Chapter 1: Iskeld

The Royal Palace of Iskeld had a hundred rooms built for luxury and life but to Theia it was a cold and miserable place.

She resided in the East Wing, separated from the main residential West Wing. In Theia’s wing, the gleaming palace hallways narrowed, and the stone walls became worn and damp. Still beautiful because everything in her father's house had to be beautiful, that was its curse, because the beauty of the place was just another thing that stung her heart. She was always just on the outskirts of it.

Ivy crept along the outer walls in a slow, creeping green conquest. Frost etched the windows each winter in patterns that no one other than Theia seemed to admire. She had learned to love the East Wing the way one learns to love a scar. Not by choice, but because it was hers, and little else that was.

She rose before the sun most mornings and stood at her window watching the light climb over the eastern hills. It was, she thought, the only part of the day that belonged entirely to her. After that came the slow unfolding of a life built around being unseen. Quiet. Wraith like. She lived not as a princess but a constant inconvenience. She’d learned long ago to be invisible. To be silent. To not question. To appear only when summoned.

So, she read from her small collection of books rescued from a forgotten library shelf, and she took long walks in the late evenings when everyone was busy with dinner peps and court obligations, along the old overgrown garden paths. They had been abandoned for a larger and newer, pristine garden on the other side of the West Wing. In the old garden, the roses had gone wild, and no gardener came to tame them. Theia always felt like she could relate.

She kept to her habits like she was clinging to a life raft. If she stopped moving, she was not entirely sure what would happen. She often suspected the answer was nothing. That might have been what troubled her most.

She was seen officially in her unavoidable Princess duties once a week and never by her father unless she was summoned. Something she often prayed to the Goddess wouldn’t happen. It was only when her father could not justify her absence that her presence was required. A dinner with visiting lords and nobles, a lesson a tutor insisted a princess ought to have, even though she never graced daily court. A ball to pretend that she mattered, while potential suitors were paraded around, unaware she was a princess in name only. Through all of it she smiled, the smile of a dutiful daughter, a loyal prince and a lonely girl. A smile that never reached her eye, but no one ever stopped and looked long enough to notice anyway.

Theia rubbed her chest. Sometimes the pain she felt was a tangible thing. Maybe it couldn’t kill her, but it still felt like it was rotting her insides. Eating away at healthy flesh. Sometimes she wasn’t sure how long she would survive it, but she always pushed those thoughts away quickly. Never giving them time to truly root.

Her father, King Aldric, ruled the human lands of Iskalia from his great throne room. Theia had learned, long before she had words for it, that her father was not a kind man. His distaste toward her was not always cruelty or rage. Sometimes it was just indifference, the absence of any true feelings for her. Which, as she grew, she had come to understand was its own particular type of violence, quiet and slow burning. Until it hollows a person out.

She did not resent him for it. She no longer had many feelings towards her father. Not even anger. Not even hate. She had lost her mother at five years old, and it was said he had lost the love of his life. He remarried a few years later, a kind woman who became Queen Sorin, who then died two years later from a viscous winter flu. For those two years though, Theia had known a quiet sort of kindness that dulled the edges of her stark life.

His kingdom watched her father for signs of weakening. He refused to show any. Grief did strange things to men who could not afford to be seen grieving. She had for many years built him excuses the way other girls built dolls' houses. She had learned not to do that anymore.

Theia sat at her shabby dressing table staring and the looking glass and took a deep breath to steady her aching heart. She hadn’t eaten in two days. She blamed it on the nipping melancholy and pushed away the tender thoughts.

Instead, she forced herself to focus, as she often didn’t in the long nights of drowning sadness, on two small little humans in this cold palace who did see her. Who ran to her on small, quick legs and called her name as if it were a treasure rather than a nuisance. For them Theia would have endured a hundred more cruel and indifferent fathers…for them, she ensured the cold and violent hands of another man too.

She shook herself and flattened the non-existent creases of her shirt and fitted pants. No one cared that she didn’t wear dresses, as long as she wasn’t due to attend an official royal function. A small benefit of being invisible. Theia took one last steady breath and then forced her steps forward. She would not lose time with her two little menaces. She would not let her sadness erode away at that too.