I never asked to be born under the blue sky of Meredith, nor did I pray for living a longer life, but Zeus gave me them both. I longed to get only some air of justice, yet Themis was averse to hear my prayer.
The time had come. It would be the fifth time in my life when I must run an everlasting honor. Yes, it was an honor for the fainthearted, but for me, it was no more than fatuity. Yet I just could do nothing more than taking the orders, because I had no more life to live but a thing they told me constantly from the first time I was endowed with ears. I did remember how it’s whispered, “It is not a command, it just has been destined. You’re born to be Nemura the fourth.”
Nemura, a clan of deathless guards, providential to protect heaven and earth of Meredith, those were what Belva oracle told me and what she engrafted in everyone’s thought.
The oracle was a very essential person in the empire. Belva had been standing in that position from the first period of Meredith in the reign of Lord Bernessa. She was irreplaceble, despite the empire had been dethroned to Feretrius, son of Bernessa. She wrote and portrayed her visions on a long parchment that was used as the only guideline by the people in Meredith. What a peculiar to know a woman with her unsubstantiated words had stronger controlling power than the ministry.
My eyes were on a woman who was standing next to the window of my room. She was the daughter of Austrin, the head councilor of ministry. Her name was Phalosa. Her ageless face was the only beauty I’d ever seen. However, she had never let it touched by any man.
“How does it feel?” asked her.
“What?”
“When you go up to the altar, standing in front the scourger and feel every single whiplash touches your skin,” she explained her question vividly.
“I’m still here. When I go back and get better, you can ask me after while,” I answered.
“No, it’s been five years from the first time you were enthroned as a real Nemura, so you have been going through this four times before. How did it feel?” she forced me to remember.
“I don’t really remember,” I saw her waited for my further explanation. “I just remember my only prayer before I went up to the altar.”
“What was that?” asked Phalosa again. Her face seemed so curious, but her eyes were still too deep to be read.
“I wish there would be a whiplash by the scourger’s hand that could take my life away,” I said.
I guessed Phalosa could get what I was trying to explain. What I felt was much terrifying than people used to think. If Meredith cursed itself by sacrificing a mean birth child every year to Poseidon for keeping its naval force strongest in the eastern earth, Nemura was the other curse.
When I was a child, I only knew that I had no father, mother, even a name. They just called me Nemura the fourth, son of Meredith. But I never settled for it. My name was and would always be Logan. It was a giving from Phalosa when I was nine. She thought that name was really reflecting my hollow eyes. But view days ago, she said that I didn’t have them anymore. It might be the time which had opened my mind and eyes, so I could see the world through a wider sight. But how could that be? I didn’t even see the world for five years long.
People might think that my life was perfect. Sumptuousness, private dwelling in a part of the palace, manna, and glad rags, I might have them in my life but it made me no more than an inmate. It felt like serving a whole life sentence without standing a chance to know whether I was guilty. My life was taken completely five years ago when I reached nineteen, they ceremonially enthroned me as a real Nemura. It was the first time I learned about two great afflictions. The first was self-restraint, when no word with anybody except to the courtier, no walk outside the royal court, no future else but Nemura. The last one was pain. Every year, in a day that people called invulnerability ceremony, the scourger gave me whiplashes no less than my age number. I always remembered every single scratch of the steel rope on my skin, but it didn’t kill me no matter how much blood I dropped when they brought my body to my bed in my unconsciousness.
