The nail that tapped slowly against the marble tabletop was quite beautiful. Long, accentuated by petite fingers, and neatly shaped and decorated. It was a beautiful piece of art that was created solely to complement the beauty of the woman it belonged to.

Not that Saraphina Vandertoph needed much to complement her beauty. She had the sort of eye-catching beauty that naturally drew the attention of every room she entered. She was, in many ways, the perfection of beauty. The fact that she also went to great lengths to decorate her body with the finest of fashions only stood to further its effect.

It was a shame then that she was not a very pleasant person.

It was a cliché that externally beautiful people were wretched on the inside. Most people, regardless of their appearance, were neither good nor bad. The humdrum of everyday life ensured that they weren’t hellishly bad or saintly good. The entire concept of dividing people into good and bad became meaningless in the face of reality.

It was in this way that she defied expectations.

She was a terrible person. She was not a complex individual with layers that made her a fascinating subject for compassion. She had a natural sort of vileness that simply couldn’t be defined as good. She was not a sympathetic villain even in her own story.

Which was strange, because her life had been legitimately tragic.

She had survived the massacre of her only family, was betrayed by those she trusted the most, and was driven solely by a twisted sense of justice that raged uncontrollably inside of her.

She really ought to have been pitiable. Or even interesting.

Truthfully, she was boring.

Saraphina wore a stoic expression and thought through matters in an oversimplified way. She was neither dumb nor foolish, but she certainly was shortsighted. She only ever saw the goal directly in front of her and never attempted to understand those around her. It was what drove her to study magic at the tower, but she held the knowledge she’d acquired to be useless as it did little to serve her goals.

That was perhaps what made her a “bad” person.

She had never had an inclination for pity or compassion. Saraphina never thought about why anyone might act in a specific way and never cared to do so. It wasn’t an inability to understand those around her or even a conscious choice not to. She simply didn’t.

Saraphina was self-centered and yet not self-obsessed: a strange but boring woman who never said very much and only acted in her own interest.

Saraphina wouldn’t be of note to anyone other than those directly related to her or those she had targeted for revenge, but now, there was a complication to the noblewoman’s life.

In theory, the most complicated aspect of her life ought to be inheriting the dukedom left behind by her dearly departed parents and avenging herself against the vile man who’d stolen her birthright.

However, Saraphina knew that the battle for the dukedom was ultimately meaningless.

In a few years’ time, everyone would die.

It was a strange thing to wake up several years in the past, before everything crumbled around them, and to be forced to consider broad concepts outside of her own experience.

The trouble with Saraphina was that she was a truly self-centered person.

She didn’t care about the people who would die or the pain that would befall the kingdom. She definitely didn’t care about the ramifications or responsibility that came with being the only one to know about the impending doom. Her selfishness was quite similar to that of her once fiancé.

Saraphina only cared about her revenge.

She truly was like her fiancé in many ways, although the comparison would cause both of them to balk with disgust.

Short-sighted and callous. She had no intention to save the kingdom and instead thought about how she could take advantage of her memories of the future to destroy her longtime enemy.

Her finger tapped against the table irritably.

Yet despite Saraphina’s wretched morality, she could not entirely brush off the fate that would befall the kingdom because it could affect her plans.

Her problem wasn’t an unwillingness to save the kingdom. The trouble was that she didn’t care.

She didn’t care if her entire dukedom was destroyed so long as she had her revenge upon the scum who stole the life she should have had. She didn’t care about the people who would suffer. She didn’t have compassion in her heart.

Saraphina had always struggled to act when she couldn’t drum up the energy to truly care very much about the problem.

Of course, there was one thing that she could do to ease the future tragedy that worked with her goals as well.

She could kill her fiancé before he ever became her fiancé.

The engagement hadn’t been one that either of them had wanted, and she found the man repulsive in just about every aspect. She had planned to utilize him in her vengeance, but he had proven useless as a tool, and ultimately, she discarded him.

And without him, the fall of the kingdom was unlikely to occur. In his current state, he ought to be easy pickings for the Assassins’ Guild, and all she would need to do was part with a paltry sum in order to watch his guts get strewn out on the cobblestone.

So why was it that the Assassins’ Guild had sent her a message announcing its failure?

Saraphina tapped her nail against the table again, glaring holes into the letter.

She didn’t want to think about any of this. She merely wanted her vengeance. Yet the knowledge that her fiancé lived left an unsettling feeling in her gut, one that made her more and more agitated as time passed.

Saraphina wasn’t fond of failure.

The Assassins’ Guild would certainly suffer for disappointing her. But more than that, she despised knowing that she would be derailed from her current goals. She could ignore him and ignore the looming figure of death that cloaked the kingdom, but only if the problem was appropriately dealt with.

Saraphina was a bad person. She was a short-sighted person. But she wasn’t a dumb person.

Saraphina gritted her teeth as she came to a decision.

It was best to deal with delicate matters with a personal touch.

However, her fiancé had never been worthy of delicacy.

“Your Highness, Prince William.” Saraphina curtsied daintily for her fiancé.

William did little to hide his sneer. Or perhaps he was trying and simply failed at hiding his disdain. Still, he managed a curt bow toward her and offered his arm to escort her. He was a droll man, boring and petty.

In that way, they really were a perfect match.

Saraphina hesitated only for a second to accept his arm. The pure disgust at having to have physical contact with him made her stomach churn.

It was too strong a word to say that Saraphina hated her fiancé. She was revolted by him. It wasn’t long after their engagement that rumors of the prince collecting concubines reached her ears.

