“Ganudos was...destroyed? M-Moons! It wasn’t because I said anything weird to Orania, was it?” asked Mia, very very timidly.
Bel tilted her head. “The diary doesn’t say anything like that, but... Hmm... Hmmmmm...” She furrowed her brow.
“You’ve got quite the scowl, but...do you actually know what’s going on?” Mia fundamentally lacked faith in her granddaughter’s education. But this wasn’t a complete lack of trust. She simply thought that when it came to anything, Bel probably understood less than her.
Now, there was clearly plenty of room for poking fun at that notion, but...
“Of course I understand! I’m a descendant of the Great Sage of the Empire! Your blood runs through my veins!” said Bel, proudly puffing out her chest.
Unfortunately, no one was there to point out that this fact was exactly what was so worrying.
“Um... To sum things up, the king was assassinated, and a revolution broke out at the same time. Oh no! It says Princess Orania was executed at the guillotine!”
The word “guillotine” filled Mia with dark, foreboding thoughts. “I see... So Orania is also a victim of the same fate,” she muttered with a doleful sigh.
“Then, um... That spelled the end of the royal family, and because all the other higher-ups were killed too, Ganudos was left in total chaos. There was even a civil war.”
“A civil war...? That doesn’t sound good at all.”
The flames of revolution were those of destruction. An unstable state of domestic affairs led to famine, which in turn led to pestilence. In the end, the chaos would cross borders, threatening nearby nations.
“I’d like to keep the wars to a minimum, if possible.”
“Then, it seems like you influenced Duke Redmoon to mobilize Tearmoon’s army and get the situation under control. Since the forces within Ganudos were nearly depleted, Tearmoon suffered very few losses. Efforts to reestablish and maintain public order went well, and the people of Ganudos were incredibly thankful.”
“Oh, I did? So things do work out in the end. But...if I solved the problem, then how does Ganudos get destroyed?”
“Well, there’s no royal family, and all the other higher-ups were killed. The heads of the different forces in the civil war vied against each other, which meant any ruler would bring back chaos, so...um...” Bel looked to Mia, her eyes sparkling. “Ganudos Port Country was destroyed and subsumed by Tearmoon. It became the Ganudos domain! It says you implored them to leave their nation’s future in your hands...”
“We subsumed Ganudos? That’s...quite...” Mia let out the same sort of sigh that often accompanied indigestion and looked to the sky. The responsibility of a foreign affair fell on the shoulders of the heads of that nation, but if Ganudos became a territory of Tearmoon, its affairs would fall on the shoulders of Tearmoon’s emperor. And if Mia was going to one day be the empress, she’d be the one bearing all that weight.
A peaceful land would be one thing, but a new territory full of citizens whose hearts and souls have been ravaged by civil war? That’s more dangerous than anything! It’d be nice to have direct access to the sea, but that could incite the jealousy of other nations. One wrong move and people would be saying I purposefully let civil war destroy the land so I could swoop in when the time was ripe!
This seemed like a dream come true for the Serpents, and it left Mia at her wit’s end.
“Whoa! That’s so cool!” came a shout from Bel.
“What is it? Is there something else?”
“It says the territory of Ganudos erected the Golden Mia Lighthouse to celebrate your amazing deeds!”
“A golden...Mia...lighthouse?” Mia was overcome with a dizzy spell and collapsed on her bed. “Wh-What exactly is this strange and ominous-sounding building...?”
“Um... It seems like it’s a lighthouse shaped like you that’s made out of gold!”
“It must be huge! I’ve seen lighthouses before—aren’t they big towers?”
“That’s what it says. See? There’s even a diagram.”
Mia looked in Bel’s book to find a picture of her, holding a torch high in the sky with one hand and a book in the other.
“The torch is the light, and the book in your left hand is probably...the Holy Book?”
Mia couldn’t help but groan. “I understand why the torch would represent light, but...wouldn’t holding a Holy Book in my hands mean depicting me as a religious figure? This is sure to anger Miss Rafina and the Central Orthodox Church.” Mia’s sharp sense of smell was picking up on a whiff of danger—building something like this would definitely tear a hole in the relationship between Tearmoon and Belluga.
“Could this be the Serpents’ doing...?” Building a lighthouse made of gold would be a terrible waste of a nation’s resources. Mia thought she saw the makings of a plot to incite a revolution! “We absolutely cannot build this. Making our way into Ganudos just became an even graver matter,” said Mia, shaking her head. “And letting my foolish protégé be executed at the guillotine doesn’t bode well either. We need to get to Ganudos as fast as possible!” proclaimed Mia, a fire in her voice.