Hearts of Iron 4 Player's Guide to Save the Isekai World

Melancholy

Revised November 2024

***

Cascadia Palace

Her father hunched over his desk, consumed by his studies of charts, messages, and advisors. But nothing as paramount as the air they breathed and the living tragedies haunting them to this day mattered—maybe never. Aurelia stepped forward and locked her joints, embracing the drill.

His advisors' eyes pierced her, and Aurelia defended with the blissful ignorance of staring into the wooden wall furnishing behind her father's seat. What's the use of fretting over it? She should've been quartered in the same cell and stripped of her rank, but here she was, still the princess, dignified above righteousness.

"We shall continue this matter later. You're all free to go."

As they bid their liege farewell, the advisors shamed themselves to Aurelia with a curt bow. The door shut, and her father heaved a breath, looking at her as if ready to stop her act, and began arranging paper around his desk.

Her palm cried from driving her nails into it. A great secret, a reality that begets the revocation of logic, and a pain unimaginable to her own, and yet, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Why would the king, who has tolerated his impulsive daughter's escapades, forcefully recall her all of a sudden?"

"Is a sudden betrothal any better?"

"It would make the 'prairie hoods' cast aside everything once they learn who might be the groom."

Just like she 'cast aside everything' once she learned what happened to Anna?

The pretense caught her attention, sure. So did the mother who pushed Aurelia away and continued cursing and digging alone her husband and child's graves for raising their pitchforks against bandits.

The voices may be hoarse, defiant, or hopeless, but it was the same cries of the innocent, the bereaving souls praying to the heroes for salvation; the little child told not to look back by his brother as a pack of hungry dreadhounds that had ruined their village gave chase, the father seeking justice against the corrupt lord's hands on his daughter, and the slaves chained in a burning dungeon.

Her father grabbed the last pieces of documents and stacked them together. "Do you know what the hero's first words to me were?"

"What?" she couldn't imagine the silence if she never asked.

"'Just kill me already.'"

A prick in her heart surged across her body. She had earned her proficiency in the Arts of Fire, but what is this? They say the truth is bitter, but she was on fire. Her flesh writhed. But one thing has been made clear: she's aware.

If the Hero's Will was this vindictive, how much pain was he suffering? Aurelia has formed a caricature from the broad strokes, of the weight her actions have brought, yet she cannot make out its extent.

"You should've seen the defiance in his eyes. It was like staring at a powerless boy facing monsters with his little sister behind him." He sighed."What a sight to behold."

"Why?" her breathless voice silenced her words.

"He came to us at the brink of death from a thousand cuts; torture; amateurish according to the spymaster."

A familiar sensation began in her chest, something ticklish that curled her heart and a pounding that resonated across her body.

"Why did you have to summon a hero?"