"Hm?"
Selena opened her eyes to find Frostwalker kneeling before her, the weapon it had drawn from the tactical case tossed aside.
The girl's exquisitely beautiful face tilted upward slightly.
"Interesting. Aren't you supposed to be following orders?"
"By rights, I should... but I cannot execute this command."
Frostwalker's tone remained as flat as ever, yet the halting, faltering way it spoke lent the construct's voice an illusion of emotion.
"Your Highness, I cannot bring myself to harm you. You should not die here."
"You're merely a tool, and yet you'd defy your master's will?"
Selena's eyelids lowered slightly as she studied Frostwalker for a long moment, then suddenly broke into delighted laughter.
"Hahaha, that fool Arcturus, going out of his way to deploy Frostwalker just so his executioner wouldn't fall under any charm. But I doubt even he could have foreseen this."
"That my beauty could ensnare not just the living, but even a heartless machine? Ah, what a deeply sinful woman I must be."
The Snow White Princess stroked her flawless cheek with one hand, sighing wistfully.
Frostwalker remained unmoved by the princess's self-admiration and simply continued:
"Lord Arcturus ordered me to kill you and bring back your heart as proof. I will find a beast nearby as a substitute. My Hunter module is fully capable of processing any beast's organs to be indistinguishable from a human's."
Selena knew now that Frostwalker would not kill her, yet even so, she showed no sign of joy.
The girl lifted a hand to her lustrous, flowing hair and said flatly:
"There's no point to it. Would you have me flee the kingdom in disgrace? No matter how far I run, the curse would drag me back to Wintertide, to carry out what every Snow White Princess before me has inevitably had to do."
An expression, fierce and resolute, crossed that face too beautiful for words to capture.
"It is precisely because I loathe such an ugly, murderous act that I choose to end my own life. My life will not tolerate a single blemish upon its beauty!"
"...Your Highness. Please, take care."
Frostwalker had no intention of trying to talk Selena out of it, nor did it possess the function or purpose to do so. Refusing to kill the princess was the one directive it had determined to be supreme, above all else.
The construct rose to its feet, picked up the tactical case, and made its way to the riverbank. The pale blue furnace core in its chest began to strain under load, and then its knees dipped slightly...
Boom!
In an instant, the massive construct broke the sound barrier, whipping up a violent gust and a surge of water, and crashed into the forest on the far bank.
Shielding herself from the spray with her cloak, Selena watched the direction the construct had vanished in and let out a helpless sigh.
Then the Snow White Princess clasped her hands behind her back and began strolling along the riverside.
She gazed down at her own slender reflection on the water's surface: hair as black as the night sky, eyes as clear as true silver, skin as translucent as snow, and most importantly of all, a face of mythic, ethereal beauty. No excessive ornamentation, nothing but beauty itself.
Pure beauty. Beauty unadorned. Beauty potent enough to shatter reason itself.
The devastatingly beautiful girl lost herself in her own reflection, tilting her head slightly.
"Mm. What a magnificent face."
Selena did not deny that she had a tendency toward vanity.
But could this truly be called the Snow White Princess flattering herself unduly? Who, after all, could look upon such a face and not feel their heart stir with adoration?
While admiring her own beauty, Selena turned her mind to what came next.
The first thing to settle was this: she had no intention of clinging to life in disgrace.
The curse the dragon had placed upon the Kingdom of Wintertide was one that every Snow White Princess before her had been powerless to escape, and Selena would never bring herself to kill her own mother with her own hands.
Still, choosing the right method of suicide proved to be no small dilemma.
She certainly couldn't simply drown herself in the river; that would be far too undignified, too ugly.
Just the thought of her own bloated corpse floating up made Selena's expression sour.
Other methods of suicide didn't sit well either. The most dignified option, really, was poison. Mm... poison it would be, then.
In life she wished to bloom as brilliantly as a summer flower; in death, to fade as serenely as an autumn leaf. The curtain call of her life had to be grand, sorrowful, magnificent. If it could not be so, she would rather not die at all.
"Perhaps I should go meet that prince who proposed to me?"
Selena drew the carefully preserved letter from the pocket of her pristine, fitted white gown and unfolded it to read once more.
The letter was written with such elegance and depth of feeling. At first Selena had simply enjoyed it as an ode to her own beauty, but now, thinking it over, perhaps she might actually accept?
In all her years, the princess had never once left the castle, let alone had any experience with romance.
Within the royal castle of Wintertide, there was no one but her mother and a handful of stiff, humorless ministers, the latter of whom hardly cared to exchange more than a few words with the Snow White Princess at all.
Selena rested a hand against her delicate, snow white chin and nodded.
"I'll go meet him, then. It would be far too great a regret to die without ever having fallen in love, even once."
Of course, this was all contingent on the Prince of Aurum being handsome enough. The princess, a devoted worshipper of good looks, could never get along with an ugly man.
She didn't expect anyone to match her own level of beauty, of course, but so long as he was reasonably presentable, and given the sincerity of that proposal letter, it wouldn't hurt to try meeting him. If they got along, they could move forward with a formal engagement.
"And then, my magnificent wedding shall become my funeral as well! Joy and celebration will be my funeral dirge, flowers will carpet the ground before my grave, and vows of eternal love shall be answered with eternal silence."
As Selena pictured the scene, a flush of excitement rose to her devastatingly beautiful face, and she pressed her fingertips together over her mouth.
Then the princess, who seemed the very embodiment of beauty itself, began humming softly by the riverside, spinning in a slow circle every so often as she sang.
"The most beautiful of maidens, at her most radiant and dazzling moment, forever branded upon the very end of her life, leaving all who knew her to mourn for the rest of their days! Ha, truly, what a deeply sinful woman I am."
Selena believed she had found the death that would best showcase her own beauty, and she laughed, whether from genuine delight or self-mockery, it was hard to say.
Beauty was flawlessness. But it was also, in its own way, regret.
"And at the very end, I shall lie still within a crystal coffin, and as the years flow endlessly onward, I will forever embody eternal beauty."
While the Snow White Princess was lost in her aesthetic fantasy, a thunderous roar shattered Selena's train of thought.
Boom!
A flock of birds burst into startled flight, and from the forest not far off came the clash and clang of steel against steel.
Selena turned toward the sound, only to see Frostwalker, who had just left moments ago, sent flying backward, crashing through and snapping several fir trees. Giving chase to the construct was a young man, absolutely furious.
"Aaaaargh, you dare kill my horse?!"
The young man had actually overpowered Frostwalker, one hand clamped around the construct's neck, dragging it and plowing a furrow through the ground.
When the young man locked in fierce combat with Frostwalker finally lifted his head, the Snow White Princess's silver, beautiful eyes went wide in an instant.
A sensation like an electric shock struck her square in the chest, and in the span of a breath it flooded through her entire body, forcing the princess to straighten her spine without meaning to.
This strange, unfamiliar feeling... how could she even begin to describe it.
Selena suddenly realized: she wasn't so eager to die anymore.