Seclusion (1) - 57

A/N: Sorry for not uploading yesterday. I had two tests, and then I had another test coming up, and that was more important than writing. Anyways, there'll be 4 chaps released today, 2 for TVADE, 1 for THWO, and 1 for MSIS, which completes the requirements set by the schedule.

Present Day:

//Have you started greeting the nobles yet?//

//No...//

The disappointed I radiated could not even be contained within words.

//I won't talk to you anymore until you greet the nobles.// I said, poutingly, the hidden meaning in my words completely clear through our mental connection.

'I don't want to be alone in this place...'

And she understood this, as she immediately turned off her side of our connection, and got to doing what she hated the most, politics.

As for me, I sat back up from the ground, as I wouldn't be able to sleep anyways, knowing that I would stay awake until Eve was finished, and so I decided that it was probably the best time to figure out what was wrong with my room.

You see, when I had looked through the window and into my room at the moment I arrived, I had seen something truly astonishing.

There had been a shadow in my room, that, I was sure of.

This could only mean that somebody had been snooping around in my room, even though it supposedly had nothing in it.

So, I quickly started searching the walls.

I had already disregarded the theory that they had just walked in through the front door of my room, as there was a layer of dust on the door handle when I had first been led to this room, and also, my "dad" had obviously sealed off this room, it being a symbol of bad luck and all with a demon as its previous inhabitant.

"Ah, I guess it wouldn't be that easy."

Murmuring to myself, I realized that the secret passage was a lot more hidden than I had thought, as I had already gone over the four walls in this room a number of times.

And, seeing this, I finally figured out the identity of the person who had cast that shadow.

"Hmm... If she made this passage, then it shouldn't be in the walls then, but rather..."

Looking up at the ceiling, I carefully studied the light-making ornaments that hung there.

But, everything looked normal, as I saw no indications of anything being moved up there in a while, with a heavy layer of dust that even predated my own stay in this room blanketing the lights.

So, the final option was to study the windows, as she would never make it in the floor due to her ideals.

At first glance, the windows looked perfectly fine, with nothing strange about them letting itself be known, but after removing a candle from its post and holding it up to the window a few times, I saw it.

One windowpane in particular had one set of fingerprints on it, no, it was a series of fingerprints that had been made so precisely that they had perfectly overlapped each other.

And so, I placed my fingers on the same places as the fingerprints, as I started trying out different motions.

Pushing, rotating to the left, rotating to the right, even applying a sticky attribute to my fingers with Angel to try and pull the windowpane back, but nothing worked.

It was only then that I realized that I had been a dumbass.

Keeping the stickiness on my fingertips, I tried moving the pane, sliding it up, down, and to the left.

Again, none of it worked, but there was one last possibility.

Taking a deep breath, I steadied my frenzied breathing before sliding the windowpane to the right, letting in a gust of air from outside the mansion, as a space suddenly opened up in front of me.

'Space magic...'

It wasn't my first time seeing space magic, yet, as always, it was a beautiful sight, reminding me of my childhood in this world.

But, again, it wasn't in my abilities to try and even understand it, so I only did what was obvious in this situation, and walked through the portal.

Unlike portals in many other novels and worlds, this portal was more like a hallway, as I walked through distorted space itself, proceeding on the path that the crafter of this portal had laid down for all to follow afterwards.

Finally, I reached the end of the portal.

There were no words needed to be said.

I could only face the woman past this portal head on.

And well, all I could say was that she was definitely not in the right state of mind right now.

She was crazy, mentally incompetent, that was a fact I was certain of at the moment.

But, seeing how she had made all of this, maybe it was her that loved me the second most out of anybody in this world.

Char and Gwen followed me because it was their jobs, Sari and Carmen looked up to me and idolized me as their savior, Vasilie both hated and respected me at the same time, and Karina was just, well, Karina.

They all liked or even loved me to a certain extent, like Char with her slight motherly/auntly love, or Karina with her almost cousin like love.

But this person was worlds different from the rest.

Only below Eve in terms of how much she loved it, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that she was made to love me, no matter what.

It was in her instincts, something that she had gained after millions of years of human evolution.

I was honestly starting to wonder what had made me believe that she had also betrayed me, all those years ago.

It was irrational, her cold face had obviously been a front that she had to put up in the presence of the true betrayer.

And I had been blind to that fact, too consumed by my rage at that time to think about everything carefully.

Taking the final step and walking out of the portal, seeing her sitting there, I couldn't help but think that she still looked the same after all these years.

Her red hair, the color of burning blood, her stately demeanor, far nobler than any other that I had met in this life, and that loving gaze she had as soon as she laid her eyes on me, something that I had missed all this time without knowing it.

"Hello, Mother."