, they only flowed and welled up inside, and finally drove her to kill someone.
‘Is it a dream? Really? I haven’t…done something like murder yet? Then…Mother and Seollim are still…’
She looks down at her hands. They were still young, smooth without any scars or calluses. Fernciana sprang up and blinked at what fell. It was a crescent-shaped pendant that had faded from its original green to a pale chartreuse.
The color drained from her face. This was clearly what she had been holding in her “dream”. Although the color had faded and dimmed, it was undoubtedly it.
Why is this… But there was no room to think deeply. Fernciana picked up the wooden basket and pendant with staggering steps. The few remaining berries inside rolled around.
Even in her dreams, there were few memories of going out to pick wild strawberries. Since she got seasick easily with the slightest decline in condition, most of her memories on land were of leaning against the bed reading books. And the last time she picked wild strawberries…
Instantly, Fernciana’s face turned deathly pale. Fernciana grabbed her collar and hair and ran down the slope like that. She almost fell once but didn’t think how fortunate she was not to tumble, and urged her legs on, gasping for breath.
A small hut with smoke rising from it could be seen in the distance. Tears overflowed from Fernciana’s eyes.
“Mother! Mother! Ser! Mother!”
Her cries reverberated through the small forest near the hut. But that voice did not last long. As Fernciana tried to raise her voice once more calling “Mother,” the smell of rusty iron brushed past her nose.
“No, no… No… This can’t…”
She had smelled it before. It was the smell that came from the liquid that gushed out when she stabbed a person’s heart in her “dream,” and the smell that had floated all around on the very day she had the will to do so.
The pain and agony of loss she had felt once pierced through her entire body. Fernciana leaped over the fence. Traces of battle were vividly left in the yard.
“Mother, Ser…”
The trees, grass, house, fence – this was a scene she had seen once before. She had seen it all. As Fernciana staggered across the yard, a splashing sound made her look down at her feet.
Her leather shoes were instantly dyed a red hue. It was a puddle of blood. The fishy smell stinging her nose made her stomach churn, but she had no leisure to vomit.
Fernciana shook her head in a daze, retracing her memories from the “dream”. Opening the door of the hut, the interior in utter disarray awaited her. She searched everywhere inside but could find no trace of people. It was the same in her memory. Her mother was nowhere to be found in the end…
“Mother, Ser, Ser… Ser!”
And in the backyard, in that very spot from her memory, where she had seen, a man lay bleeding.
A man who seemed to have just passed his thirties looked up at the sky, then turned his head toward her cry. A faint smile lingered on his dying face.
“Fern, ciana…”
“Ser!”
Fernciana ran to the man’s side. Although it was a sea of blood around her, she knelt down without hesitation and grasped the man’s hand. Tears overflowed from Fernciana’s eyes.
“Ser, no, no, Ser, no. No, don’t go. No, no…”
“You’re, safe… Cough, Fernciana, the Emerald Tabula, cough, cough!”
The man tried to continue speaking but vomited blood. It splattered on her clothes and the man’s eyes trembled. He seemed apologetic.
“E-Emerald Tabula? I have that, so, so, no, Ser, Mother is, Mother is…”
“It was, cough, her time… So Fernciana…”
“Her time? What, what time has come? No… No, why Ser, why those people… Why…!”
“To you, Fernciana, cough, hu, I’m so-sorry…”
“D-Don’t go. No. I can’t bear it without you. I can’t bear it without Mother and Ser. Please… I really don’t understand anything so please…”
Tears overflowed from Fernciana’s face and fell on the man’s face. The man smiled gently. Fernciana’s eyes widened. It was a face she had never seen even in her dreams. An expression she had never witnessed.
“Fernciana, the Emerald Tabula, the emperor took it, cough, so go, tell him to return it… Without it, it’s hard…”
“I, I have that, Ser, don’t talk, right now…”
“Leaving Fernciana alone like this… I’m sorry… I’m fine so… Fernciana, forget everything…”
The last words were faint but discernible. ‘The Emerald Tabula, from the emperor.’
And with a thud, the man’s hand fell. Fernciana kept her eyes wide open, letting the tears fall.
In the terrible silence, only the sound of her tears falling could be heard.
The man had his eyes closed and was smiling softly. He was dead, he had died but he was smiling.
She had seen this face before. When she had stabbed the emperor to death, the emperor too had been smiling with this face. Fernciana slowly closed and opened her eyes. Tears fell in drops then welled up again.
She tries to raise her body. Her hands trembled. Blood dripped from her clothes soaked in blood.
Stepping backward, she tripped on a stone and fell. Her palm was cut on the dirt floor but she had no room to feel pain. Fernciana only gazed at the wrecked yard with a blank tear-stained face.
“Ah… Ahh…”
She thought it was only a dream but it wasn’t a dream.
Fernciana then began to vomit. Even after heaving up everything inside, she continued until only stomach acid came up. And finally, when only bitter liquid rose, Fernciana staggered across the devastated yard and entered the hut. She fell a couple times in between, making her knees bleed too, but she felt no pain.
“Again…”
In the terrible stillness brought by death and loss, only one thing was making a sound. It was the sound of firewood burning in the kitchen hearth. On top of it, a pot of stew was boiling. Fernciana shed tears. Even this was exactly as she remembered from her dream.
After staring at the boiling pot of stew for a long while, Fernciana overturned all the drawers in the house like a madwoman. Every step left bloody footprints.
She ransacked everything up in the attic on the second floor. It was already a mess so she was just making it worse, but she did so anyway. The bedsheets got blood on them too but she didn’t care. Only after turning the whole house inside out could Fernciana sit on that floor and think.
The pendant the emperor had given her in the dream, the pendant Seollim spoke of, was gone. But what she had been holding the moment she awoke from the dream was none other than that pendant, the Emerald Tabula.
With that, no one could ever kill the owner. Her mother had it. But her mother was nowhere to be found, and the Emerald Tabula had also vanished.
Fernciana took out the pendant she had brought. The light had faded from it. Someone had stormed in to find it and Seollim had died trying to stop them.
But it must be that there was no one left, and that those who barged in, whoever they were, had accomplished their purpose as Seollim told her to go to the emperor and retrieve it.
Then what about this?
Lost in thought, Fernciana raised her head. Her reflection showed in the mirror on the wall. The face of a young girl who seemed barely sixteen was a mess with tears.
Fernciana looked up at the ceiling, trying to hold back the rising tears, and ended up bursting into sobs. A small bird figurine hung from the ceiling.
It was something Seollim had carved for her.