The first fitting was a ceremony in itself.
Three seamstresses from the royal guild worked in silence, adjusting velvet sleeves and pinning golden embroidery with needlepoint fingers. I stood still, arms slightly raised, as they shaped fabric around me like sculptors perfecting a statue. The coronation gown was beautiful—too beautiful. It looked like it belonged to someone who didn't bleed.
"Don't move, Your Highness," one of them murmured. "We're threading the dragon's flame."
Gold thread, red fire. The crest of House Noctis. Glory and ruin sewn into silk.
Behind them, Lady Myriah—my father's closest advisor—watched with thinly veiled judgment.
"You must look like the empire's breath made flesh," she said, lips barely moving. "Even if your voice trembles, your image cannot."
"I wasn't aware the empire needed a doll," I replied.
One of the seamstresses froze.
Myriah's gaze sharpened. "You're not a doll, child. You're a symbol. And symbols must be flawless. Unquestionable."
I didn't reply. What was there to say? I already knew how they saw me. Not a girl. Not a ruler. A placeholder. An image to be propped up, dressed in ancient power, and paraded until my spine cracked under their expectations.
I endured the rest of the fitting in silence.
Later, when I was finally alone in the royal solarium, I stepped into the green stillness and exhaled. The air here was warmer, thick with the scent of blooming starshade and moon ivy. Plants my mother once tended before illness silenced her.
I sank onto a stone bench, crownless and barefoot, and let the garden swallow me.
This was the only place in the palace that felt untouched. Real.
Until—
"You wear disappointment well."
I didn't have to turn to know who it was.
Rael.
He leaned against one of the marble columns, arms crossed over his chest, hair slightly damp from the morning mist. Watching me like he always did—with that unreadable expression that made me want to scream and sigh at the same time.
"They want me to be a symbol," I said. "Something golden and empty."
"And you?"
"I'd rather be sharp."
He tilted his head. "Symbols don't bleed. Blades do."
"Then I'll be a bleeding blade," I whispered.
He stepped closer, slowly, like he was approaching a wounded animal. Or maybe something far more dangerous.
"You can't win this playing by their rules."
"I know."
"Then what's your plan?"
I met his gaze, the fire in me barely restrained. "To make them regret teaching me the game."
For a second, his lips twitched. Not quite a smile. But not indifference, either.
"I take it you're not going to walk down that aisle meekly?"
"Not unless it's lined with traps."
A moment passed between us, heavy with something unspoken.
Then Rael reached into his coat and pulled out a small glass orb—glowing faintly with blue light.
"What is it?" I asked.
"A gift," he said, placing it in my palm. "A ward. Ancient magic. Very illegal. But effective. It'll shatter if someone tries to poison you."
I stared at the orb, pulse quickening.
"Why give this to me?"
His eyes, for once, softened. Just a little.
"Because queens die easily," he said. "But empires fall harder when they take someone like you with them."
He turned and left before I could ask more.
And for the first time in weeks, I realized something dangerous.
I wasn't afraid of the crown anymore.
I was afraid of what I'd become once it sat on my head.
The underground archives weren't on any official map.
You had to know the right corridor to follow, the right mosaic to press, the right lie to whisper. My father never let me down here as a child. Said the knowledge below was "too sharp for soft minds."
Funny how often men mistake obedience for softness.
The guards had tried to follow me. Rael stopped them with a look.
"Her Highness requires silence," he had said, voice steady, polite—yet threaded with enough quiet steel to make two grown men pale and bow away.
Now, we walked side by side in silence. Rael's boots echoed with precision, mine slightly behind. The torchlight flickered across walls lined with tomes older than memory. The scent of dust and ink was thick. And below that... the iron bite of something ancient. Forbidden.
I stopped before a locked gate carved from nightwood and veined with silver. On it, engraved in Old Caelorin, were the words:
"Here lies truth stripped of mercy."
My fingers hovered just over the sigil lock.
"Are you sure?" Rael asked.
"No," I said, and pressed it anyway.
The gate groaned open like something waking from a dreamless sleep.
Inside: a single table, a single book.
The Empire's True History.
Bound in skin. Whispering in a tongue long buried.
"I've never seen this room before," I murmured.
