If Happy Ever After Did Exist

Chapter 1

Not with the magical shield the man hides under like a coward, the only reason why, when he had smiled as he had watched Ryousuke fizz out into seafoam, he had been able to dodge as she barreled forth to wring his neck.

“Y’know what, with everyone all here like this, it’s almost like I’m the only one who didn’t get an invite.” Yuzuki says, her voice velvet-smooth and just as entrancing as the ‘Lorelei’ myth the humans had made off of the beautiful voice they hear at midnight, the one they don’t know belongs to her. “But you wouldn’t do that on purpose, won’t you, my dearest Queen? You wouldn’t just forget about me, would you?”

She knows that the Queen is shivering in her beautiful shoes right now, and she revels in the fact that she was the one who brought that fear to her doorstep. Yuzuki smiles, razor-sharp and deadly, and on her tentacles slithers step by step to the cradle in its spot of honor in the ballroom.

“Aw, don’t be so mean,” Yuzuki pouts, pulling the pout she’d seen her own brother give the Princess before, when he’d want to convince her to not eat fish or not wear shoes. It’s a stab to the new Queen’s heart, a vague sort of pain that eats her from the inside out, one she cannot for the life of her imagine why it persists. “I’m just gonna give the kid a gift. Would be impolite of me to visit the celebration of the Prince’s birth and not give him a gift, right? Prince – what’s-his-name, again?”

“It is Prince Hirotaka Wakamatsu,” the King smiles back at her, his smile just as innocuous and just as cutting. Oh, how she’d just love to rip that smile off his pretty face. “Of the Houses of Miyako, and Maeno.”

“Okay, Waka, whatever.” Yuzuki shrugs off. She would never claim to understand the humans’ propensity for long names. What was so important about them? Technically she was Yuzuki of the house Seo, sure, but most of the time she had just been called ‘Queen’ and it was fine, why’d they have to have all the fuss?

“The old hags were right,” Yuzuki says, still beaming, as the white magic mistresses had to physically restrain one of their own from barreling forward to, she guesses, stab her in the eye with one of their puny little magic sticks. How quaint. It wouldn’t work, though. “The Prince would indeed grow up to be strong and brave and intelligent, the most handsome one in all the lands, loved by all who knew him.” She says, still smiling, always smiling, people were most scared of her when she was happy and she knows that, always uses that to her advantage. “But.”

“On his sixteenth birthday, he will dive into the deepest depths of the ocean,” Just like what her brother had done, what now seemed like forever ago, “He will lose all his breaths, drown, and die.”

The Queen stands up, cradles the cursed babe into her arms, looking at the dark witch with tears in her eyes. Yuzuki cackles, as the King spurs his men into action, telling his men to take her down, with their pithy swords, as if those could do anything against her –

Yuzuki, Queen of spells and darkness and her brother’s revenge, who had simply snapped her hands and...disappeared, in the spaces between one human blink and another.

Masayuki misses a lot of things, but right now, what he misses the most is his little brother.

At barely four years, he was simply too young to remember in full the day when Hirotaka was taken away, but he does remember crying. He remembers their mother, may she rest in heavenly peace, how she had bundled them both under her embrace and said that she would take care of them for as long as she lived.