The Sand Bride - Chapter 88

He gritted his teeth, grabbed Bianca’s hand, and tried to pry it away. Bianca, suppressing the scream that wanted to burst out from the pain as if her hand would break, shouted to Esther.

“Go! Esther! Hurry and go!”

Only then did Esther begin running frantically. Bianca, who had endured until the small body looked even smaller as it moved as far away as possible, was thrown aside by Karzhen, who then ran after Esther.

Bianca, who had tried to follow behind him, collapsed unsteadily after only a few steps. Her body wouldn’t move as she willed. She had already lost too much blood.

Just like childhood, Bianca smiled with self-mockery as she barely reached where Esther had left the bow and arrows scattered. Yes, those days when she couldn’t do anything.

“Why were you even born? When you can’t do anything.”

Not only the king but even the servants around her often muttered like that while looking down at the newly born Bianca.

If she couldn’t do anything, it would have been better if she hadn’t been born so she wouldn’t want to do anything.

Yet Bianca had wanted to help her mother. She wanted to become someone who could help her. Though she often thought it was ridiculous, she couldn’t give up. The reason she was born, the reason she could live. Things that were very natural to others but had been taken from Bianca since birth.

She had desperately wanted to have such things. When her mother was alive, to help her mother; when she died, to take revenge on the kingdom…….

And then she met Esther.

Let’s admit it. At first, Bianca had approached Esther seeing her as some card she could use. Even after learning she was from the Kingdom of Donova.

But that appearance, those eyes……. Bianca didn’t know what to do each time she witnessed them. Looking into Esther’s eyes, she felt as if she had returned to the past.

To those despairing days when she could only hold her weeping mother’s hand and say it would be okay, when she couldn’t do anything else. When looking into Esther’s eyes, she felt that ridiculous feeling as if God would compensate for the pain of those days.

When Esther jumped with joy saying she had found her father thanks to Karzhen, Bianca had therefore felt conflicted.

The fact that she no longer looked like her mother was both relieving and strangely bitter. However, she also resolved that now she could truly focus on her revenge.

That’s how it was…….

‘It was all lies, Bianca……’

That’s how it was, yet those eyes. Those words.

Bianca remembered her mother’s eyes when looking at the grandmother who had sold her for the second time. She knew that woman who, with all hopes shattered, couldn’t live without receiving false hope from her young daughter.

The day she met the sick Esther and returned, Bianca newly set her life’s goal. The king, who had been the target of revenge anyway, was dead. Then there was no longer any need to remain in Gharyam. If Bianca, who would stand as witness, disappeared, the war would also end inconclusively with compensation and negotiations without reaching conquest.

If she left Gharyam, Bianca planned to stay by Esther’s side for life. She decided to live with her in a quiet, peaceful village. Imagining herself with Esther in a forest, Bianca felt extreme tranquility.

When the image of time that had always been cut short in the burning palace changed to another scene, it became endless permanence.

A lush forest, a small house, Sarasa flower tea…… There was no longer any blood or hatred there, and Bianca was neither a half-royal nor a princess who should disappear. There, Bianca was merely Bianca. That was all.

Her side, cut by the sword, burned with pain. Bianca, who endured the pain of her wound being rubbed by grains of sand, crawled and dragged her body to pick up the bow and arrows Esther had left behind. When she found an arrow buried in the sand and drew the bowstring, her entire body from shoulders down cried out in extreme pain.

Pain that seemed ready to make her lose consciousness and collapse any moment seeped from the wound on her side that Karzhen had cut, but Bianca gritted her teeth and drew the bow.

She had put in so much strength that the metallic taste of blood seeped from her mouth. Swallowing the blood from her torn lips, she aimed the arrowhead toward Karzhen’s back.

He seemed too busy chasing Esther to notice anything else. In the direction Karzhen was heading, toward the front where Esther was fleeing, a sandstorm was approaching. The arrowhead she was aiming trembled. It wasn’t only because of her body’s pain.

Bianca could give up her own survival of being left in the desert with these injuries, but she couldn’t give up Esther’s survival as well. Surviving with Karzhen or escaping him through death. Bianca couldn’t tell which was the right path.

“Esther!”

Karzhen’s shout reached even Bianca. He was shouting until his throat burst with blood as he chased after Esther. Blood followed his footsteps, but Karzhen paid no heed and focused entirely on catching up to Esther.

Bianca knew that Karzhen would keep Esther alive no matter what. Whether she wanted it or not.

The arrowhead trembled so much it was no longer meaningful for aiming. Bianca finally lowered the bow to the ground and wept, rubbing her cheek against the grains of sand. She wanted Esther to live, and she knew Karzhen would make it so. Unlike herself, who couldn’t save her mother, he could do it.

Karzhen disappeared between the sands. Esther was already out of sight.

As Bianca stretched her body out in the sand, she suddenly realized. That she too had wanted something from her mother, and what that was.

Instead of saying “It will be alright,” she had wanted to hear “It will be alright.”

She had wanted her mother to want to live for herself.

‘It will be alright.’

The flowing blood moistened even the sand that touched her cheek.

Bianca closed her vision that was fading like the evening horizon.

“Fortunately, you’re not dead yet…….”

It was the moment when eternal night descended on her eyelids.

When something lifted her body up, Bianca thought the god of death had extracted her soul from her flesh. However, before she could think to open her eyes, the pain of her wounds brought Bianca back to reality, and she was soon able to see the side of someone leading her.