"Few have," Rael said behind me.
I turned, slow. "You knew about it?"
He nodded. "The day I was chosen to guard you, I memorized every inch of this palace. Every secret, every shadow. If you were going to be hunted, I needed to know where you'd hide… or where they'd bury you."
There was something in his voice that made my skin cool.
"What else do you know, Rael?"
He didn't answer.
I opened the book.
The ink moved. Shifted. I forced my eyes to adjust, forced my breath to stay calm as the first few lines revealed themselves—about the founding of Caeloreth, about the pact sealed not with honor, but with blood.
A goddess betrayed. A continent stolen. Magic bound in chains.
I closed the book before I read more.
The crown was built on a grave. A gilded lie.
I leaned back, suddenly exhausted. "Tell me something true," I whispered. "Anything. Just… not a lie."
Rael was quiet for a moment. Then:
"When I was sixteen, I was ordered to kill a traitor."
I looked up. "Did you?"
"Yes."
"Did they deserve it?"
He met my eyes. "She was my sister."
The air turned colder.
"I never saw her face," he added. "She was wearing a veil. But I knew. I knew it was her."
A hundred questions stormed my throat, but none left my mouth.
Rael stepped forward.
"You want to change things," he said. "But to do that, you'll have to become the kind of monster they never planned for."
I stood.
"No," I said softly. "I'll become the kind they can't control."
Rael nodded once, as if something had just been decided.
And I realized: I was no longer learning the rules of the game.
I was beginning to write new ones.
The day of the mask fitting began with thunder.
Not rain—just thunder, low and rolling across the floating skies of Caeloreth like the growl of a beast too large to see. Omen, they whispered. The gods stirring. The old blood waking.
I stood in the grand hall of reflections, arms bare, hair coiled into a crown more ornate than I felt. Before me: a dozen golden masks. Each handcrafted by a different house, each meant to represent how they "saw their future queen."
A lie within a lie.
House Merenth's mask was delicate and hollow-eyed, with sharp lips carved from crimson glass. Beauty without voice.
House Vaellen's was stern and sharp, forged from bronze, mouth sealed shut with metal thorns. Strength without emotion.
House Ilvyr's was veiled in pearls, eyes closed. Obedient. Blind.
I stared at them all and felt sick.
They didn't want a queen. They wanted a symbol they could silence. A marionette in silk and steel.
"You're meant to choose one," Lady Myriah said, her tone clipped.
"I see that."
Her heels clicked behind me. "It is tradition. Each heir chooses the mask that will be worn during the Binding Oath before coronation."
"And if I refuse?"
Myriah's eyes narrowed. "Then the people will ask what kind of queen rejects the very customs that define her throne."
Rael stood at a polite distance near the marble pillars. He said nothing, but I could feel his gaze like a touch on my spine.
I turned back to the masks. To their empty eyes. Their frozen mouths.
And I smiled.
"Fetch the artisan," I said.
Myriah blinked. "What?"
"I won't choose a mask they made for me. I'll design my own."
"That's not how this works."
"It is now."
She stepped forward, voice low and cold. "You do realize you risk angering the High Houses?"
I leaned closer, whispering just for her, "Good. Let them show their teeth. I'd rather know where the daggers are than pretend I'm not being bled."
Myriah's face twisted with something—anger or awe, I couldn't tell.
She stormed off, muttering about rebellion disguised as royalty.
I turned away before I could see her disappear and walked to Rael.
He didn't ask anything, didn't even look surprised.
"What kind of mask will you make?" he asked quietly.
"One that sees. One that speaks. One that remembers," I said.
He tilted his head. "You're not afraid of the storm, are you?"
"I am the storm."
And when the artisan arrived that night, I gave her the sketches I'd made in secret. A mask with open eyes. A mouth unfettered. Gold fused with obsidian. Beautiful, but jagged—like the truth.
And on its forehead, a single etching: a phoenix rising from fire.
Because I would not rise like those before me.
I would rise despite them.
The great sky-temple was built into the bones of a god.
At least, that's what the priestesses said. White spires pierced the clouds like frozen lightning, and the floor beneath my feet shimmered with living starlight—a memory of ancient power, bound in celestial stone. Above us, the roof was open to the ever-turning sky, where Caeloreth drifted among the constellations like a sovereign dream.
