"...I... I didn’t have a childhood like that..." Cassandra spoke softly.
Her voice carried a weight that made my chest tighten. Without hesitation, I quickly activated the Shared Burden and Lanter’s Glow, letting the warm light flow between us as I prepared to shoulder whatever pain she was about to reveal.
I didn’t know whether she would continue, but I was ready to listen, no matter how long it took.
The silence stretched for a few more moments, maybe she was hesitating to speak, to reveal her past.
"...I... I don’t remember having preferences about food because..." She paused, her fingers unconsciously tracing the edge of the table. "Because there’s not always food to have preferences about."
I remained silent, feeling the edges of her emotions through the invisible connection - a deep, aching emptiness that spoke of more than just physical hunger.
"Your mother... she told me about all these little moments of your life. How you’d wrinkle your nose at cooked carrots, how she’d negotiate with you to finish your vegetables." A sad smile ghosted her lips. "It sounded so... normal. So wonderfully normal."
Her voice grew quieter, more distant. "I think... after talking with your mother today... seeing how a real family works, how a mother treasures such simple things..." She looked up at me then. I saw something raw and vulnerable in her eyes.
"It made me remember my own childhood. Or rather... what I wished it could have been." She drew in a shaky breath. "You see... Being born into the Virellia house would have meant luxury, abundance, glory, and never wanting for anything. And in terms of material wealth, that was true enough for the most. But...."
Her laugh was hollow, bitter.
"But when you are the unwanted daughter, the one who came out wrong... when your very existence is seen as a disappointment..." She trailed off, her gaze fixated on her hands.
"You... you lose everything except the grand Virellia title, which they constantly reminded you was the ultimate gift you could ever dream of."
I was silent, feeling the full force of her words, even if I couldn’t truly feel her exact pain. My abilities let me share her emotions and understand the depth of her despair, but maybe having never experienced such profound neglect myself, I knew I couldn’t fully comprehend the suffocating emptiness she must have lived with. Well, if those dreams were real... Then it was another story.
"But... They didn’t know or pretended not to know that their majestic title doesn’t feed you, doesn’t keep you warm at night, doesn’t hold you when you cry... It... It only binds you to their expectations while giving you nothing in return."
"...It chains you." She finally lifted her head, her eyes burning with fierce resentment. "A gilded cage is still a cage. The heavier the name, the tighter the shackles."
She paused, taking a ragged breath. "My life was a script they wrote. I ate what I was given - be it a tiny piece of a cake, or just a piece of bread, or even nothing at all."
"I wore what they chose, a beautiful dress, when I made appearances on rare occasions as a ’daughter’ of the Virellia, or a servant’s clothes when they wanted to remind me of my place." Her fingers clenched around the fabric of her sleeve, as if reliving those moments.
"I was ’taught’ to speak only when spoken to, only what was approved, in the exact tone they demanded. I did what they ordered me to do, from serving my own siblings to doing the most menial tasks they could think of - all while being reminded that I should be grateful for the discarded scraps of their benevolence..."
I wanted to say something, but I held back, for I could sense she wasn’t finished, but was only just beginning her tale.
Still, countless questions burned in my mind. Like, why had they treated her that way? What made her so ’wrong’ in their eyes?
Was her mother like Aeron’s? Or had she been born to a commoner, making her status that precarious?
Did she have no one, no grandparent, no kind servant, to offer even a silver of genuine care?
How could a family, even a powerful ducal one, be so utterly devoid of warmth? Were the nobles of this world so rotten?
As if reading my thoughts, Cassandra’s voice grew quieter, more hollow.
"What was more painful was that the only person who could have given even a fraction of what I needed... what I wanted... was nowhere to be seen." She laughed in sarcasm. "That’s right, my mother."
"The person who left me as soon as I was born, as if the contract between her and the duke was complete."
"And me? I was the transaction. The proof of whatever agreement they’d made. A living, breathing reminder of a deal struck, but apparently not valuable enough to warrant any actual care or love."
"...Not yet at least..."
...Is she talking about that engagement with that third-rate villain-looking guy?
I watched as her fingers traced the invisible patterns on the table.
"She... She vanished the moment her obligation was fulfilled, delivering a child to carry the Virellia name. What happened to the ’product’ afterward? Whether I lived or died, whether I was happy or miserable... that was never part of the bargain."
The emotions radiating through our connection deepened, tinged with the abandonment so intense that it felt like a physical wound.
I could see it with my eyes, thanks to the Lantern’s Glow. It was the biggest and deepest ’stain’ in her soul.
"Yeah... There was none... No mother to force me to eat vegetables, no father who saw me as anything more than a mistake to be managed. Just an empty title that weighed more than my entire existence."
Words left my mouth, but she didn’t seem to hear them. Her eyes had gone distant, as if she were no longer in this room with me, but trapped somewhere in the past, lost in the depths of her memories.
"What could a little girl with no voice, no will, no power do?" she continued, her tone flat and mechanical. "She could only obey. Live exactly as they wanted her to - a ghost in their grand halls, existing only when convenient, invisible when not..."
...Something is wrong.