It has only been a week since I recovered from the eastern fortress Kine's remnant and the royal family Djeem's remnant, and just a few days since Nia and Shania retrieved Sora's remains from Archbishop Whiteley.

We were alone in the fortress, with only a handful of us present in the room. I was standing beside the mother, looking at a coffin on a funerary pyre, inside of which was the corpse of an ash-haired woman, surrounded by blue flowers.

"You’re sure we’re doing this? After all the trouble Shania and Nia went through to recover it," I asked the person standing beside me.

Tenderly but seemingly hesitantly, the mother reached out and touched Sora's face. From her expression, it seemed as though she was expecting some kind of reaction, but nothing happened.

As she withdrew her hands from Sora, seemingly disappointed, she finally answered, "Yes. Unlike Djeem and Sora's remains, this is nothing more than a corpse, of no use to me or the aristocracy." As she spoke these words, she lifted her gaze to me and asked, "What's with that expression on your face, Faceless One?"

"Nothing. I'm just impressed with how absurdly unemotionally you can be," I said to her, looking at Sora. "What kind of person was she—she truly was—when she was alive?"

"What do you want me to say,…. She was very different from what people revered her for. She was nowhere close to being the so-called Gotsent apostle she was painted as; she was an ignorant and clueless girl in love who spent most of her life chasing after what she imagined herself to be. In the span of her long, century-long life, she kept piling up mistakes after mistakes, terribly wrong decisions after terribly wrong decisions that, in the end, ended up getting the best of her."

"Harsh as ever, aren’t we? Surely, as a person, she had two or three redeeming qualities."

"… she had… Her love for her children—each of her daughters and the son she never got to love. That was her only redeeming quality, and this might also be the only true thing about the worship heaped on her: her love as a mother for her children.

For the first time since I met her, she had a conflicted expression on her face as she spoke these words, but it was short-lived, as it quickly shifted to her usual cold expression when Nia came and stood by my side.

"Princess, I will leave the handling of the rest to you," she said to Nia in the old language.

"You’re sure you will not stay, Aunt?"

"No, I don’t think this would be something for me to assist—It wouldn’t be natural," she derisively smiled. "As of now, you might be the best-placed person alive to do it, as you are the closest thing she has to a living member of her family."

"Understood."

On Nia's words, the mother exited the room, leaving Nia and I in a silence that lasted a while.

"Nia?"

"Hum?"

"Not to urge you, but I think it's about time."

With an unready but resigned expression on her face, she answered, "I know," before reaching onto the coffin.

"When we lived in the tower, I didn’t have a mother, but when I was sick, there were times I remembered her at my bedside; she was the closest thing I had to a mother figure; she was my aunt Sora."

In an instant, the funerary pyre and coffin were engulfed in blue flames, which devoured everything in a matter of seconds, leaving nothing behind, not even ashes.

Finally, she drew her hand back and looked at the golden and blue ring she was wearing on her finger, the same ring I was also wearing.

"You once told me it was a gift from her to your parents, right?"

"Yes, it was. Father had them made by her as a token of love for my mother."

"I see…"

Those two alliances went through a lot to ultimately end up on one of my fingers—a lot, that's for sure.

"I understand that this funeral meant nothing to her, that it didn't bring her peace in any way, but it did get me thinking about what I—we should do next."

"Good," I simply replied, reaching for her hands, "come, I heard the mother would have something to tell us after, but for the time being, before hearing whatever grand schemes she has in store for the rest of us, but before that, I would like to eat something," taking her to the exit, "and that in good company," I precised.