ᴡᴍᴍᴀᴘ: ᴏɴᴇꜱʜᴏᴛꜱ

Bury me in gold and white feathers.

In the abandoned palace, roses grow unsupervised at every withered corner. The low sound of ripples against the stone of a pond within the sanctuary, small blue glass lilies gently swaying to an unseen breeze of laughter.

Dark red and light pink petals blow across the floor, their parent shrubs casting tall shadows against the walls. 

Benches lined up next to each other, once covered in gold, now stripped bare of their decorations and it seems as if someone had tried to make a bridge, crossing an imaginary river to the entrance of a fairy tale land that existed in their imagination but had tried to make it into reality.

Dark streaks of ashes and smoke upon the ceilings still remain, crumbling walls leave open areas in the building, birds nest in all corners, and they can smell the roses nearby as they continue to move deeper into the palace.

Perhaps those dusty candlesticks wouldn't have needed to have been lit every night if their owner had the chance to dance under the bright chandelier lights of the grand palace ballroom.

Maybe those benches wouldn't have been pushed together with rapidly thinning arms because their owner would have their own gardens to look at the sun from.

Maybe they wouldn't have been shunned by the high society of nobility due to their half commoner bloodline if they were the only princess because she would have been the only heir to the throne of their blessed empire.

Maybe if they hadn't been so quick to accept someone like their grandfather onto the throne, and then their aunt- could they even dare to call her that with all their family did to her? 

The poor princess that was the true heir wouldn't have needed to waste away in a place such as this, barely leaving to see the outside world without tracking magic embedded into her skin.

They closed the book of the history of the Obelian Empire and leave it on the wooden bench, their shackles clanking against their ankles as they walk to the last standing doors, and extend their hands out.

Watching silently as handcuffs click back into place, the magic activating and their Imperial gem eyes that came from a single drop of Imperial blood from a tainted birth of black magic, disappear into gold, their silver hair gleaming under the sunlight.

His sister shouting at her guard, her eyes changing into their mother's green, her brunette hair flying in front of her face, as she spots him walking towards them with his guards in tow. 

"Brother, why are you always so complacent with these fools? We're royalty, they can't do this to us!"

With every word she spouted he murmurs silent prayers to the heavens for her headstrong beliefs. 

She was just like their grandfather. Just like their mother who believed nothing she did was wrong, that she had no reason to help anyone for she was to be loved, that she needed a family connected by blood above all else.

That everything had to be explained to her no matter the cost. 

Even if the cost was her father's brother's life, his aunt's life for hers, and what a lovely couple, so pure-blooded, so wonderful, all the nobles cared about were riches, and he saw how his aunt's friends never involved themselves much into high society again.

Marrying off into other kingdoms, and he sees a few of them once, one with light brown hair and light green eyes...Irane was it? Who looked at him with such pain and discomfort that he couldn't approach her, even with his title as crown prince. 

But had that title truly been earned with good intent? No. It hadn't.

The book's pages flutter, and it opens to a chapter titled, "The Lovely Princess".