This was where every heir of House Noctis made their Oath.
And where they were bound, forever, to the empire they would die for.
I stood at the altar, draped in deep crimson and shadowsilk. My custom mask—a golden phoenix wreathed in obsidian—rested in my hands. My heart beat too loud in my ears. I could barely hear the sacred hymn echoing through the marble arches.
Behind me, nobles and traitors watched from their high balconies.
And Rael stood in the shadows near the southern pillar, like my own guardian phantom.
You chose this, I reminded myself. You demanded this. Then wear it like armor.
The High Flamekeeper stepped forward, ancient and robed in silver fire. He spoke the rites. Recited the old verses. I repeated them, voice steady. Until the final line.
"Do you, Princess Lazaria Velmira Noctis, swear your life, your blood, and your will to the immortal empire of Caeloreth?"
A long silence followed.
Every breath in the temple froze.
I looked down at the mask in my hands. The one I had designed. The one they hated.
Then I looked up at the gods.
"I swear," I said, slowly, "to burn down the empire if it dares chain me."
Gasps. A cry. Myriah's sharp intake of air.
But the flame at the center of the altar flickered—once, twice—and rose.
The gods heard me.
And they did not object.
I placed the mask on my face.
The world turned gold and shadow. I could see them all now—every scheming noble, every fearful priestess, every stunned traitor behind velvet robes. Their faces twisted, their illusions cracking.
They didn't know what to do with me anymore.
And that made me more dangerous than ever.
As I turned from the altar, something in my chest settled.
I was no longer a girl waiting to be crowned.
I was the storm they couldn't name.
The fire they couldn't kill.
The queen they would never control.
And in the shadows, Rael watched with that unreadable expression again.
But this time, when our eyes met—he bowed.
Not out of duty.
But out of something far deeper.
The first attempt on my life came exactly three hours after I took the Oath.
Poetic, really.
I had expected poison in my chalice. A corrupted priestess. A veiled blade from the shadows. What I did not expect was a gifted dancer.
She moved like a whisper during the evening banquet—silver silks, moonlight smile, eyes rimmed in kohl. My court applauded her every twirl. The High Lords toasted to my future. Laughter echoed beneath the floating lanterns.
And then she spun toward me—one final turn.
Too fast.
Too sharp.
Her fan flicked open mid-step. Not silk. Steel.
I didn't think. I moved.
The blade hissed past my throat, close enough to kiss skin. I caught her wrist before the second strike, twisted—too hard. Bones cracked beneath my grip. The fan-knife clattered to the marble floor.
Gasps.
Screams.
Rael was at my side a heartbeat later, sword unsheathed, eyes ice-cold. The assassin writhed beneath my boot, breath ragged.
"Who sent you?" I demanded.
She looked up through a veil of blood and hate. "You were never meant to rule," she spat. "You are a fracture in the empire's design."
I leaned down, voice low. "Then pray the empire never breaks."
She lunged again.
Rael's blade stopped her—swift, silent, final.
Her body crumpled.
The hall fell into stunned silence.
I stood there, chest rising, mask discarded beside me, blood on the hem of my gown. Every noble watched, frozen between horror and awe.
I stepped forward.
"Let it be known," I said, voice ringing across the marble, "that the empire has drawn first blood. I am done dancing for cowards."
Not one of them spoke.
Later, alone in my warroom, I poured wine with hands that didn't shake. Rael stood by the door, expression unreadable.
"She wasn't the last," I said.
"No."
"They'll keep coming."
"Yes."
I turned to him. "Are you going to try?"
A pause.
Then he said, "If I wanted you dead, Princess, you'd have died before your first breath."
"Comforting."
"I only deal in truth."
"And what is your truth, Rael?"
He took a single step closer. His voice dropped.
"My truth is that I no longer know if I'm guarding you for the empire's sake—or because I can't stand the thought of you falling."
The air thickened between us.
I hated how it warmed me. How it terrified me more than the assassin's blade.
I looked away first.
Because I was still learning how to be a queen.
But love? That was a battlefield I hadn't dared step into yet.