The thunder did not rumble that night; it screamed. It tore at the sky and shook the very bones of the palace.
I sat up in my bed, the velvet darkness feeling alive and threatening. Beyond my door, I heard it, not the usual measured tread of servants, but a frantic, hushed rushing. A current of panic moving through the stone corridors like a hidden river.
A cold foreboding, slick and formless, coiled in my stomach.
When the door opened, it was not a maid with warm milk. It was the Head Maid, her face a mask of composure over profound sorrow. Without a word, she gathered me into her arms, her hug tight and trembling. It was not comfort; it was a transmission of shock.
In that silent, desperate embrace, I knew. Something vast and immovable had just shattered.
The Emperor was dead.
My father.
The night did not pass in quiet grief, but in the stark, official machinery of mourning—a symphony of hushed voices, tolling bells, and the rustle of black silk being unfurled in endless bolts. I felt… nothing. No tears welled.
No sob clawed its way up my throat. How could I mourn a portrait, a title, a faint cough heard through a distant wall? He was a concept, not a person.
Yet, a strange, hollow ache bloomed behind my ribs. It was the feeling of a door I never knew was there being permanently closed. A loss not of what was, but of what could never now be.
My thoughts flew to my mother. The Empress. Was she in her chambers, her legendary composure broken at last? Was she weeping? A fierce, protective urge surged in me, I wanted to be at her side, to shield her, to be the strength for her that she had always been for the empire. I needed to see her.
The next day, shrouded in a dress of oppressive black velvet and pearls like frozen tears, I was readied. My brother, Xane, arrived at my door, a pillar of somber elegance in his own stark attire. He was to be my escort, my consort in this ritual.
My hand trembled as I placed it on his offered arm. The tremor was not from grief, but from the sheer, terrifying weight of the occasion.
"Do not waste sadness on a stranger, Cia," he said, his voice low and devoid of inflection as we walked the draped hallways. The words were meant to be a solace, but they felt like a knife. How could he dismiss the blood that tied us, the phantom of a presence that had loomed over our entire lives?
I said nothing. My turmoil was a language he would not understand.
As we approached the vast doors of the Grand Funeral Hall, we saw her.
The Empress.
I braced for devastation, for a face ravaged by tears. What I saw stole my breath.
There was no devastation. There was resolve, forged in the fiercest fire. Grief had not broken her; it had tempered her. Her spine was straight as a blade, her eyes dry and holding a piercing, formidable light. She was not a widow drowning in loss. She was a sovereign standing upon its precipice.
We moved to her, and the surrounding courtiers fell into a deep, hushful bow. "Your Majesty," Xane and I murmured in unison.
The silence that followed was thicker than the mourning drapes.
Her gaze swept over us, and when she spoke, her voice did not waver. It cut through the funereal air, clear and absolute.
"Crown Prince. Princess. You will enter not as mourners, but as the future of this realm. You will not lower your eyes. You will not bow your heads.
You will meet their gaze and remind them that the dynasty does not falter."
It was not a suggestion. It was a coronation of spirit.
We nodded, a silent pact forged in that moment. Falling into step behind her, I felt my own spine straighten, my chin lift. The hollow ache in my chest did not vanish, but it was suddenly filled with a new, electrifying substance: power.
The great doors swung open. Our names boomed through the hall—Her majesty, Crown Prince Xane, Princess Ciaza—a declaration, not an introduction.
And as a sea of the most powerful lords and ladies in the empire bowed their heads not just in respect, but in submission, I felt it crackle in my veins. The royal blood. The right to rule. The unyielding authority.
This was not something I had lost. It was something I had just, truly, begun to claim.