The Maid of the Cursed Princess

That day, the rain poured with particular intensity.

While the rainy season did ensure frequent showers, even in the perpetually gloomy, dreary slums, rainfalls invariably cloaked the atmosphere with an oppressive pall.

“…My body feels unbearably heavy…”

Yet the boy sensed an especially ominous ambiance today, a foreboding premonition that some calamity loomed.

“Perhaps Robin won’t come…”

Huddled by the sewer entrance, the boy awaited the girl’s arrival with unwavering vigil.

The reason he kept his vigil by the sewer rather than their oasis stemmed from the latter’s only accessible route lying through that very underground passage.

Venturing into the sewers during rainfall essentially tempted fate itself, yet he could hardly neglect their customary rendezvous. Thus, braving the inclement downpour, he had dutifully reported to the entrance intent on intercepting her arrival.

“Should I keep waiting…?”

Perhaps the girl might not appear given the heavy precipitation, yet the boy didn’t even consider that assumption.

Previously, the girl had always arrived at their oasis first regardless of rain or shine, unfailingly awaiting him without exception. Of course, the previous showers hadn’t approached today’s torrential intensity, but her indifference toward rains remained unambiguous.

That was precisely why the boy couldn’t readily abandon his current position, for if he returned home or attempted locating her at the Court of Miracles, their paths might diverge – potentially missing her altogether.

“Achoo!”

Yet as chills wracked his drenched, shivering form inducing sneezing fits, the boy ultimately gave up on his fruitless vigil.

“…I should go to the Court of Miracles.”

Not to relinquish their reunion entirely. It would be utterly unfair to trudge home in such a sodden state having failed to meet her. Or so the boy rationalized his decision to finally set foot within the normally avoided Court of Miracles.

The boy knew the Court of Miracles’s location well enough, because that edifice’s sheer enormity rendered it an unmistakable landmark besides being one of the scant few local charitable organizations that actually extended aid to the denizens of the destitute slums.

Within those unforgiving badlands more bereft of human compassion than anywhere else, any organization operating under stated philanthropic objectives undoubtedly harbored ulterior motives. Or outright malicious agendas, more often than not. Only the Court of Miracles itself alongside the local cathedral enacted true selfless charity lacking any covert incentives.

And even then, the cathedral lay beyond the slums’ borders while its alms carried an implicit evangelistic mandate, rendering the Court of Miracles as the sole entity bestowing aid without any intrinsic underlying conditions.

Thus, the boy knew enough about the place to recognize its distinctiveness, if not its inner workings. His aversion to socializing has dissuaded him from ever venturing within that crowded place until now.

To the misanthropic boy, the Court of Miracles represented a veritable labyrinth of formidable, nigh-insurmountable challenges.

“This is… the Court of Miracles…”

Yet today, he had arrived upon its doorstep of his own volition, driven by his conviction that the girl could be nowhere else.

“…What should I say? Um… ‘Excuse me?’ Yes, that should suffice…”

Brushing the raindrops from his sodden visage, the boy grasped the door handle – only for it to abruptly fling open accompanied by a bloodcurdling shriek the instant before he could announce his presence.

“I told you, she’ll be back soon… Kyaaaahh!?”

“Hieeck!?”

Startled into nearly stumbling backwards by that piercing, anguished wail erupting from within.

“Wh-Who goes there!? Without even an umbrella in this weather…”

The shriek’s source recoiled in equal shock upon glimpsing the boy’s sudden materialization.

“You are…”

Jet black tresses framing obsidian irises, relatively well-dressed compared to typical slum attire aside from a conspicuously loose, unoccupied right sleeve.

“Could you be that person…? No, surely not…”

The one-armed girl often kept company with Robin recognized the boy in the same instant he discerned her identity as that very acquaintance.

“…That daft one-armed twit?”

“That brooding, ill-mannered boy…”

While their mutual first impressions were hardly flattering:

“D-Daft… ahem, wh-what’s the m-matter…?”

It was the one-armed girl who initiated dialogue first, her quavering stammer finally formulating an inquiry despite her apprehension.

“I came seeking Robin.”

“R-Robin? Robin… the one I know? The name her friend bestowed upon her…? Surely you can’t be referring to that very friend…?”

“…Yes. We were supposed to meet today, but she didn’t arrive. Is she perhaps here?”

Though momentarily discomfited to learn a third party was privy to the intimate monikers they had christened each other with, the boy suppressed that fleeting possessive disquietude to probe the girl for Robin’s whereabouts.

Surely in this relentless tempest, even that vivaciously carefree girl would have little inclination to venture outdoors? She must be sequestered here, within the Court of Miracles’s halls.

“Oh… no…?”

Yet contrary to the boy’s presumptions, his deepest yearnings-

“She went out a while ago… adamantly insisting on going out to meet a friend despite my protests…”

The girl wasn’t present within the Court of Miracles’s confines. The boy had missed her entirely.

“Carmen then… escorted her out to meet that friend…”

“…What?”

In the most dire, horrifically conceivable scenario the boy could never have envisioned.

