Dearest Anonymous, Let Me Be

Chapter 22: ARC 1 - The Lost Princess

Umi glanced at the pale skin of the woman on the bed and she immediately felt warm. Umi, who didn't have a mother figure growing up, found motherly love from this woman, even if Shiera already knows that she isn't her real daughter as she has claimed to be before.

Thinking of her real daughter, Shiera stopped laughing and her face went uneasy as she touched the amethyst pendant of her necklace that she wears all the time. "What do you think Rosalyn is doing now?"

Umi, who has been reminded of someone who contributed to her demise, hid her bitterness from the woman and smiled gently. "The fortress is the safest after this cave, she must be doing well."

Shiera, who found out that her companion wasn't her daughter when Umi confessed to her after she woke up from her coma for a week, put her hand into Umi's arms. "You should go back to your room, Fae. Take a rest too."

The woman on the bed, after lying down, slowly moved her hand to have a feel on the scars of Umi's skin. She then spoke in a low voice, "I hope you're still aware of your limit, Fae"

Umi just gave the woman a smile before turning back. When she was about to go out, she looked behind and spoke to the woman, her voice weak. "I know what I'm doing, Shiera. This war has to come to an end."

Going back to her tent, Umi threw her robes and settled down again in her bed behind the blinds. She then picked up a piece of cloth on her bedside table. On the cloth, there was an embroidered emblem of the Tower of Magic, the same piece of cloth that she cut from her laboratory gown from the tower, and the same cloth that she had with her all this time.

Looking up at the ceiling, her thoughts traveled deeper into her mind, reminding her of the things she had painstakingly done to come to this point.

Umi recalled how she had bought all the valuable treasures from the villages of the East Kingdom using all her gold and jewelry. After gathering the valuables and items she needed, she remembered how she claimed her identity in every village, declaring to be the long lost princess of the east using the emblem as proof, and urged the people to move. She was then reminded of how she fought all the phantom knights and beasts when the people were finally on the move towards the cave she built. She thought back to how she blasted fires to the villages until she put the capital on fire and until the whole of the east was engulfed in her powerful flames.

She remembered how she was loathed by the other kingdoms who didn't know her purpose, how she tried her hardest to encourage them to move too, how she fought the phantom in front of the crowd to prove her motive, how she engulfed the west with fires too, just like how she did it with the east.

Then, Umi recalled how she accidentally met with Reyr in the west when she came back to her small village to retrieve her grandparents. Reyr was paying a visit to her grandparents at that time. He did it for a while to pay for the valiant sacrifice that their granddaughter had fulfilled. She thought of how Reyr joined her without hesitation and with the promise of not telling Obsidian about her.

Umi had decided long ago already that if she wanted to win this war without casualties, she has to cut ties with the rebellion so that the Mad King's spies shouldn't be alerted and won't connect her actions with the rebellion. Besides, the Mad King didn't know who Umi was in the first place.

The people on the territories that still haven't caught in the fire didn't know her identity and her true purpose. All they know was that there's someone who was raining fire on the whole continent. Every one of them knew her as a villain, an awfully wicked one at that.

But it was different for the people who knew the truth.

To them, Fae was a savior and the fires were a cure.