Secrets of the Diary

The afternoon was getting late, signaling the start of the evening. Inside the confined of her bedroom, Elucina settled herself cozy at the table.

She felt slightly tired after having gone over her mountain of dresses, but she was not totally exhausted. Realizing none of them would be perfect for the debut, she raced to the Queen's castle with her horse. There, she asked her mother for the ideal dress, which was currently waiting in her dressing closet.

"Alright," Elucina exhaled a breath, feeling her tiredness escaping from her lips as she sank into the chair. She said, "Now, onto the thrilling part."

Having just finished picking the dress she would wear for the upcoming debut, Elucina still had one last preparation to do before she faced the battlefield.

She placed the diary down on the table, recalling how she had snuck into her old castle to retrieve it, only to be caught during her stealthy mission just as she was about to leave.

Elucina touched the lines of her old diary, running her fingers over its worn cover. She could remember having received the journal from her mother when she was seven years old.

Now faded and with some tarnished patches, Elucina paid no mind to those as she opened her diary. The smell of the parchment greeted her, wafting up to her nose, as she turned the cover.

The first paper had nothing written on it; blank. She turned to the next page, where she found what she needed for the battlefield… because her diary was not just a journal; it held much more than that.

This diary would serve as her guide, like records of the nobles across Ethara, including any outsiders or foreigners she had encountered.

But she had written did not contain trivial details about them, no. Because that would only clutter the entire journal with unnecessary details. What she only included was the rumors that had gone on about them or her personal description of encounters with them.

"...Hm, where should I start to find out about the Duke of Solmere?" she mumbled under her breath, moving her hair aside and flicking it to her back.

Though she had memories of her encounters with the Duke, the details were blurred in her recollection.

'This is where my diary comes to the rescue,' Elucina thought. She did not care about writing in the journal to control her emotions. There were more necessary uses for the paper than that.

Elucina flipped through the pages, scanning the contents briefly until she found the exact section when she had her tenth birthday. It was around this date that she received the crown at a young age, and had met nobles from the neighboring kingdoms and empires.

Elucina stared at the page in front of her eyes, silently registering the words written by her younger self – young Elucina.

"I, I have quite a unique way of recalling them," she muttered out loud as she read how the young Elucina described the first foreign noble person she had written.

She choked at her own words: "Dandelion Prince of the Aerilon Empire. A year older, blond hair, looking like he will lose a fight against mere breeze – God, what was I thinking?"

She fell silent for a minute, painting a concerned expression on her face as she grasped what she had written about a foreign royal…

Of how she would be in serious trouble for these words. 'I, I really have to keep this hidden from others,' she said to herself.

Elucina quickly glanced around the room, to check if she was alone. Fortunately, Daleah was not there; Elucina had insisted she would do her own preparation for the ball and think of herself. Therefore, she would not have a handmaiden for a couple of days.

'Great.'

Elucina went back to her diary and looked over the other names. She ran her finger to scan each individual until she finally found the person she was looking for.

"Duke Lostin of Solmere," she read at the words pointed by her finger. "Weirdo and dislike – Wait, huh? Is that it?" Elucina expected more, but there were only three words that were written beside his name in her diary.

She shifted through the other pages, to another, and the one after that. However, she found no other information than young Elucina writing him as a weirdo person that she disliked on their first meeting.

"A, Are you being serious, right now?" she muttered in frustration.

Elucina could not believe that her younger self wasn't that much help. She just wrote what she wanted about this person and none that had been about him; no rumors or anything.

Elucina ran her hands through her hair, combing her strands back. "No, no," she refused, shaking her head. In determination, she continued searching for more information about Duke Lostin that she might have written on the other names in her records.

Just anything.

"Wait." Elucina stopped and interrupted herself. She flipped her diary over on the table, about to open the back pages as something flashed in her mind.

She had written something about the late Queen Vittoria, whom she may never had the chance to meet, but she had heard of from her mother's mouth during her episodes.

'R, Right, I might have written something there,' she said inwardly.

But…

She hesitated to go down into that section of her diary. There was a reason why her younger self wrote her mother's episodes at the very back of the diary.

"No, I need to find out about him."

Elucina mustered the courage to continue. With an exhale, she opened the back of the diary. Though the pages she initially saw were empty, she flipped some pages. After six pages, she finally saw the section she was afraid to look over.

She quickly brought her hand to hide the other details, not wanting to open another memory she had buried deep in her head. She gave a gap between her fingers, allowing herself to skim through without reading the entire thing; she just ran her eyes to search for anything that might be useful.

Until there, between her thumb and forefinger, she caught the Duke's name.

Young Elucina wrote: "Mother kept saying that the Duke of Solmere loathes her husband, who is my father."