“But why, why would Robin become separated from… Kyaaahh!?”

Before the one-armed girl could voice her ominous epiphany or pose any further inquiries, the boy had already sprinting with every last ounce of his shivering might.

His legs blurring until rendered invisible, his desperation fueled by a delirious sensation of his very musculature rending apart, bones snapping, lungs constricting from some unseen assailant’s stranglehold.

“Gghhhkk…!!”

Perhaps this frantic haste was unnecessary after all.

His mother and the girl were acquainted, potentially even more intimately familiar than the boy himself could fathom. His aversion toward venturing outdoors, particularly in the Court of Miracles’s direction, conflicted with his mother’s tendencies to indulge in frequent public sauntering.

No, the odds favored the mother having cultivated her rapport with the girl before her own son, would they not?

Realistically speaking, their relationship dynamic as the respective ‘mother’s friend’ and ‘friend’s son’ while not particularly close should at least preclude overt hostilities unless one party egregiously overstepped certain boundaries through insensitive meddling or unforgivable slights.

Neither of their temperaments suggested that plausible likelihood.

So why, why did this overwhelming sense of trepidation persist?

Grating his teeth against the relentless downpour, the boy soldiered onward toward their decrepit hovel, fervently praying that this disquieting apprehension was nothing more than a horrendous unfounded delusion.

“Hhah… kkhhah…”

By the time he could no longer distinguish whether the moisture trailing across his flesh stemmed from perspiration or rainwater, at last the dilapidated shack’s exterior loomed into view – its facade wholly unremarkable.

Yet the boy flung the front door open with such unrestrained force that it crashed against the opposite wall with a resounding thud.

“…Well now.”

The one greeting his frantic disruption was his mother calmly ensconced in a reclining chair, unhurried puffs of smoke from her cigarette dissipating languidly.

“Whatever is the matter? That was rather unbefitting even for your boorish conduct.”

Her demeanor exuded her typical unruffled aloofness, retaining that ever-impassive placidity the boy had seldom witnessed waver.

“Did something happen out there…?”

“…Robin.”

But the boy couldn’t extend his mother the same dispassionate courtesy. Not if the one-armed girl’s testimony proved truthful and the girl currently accompanied his mother, as his intuition insisted was undoubtedly the case.

“Where is Robin?”

“Robin? Ah… that girl, you mean.”

Momentarily perplexed by the unfamiliar appellation before recollecting its subject, his mother wordlessly gestured toward the bedroom door with her cigarette.

“…”

Droplets trailed in the boy’s wake as he made his way across the room.

His solitary focus remained riveted upon that sole inviolable destination. And upon opening that door-

“What’s this?”

He bore witness to an abhorrent reality.

“You just up and turned into some miserable drowned rat?”

The Ruffian puts on his clothes and puffs of smoke trailing from where he nonchalantly grasps a lit cigarette between his lips.

“…”

And sprawled lifelessly across that rumpled bedding – the girl.

“Since you’ve arrived, do some cleaning while you’re at it. What were you thinking, bringing some brat here…”

The boy had no time to pay attention to the Ruffian who brushed past him.

His previously bold demeanor now gone, the boy dragged his feet that seemed unwilling to move as he approached the girl.

“…Robin?”

Only then did the harrowing truth shatter the veils obscuring his perceptions.

“…Arai… gnée…”

The atrocities the girl had suffered at their hands.

“…”

Snap.

He felt as if something had broken inside his mind.

…

“Hah… hah…”

When the boy regained consciousness, he felt a burning heat in his hands.

His hands were stained bright red, with broken needle fragments between his fingers and a bloodied hammer in his other hand.

Only upon seeing the Ruffian’s mutilated corpse did the boy realize the red liquid coating his hands was human blood.

He must have used every means at his disposal – stabbing eyes with needles, smashing the skull with the hammer, or wildly attacking in a frenzy. For a small, weak boy to overcome a much stronger opponent, he would have had to use any method available.

“My son, you have more impressive qualities than I thought.”

The boy then turned his gaze to his mother pinned beneath him, barely suppressing the urge to smash her head with the hammer.

“Why did you do it?”

He wanted to ask.

“Why… to Robin?”

Why had she committed such a horrific act?

“Well…”

His mother answered:

“You have become quite disobedient lately, my son.”

Her tone was calm, as if listening to a child’s complaints.

“…What…?”

So many emotions contained in just one word.

“It seemed to be because you made a bad friend, so I called that friend over to discipline her too.”

Utterly disregarding the boy’s retorts, his mother continued violating every remaining semblance of his heart’s integrity.

“Just because of that?”

Simply for his recent insubordination? Merely for daring to crave affection and withhold the abject submission she had indoctrinated into him since birth?

“What… am I… to you…?”

What, exactly?

“What does the word ‘son’ even signify… to someone like you…?”

Words quavering as if choking back sobs or visceral terror.

“My…”

Yet his mother’s reply resonated with unsettlingly tranquil, doting fondness utterly dissonant from his plaintive anguish:

“Possession.”

The boy could no longer hold back.