"Looks like she's back to normal. Ah, that gave me a real fright—I thought this kid was about to go berserk next and start swinging at all of us."
Capella's Authority of Lust could transform a person completely. If she transformed someone into a species with low enough intelligence, then over time, losing their sense of self was simply unavoidable.
Turning one person into a whole cluster of creatures that all shared a single consciousness was also within her power. Hard to say whether Capella herself might have clung to life that way—but now, none of it mattered.
"Don't run, frogs."
With her little paws Yimi caught the frogs as they hopped every which way, showing none of the fear a little girl was supposed to have of such things, and simply scooped every last one of them into her arms.
Though they all shared a single consciousness, even Meili couldn't keep the frogs from hopping about. If even a single one got away, so the story went, she'd never be able to change back—a dread that loomed as the darkest shadow over Meili's short life.
A moment ago Yimi had looked like a pretty little princess. Now, with an armful of not-exactly-small frogs, she suddenly looked like some feral kid stomping through the fields with the boys.
"So this is the real thing, huh—the Frog Prince."
"The Frog Prince?"
Subaru explained. "It's a story from my homeland. A cursed prince gets turned into a frog, and in the end it takes a princess's kiss to turn him back…"
As he spoke, he noticed Beatrice shoot him a look of pure disgust, slowly shifting her feet to block his line of sight to Yimi.
"Don't look at me like I'm some kind of scum. The Frog Prince is just a children's story—the moral's something like, 'the ugliness of the outside can't smother the beauty within, and someone will love you all the same'… probably…"
"Probably?"
The way each Sin Archbishop operated was, to some degree, bound up with the Witch Factor they carried. Capella, who embodied Lust, insisted that all so-called love was built on appearance alone.
Just as no one would ever fall for a kindhearted housefly, anyone who laid eyes on a beautiful member of the opposite sex would—no matter how wholesome the mood—harbor some filthy little thought. A pity she would never get to meet the foolish girl in another world who shared her voice; otherwise there'd have been a living example to throw her whole philosophy back in her face.
The frogs puffed their cheeks, fixing the little girl who was willing to hug them with their frightening, block-like eyes, until the light of D4C -Love Train came pouring down over their heads.
The misfortune weighing on her body was cast off onto the Great Rabbit, one of the Three Great Witchbeasts, and an unharmed Meili reappeared, cradled in Yimi's arms.
"I changed back…" Meili looked down at her own palms, her legs slowly giving out, and she sank to the ground.
Her eyes were empty as they drifted to the black dragon sprawled in the courtyard, and she tugged a careless little smile across her face—the way she always did, the way Elsa did.
"How mean. Turning a person into a frog—doing something like this to a girl is just too much."
Meili went on talking about her narrow escape in her imitation of Elsa's tone, but the tremor threaded through the words made the impression an unconvincing one. In the end, a mere imitator could never become the original.
She'd truly believed she wouldn't change back. This was the fate of anyone who defied "Mother"—turned into an ugly, hideous frog, hopping around, until one of the frogs vanished for good and she was left with no choice but to become a real frog forever.
Was "Mother" dead? Did that mean she never had to be afraid again?
"Pat, pat."
Yimi reached out and patted the head of this bigger child in front of her, stroking gently from front to back along her hair.
Back when she used to get chased by dogs, this was the very cat-petting technique her grandmother had used to comfort her—though her grandmother had first grabbed a stick to drive the bad dog off.
"…"
And now she was being comforted by the very person who'd killed Elsa. Through all their old games together, this little thing had probably never once sensed the urge that had lived in her—to strangle her. Right?
Meili pressed her face to Yimi's belly, the little cat's peculiar fresh scent washing over her. Her hands rose behind Yimi's back, then dropped naturally away again, never quite accepting the kitten's comforting embrace.
Of all the Sin Archbishops, Capella was without question one of the vilest. Disguising herself as Meili had been nothing but a ploy—to watch Emilia and the others drive away the real, frog-shaped Meili for her sake, or do something crueler still.
But the one mercy in all the misfortune was that, for all her toying with her Authority to torment others, she hadn't gone in for burning or slaughtering anyone. So, as with the village earlier, everything should still be salvageable.
Beatrice watched Yimi from a distance, less and less able to make sense of where this child had come from.
"Geuse."
She turned her eyes to the man Subaru had choked unconscious.
Under the divine radiance, he hadn't recovered his old sunny, handsome look—but at least his face was no longer the hysterical mask that could scare a ghost witless in the dead of night.
Beatrice crouched down and sorrowfully took his hand. "How much longer do you intend to lie here unconscious? You've remembered everything, haven't you?"
This isn't like you.
Subaru had choked Geuse—a spirit—into unconsciousness with that masterful hold of his. How was such a thing even possible? He must have remembered something terrible and shut himself away, unwilling to wake.
The Sin Archbishop of Sloth, lying on the ground, opened his eyes. He made no move to shield his face from the rain streaming down onto it—perhaps it helped calm him.
"I've had a very long nightmare."
His mind seemed still lodged on the day he'd forcibly taken in the Witch Factor of Sloth and, in doing so, accidentally killed Fortuna—wishing only to give up thinking, to dwell on nothing at all.
To be cut down as a mad Archbishop by some agent of justice—that might, in truth, have been the kinder ending for him.
"You always wake from a nightmare in the end," Beatrice consoled him.
"And this is…?"
It wasn't until a thoroughly bewildered Emilia stepped into his view, holding up an umbrella of ice magic to shield him from the rain, that a little color returned to Geuse's eyes.
"Lady Emi… lia…"
However different she was from the child in his memory, there was no mistaking who she was: silver hair, violet eyes—so very much like Fortuna.
She's grown so big.
He instinctively lifted a hand—then looked at his ghastly pale hands and decided they had long since lost the right to touch her.
"Eh? You know me?" Emilia pointed at herself, puzzled.
Her earliest memory was of waking in a frozen forest—everyone in it, herself included, locked beneath a near-endless ice, and she alone had thawed and stirred awake.
Of anything before that, she had no memory at all.
"Lady Emilia—"
Geuse dragged himself up from the ground, then dropped to his knees and prostrated himself on the ground, weeping, repeating in a hoarse voice over and over: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry…"
"Why are you apologizing?"
Emilia didn't understand—he even startled her into a small step back. "How strange. Why do I feel a kind of…"
Grief and relief both at once. The urge to weep.
"Emilia!" Subaru—killed twice by this lunatic—tensely planted himself between her and the man.
At the sight of him, Geuse's pupils shrank too. "Lady Emilia, get away from him!"
He might seem frozen on that one day, but that didn't mean he truly remembered nothing—and he remembered with perfect clarity that this man was the lunatic Sin Archbishop of Greed!