RAGNA POV...
The day we were born, they said the palace bells rang without pause, and servants ran through the halls with tears in their eyes because male twins meant strength, meant legacy, meant the continuation of a bloodline that had been carefully preserved for generations; yet the same voices that once praised our arrival fell into suffocating silence the moment the court magicians confirmed what we were, and just like that, joy turned into something filthy and unspeakable.
They stopped calling us princes.
They started calling our mother a witch.
She was stripped of her voice long before they stripped her of her title; no one allowed her to defend herself, no one asked what she felt, and no one cared that she still cried at night while holding us close as if her warmth alone could shield us from the verdict that had already been passed. A princess reduced to a witch overnight, as though affection and blood meant nothing once the word "Cursed children" was whispered in the royal chambers.
To them, she was no longer a daughter.
She was a stain.
And the man we were meant to call father... even as children, Matthew and I could feel it in the way he looked at her. There had never been love in his eyes, only calculation. She had been a bridge to greater influence, a stepping stone to expand his authority over neighboring territories. But when she gave birth to what the scriptures condemned as the sworn taboo of humanity, that carefully constructed future shattered, and he needed someone to blame.
It was easier to call her a witch than to admit his own ambition had been built on fragile ground.
"Dammit, useless. Guards, I said throw them into the f*cking desert so they can reunite with that witch!"
I still remember his voice. It trembled—not with sorrow, but with frustration and fear. Fear of losing power. Fear of rumors. Fear of us.
"I hate you!"
Those were my last words before the guards’ gauntlets tightened around us, before the desert wind swallowed the palace walls from my sight, before the world dissolved into darkness.
REINER AND BERTHOLD POV...
That was the truth behind our silence.
Not the story we told.
According to what we fed Ragna, our father had been a baron who died honorably after winning a battle alongside his knights, and we were on our way to join the kingdom’s celebration when tragedy struck, forcing us into the Great Desert of Death where everyone perished.
It was a clean lie.
Sympathetic.
Easy to believe.
But every word of it had been fabricated so that he would lower his guard around us.
Because the quest required it.
The system had granted us a ritual—devour demons to instantly rise in power—but it came with strict conditions carved into our very souls. Only foes could be consumed. The ability had a limit. At most ten demons, and the last one had to be powerful enough to amplify the effect. We were already at the brink of that limit.
Originally, Ragna had been a target.
A potential stepping stone toward that final devouring.
Every softened expression, every carefully measured confession, every fabricated tragedy was meant to secure his trust so that when the time came, we could strike without resistance.
But the system had started speaking again, urging us to devour another demon after our first encounter with him, and that was when something inside me shifted.
If he had truly been our enemy, he would have done the same to us.
That was the unspoken rule among demons with systems: hesitation meant death.
Yet he accepted our friendship.
He trained with us. Ate with us. Watched over the younger children as though their survival genuinely mattered to him.
Over the past few months, I began to see it clearly—he wasn’t cruel, nor manipulative, nor secretly plotting our demise. He was grieving, just like we were. A boy carrying the weight of a broken family and pretending he could endure it alone.
In the end, Berthold and I reached the same conclusion without needing to say it aloud.
We would not devour him.
’It’s better not to reveal the truth,’ I told myself more than once. ’If he learns why we approached him, the little friendship we’ve managed to build will crumble.’
And I wasn’t sure I could bear losing that too.
After we crossed the plains, the world transformed into endless gold.
The Great Desert of Death stretched before us like an ocean made of sand, its dunes rolling beneath the pale sky in silent, oppressive waves. The carriages creaked as they pushed forward, wheels carving temporary paths that the wind erased almost instantly, as though the desert rejected any sign that humans had ever dared trespass here.
Ragna scanned the horizon cautiously.
Berthold and I did the same—but for entirely different reasons.
Even the steel knights seemed tense, their usual rigid composure edged with restraint, hands resting closer to their weapons than before. The desert was not the only legend whispered across kingdoms; beyond it lay a boundless ocean said to cradle horrors older than recorded history. They claimed cursed children were born from this land, that vile beasts roamed beneath its sands, and that countless corpses of ambitious warriors were buried beneath every dune.
No knight, no matter how renowned, willingly entered this place.
"Relax a little," Ragna said, offering us a faint smile. "With the Black Steel Knight here, I’m sure we’ll at least have a chance to survive."
He spoke after careful thought—I could tell by the way his eyes lingered on the knights before returning to us. He had sensed something was wrong earlier, perhaps noticing the bitterness that slipped into my expression when the desert was mentioned, but he chose not to pry.
He probably assumed it reminded us of our father’s supposed death.
He didn’t want to reopen wounds he believed were already bleeding.
The other cursed children sat stiffly in the carriages, their confusion obvious. They didn’t know the history of this desert, but instinct alone told them it was dangerous. Small clatters echoed whenever the wheels struck uneven ground, and every sudden gust of wind made a few of them flinch.
After all, they had already brushed against death once at the hands of the knights.
Fear didn’t disappear just because their captors now played the role of protectors.
If circumstances demanded it, the knights could abandon the majority to secure the survival of a select few. From a strategic standpoint, it would not be considered a significant loss.
That was the kind of logic adults used.
The wind howled across the dunes, lifting golden sand into the air and sweeping away our tracks as if we had never passed through at all. With each step the horses took, dust rose around us, blurring the edges of the world until everything felt distant and unreal.
’It’s already been a few days since we entered the Great Desert of Death.’
With my sharpened senses, I could feel something pressing against us—an invisible weight settling over the carriages, subtle yet undeniable. It wasn’t just the harsh climate or exhaustion.
It was as if the desert itself was watching.
And for the first time since we set foot on this accursed land, a quiet unease began to grow inside me, heavy and persistent, whispering that the true danger of this place had yet to reveal itself.