There was no love between them, not even the faintest of affections, but the disregard that he held for her becoming the object of public amusement was aggravating.

Her disgust for him had begun long ago though.

Despite their similar personalities, or perhaps because of it, from the very first meeting they had treated one another with scorn. There was simply no area within which they agreed.

The ballroom up ahead of them held so many that had high expectations of their engagement. The fabled crown prince marrying the duchess of Vandertoph. It truly was a perfect match in the eyes of the public.

Saraphina turned off her emotions and walked stoically at William’s side. One day, she would make this man pay for the indignity she endured remaining at his side.

For now, she would make use of him as a tool for her revenge.

Surely, he wouldn’t prove to be entirely useless.

★★★

The man Saraphina wanted murdered was currently on a boat, being entirely useless. For most outside of the capital, the use of a boat would imply that an individual was at sea or at least on a deep lake. Willow and Ny, the two reluctant sailors, however, were simply traveling down the canal. 

The great capital boasted a long canal that could be used for travel through the busy streets, although it was strongly recommended that one didn’t swim in it. While it was fine enough to sail on, drinking the water could prove fatal for the unwary traveler. The city had collectively chosen to discard its nonessentials in the sludge that flowed slowly downstream.

It was why Willow was looking over the edge of the boat at a drifting piece of garbage. It was probably once something edible, but the mold encasing it made it quite difficult to tell.

He remembered reading reports about litter in the canal back when he sat on the throne. He had discarded the reports at the time for more urgent issues, but taking a look at the canal, he could see exactly why his attendant had appeared so distraught at his decision.

Anyone who saw this canal would think it was detestable. The water looked more like sludge than liquid life. The smell made him worry that if he set a match, the water would catch flame. It brought attention to just how much of the capital he’d never seen despite vying to become the king.

A truly pathetic admission.

He glanced back at his travel companion and wondered where they were going from here. Ny had been the one to suggest that they board this boat and had assured him that it was the best course of action. He’d agreed, unthinking and panicked after their experience at the inn, but now he had to question his own sanity for doing so.

Ny was lying back and staring up at the sky while humming faintly. The injuries that he’d incurred while fighting the assassins had all closed up, leaving only scars behind. Would the scars last or would they too fade with alarming speed? Willow had yet to get an answer as to what precisely the man even was, and the questions only mounted.

“Whatcha staring at?” the drunkard asked, his gaze not moving from the gentle flow of clouds above them.

“I’m not staring,” Willow said haughtily. He hesitated just a moment before he continued. “My name is Willow. Isn’t it time you told me your real name?” Willow wondered why he said it. He’d never cared about names before. There were a great many people in his life that he’d never once bothered to ask or remember their names. There was also no good reason to introduce himself to someone so worthless and insignificant.

Perhaps he was trying to change.

Or perhaps this crazy drunkard was simply far too suspicious to ignore. Willow narrowed his eyes as the drunkard squinted up at the clouds, as though thinking over his answer carefully. Whatever the crazy bastard said, it was sure to be a lie.

“Low? Will-Will? Ill? Hm… ya have a difficult name to shorten. What about Wi? Wi sounds cute,” Ny said, not at all hiding that he was avoiding the question.

Willow frowned. He’d been annoyed, stressed, angry, and panicked, and now he was simply tired. Things had been going quite smoothly right up until the moment he’d picked up Ny. He was certainly a bad omen, and Willow ought to leave his side at the soonest possible juncture.

And yet, he didn’t want to. It wasn’t due to any fondness in the crazy omen of bad tidings but rather his own insatiable curiosity.

Willow liked to know things. More accurately, he liked to know what was being kept from him. He hated the idea that anyone could successfully hide something from him and he hated being left out of the group of people who were knowledgeable on a subject.

It boiled down to pride again. It always did.

“What are you?” Willow asked, feeling that if he didn’t get an answer earlier that he certainly wasn’t going to get one now.

Ny looked at the clouds with that same disrespectfully obvious intention to lie. “Good question,” he replied finally. “I probably should have died back there.”

“Why didn’t you?” Willow pressed.

“Hm… Would you believe ‘divine intervention’?”

It would take quite a bit of prose to even attempt to summarize Willow’s feelings toward religion, but the way that would most aptly manage the feat would be to point out Willow’s ongoing issues with pride and how dimly prideful people tended to view those who held power over them. When intermixed with his deeply traumatic experience with the most religious person he’d ever met, the feelings became even more intense.

It wasn’t a fond impression.

“No,” Willow replied flatly.

Ny chuckled, strangely amused with Willow’s reply. “Good, ’cause then I’d have to call you gullible.”

What a patronizing bastard.

Willow contemplated more efficient methods of getting the answers that he wanted but eventually dismissed them. As annoying and unpleasant as the drunkard was, he had helped Willow twice with his attackers. While Willow maintained that he was perfectly capable of handling the situation without help, he also wasn’t the sort to dismiss a debt.

Still, he would have preferred to live in a world where people had no choice but to obey his commands. Of course, kingship wasn’t a world like that either. For every person who obeyed, there was another that plotted behind his back.

Ruling a kingdom was far more similar to herding cats. As Willow’s experiences in life involved herding sheep, he hadn’t quite been prepared for the rise in difficulty.

“Where are we going?” Willow asked. If he didn’t receive a proper answer to this question he really would leave.

Ny glanced up from his prone position. “Looks like we’re heading to the slums.”

“…You don’t know where we’re going?”

“I told you, we’re going to the slums.”