Prologue
Queen Styment Dayholt-Hadron's glassy blue eyes never wavered as she brought the thick official parchment paper to her perfect red lips, laying a gentle kiss on the seemingly unspeakable words. Memories of their short year together flooded into Styment's thoughts, the most blissful moments spent together, private kisses and silent exchanges of loving reflections.
The Queen wore a gown of white, a color reserved for only funerals, and any other time would be offensive to wear a gown of only the palest color. Though Styment's gown was adorned with blood-red stitches—similar to ferns, with their twirling and growing leafy vines. The blood-red stitched ferns embedded among the bottom and sleeves of the heavy white coat that she wore over the plain tulle dress underneath. Embellishing the red blood stains on the pure and clean history of the Hadron Era.
Only the briefest minute passed before a maid arrived at the door, a young girl struggling to keep her facials unemotional and unreadable. She was nervous, fidgeting toned fingers and reaching constantly to tuck dark brown strands behind her pointed ears. Styment didn't react to the girl at first, continuing staring into the void of too-pure white walls, her own tanned fingers wrinkling the edges of the parchment paper with a helpless clutch.
"Your Majesty?" The girl said anxiously, "It's time."
"I am the Queen. I run by my own schedule, not the one crafted by fanatical Lords." Styment responded with brittleness on her tongue, reaching up to stroke a loose tawny tress back into place, her facials colder and sharper than ever.
The girl opened her mouth to announce another scheduling conflict, but her words got caught in the hollow of her throat, a few unintelligible sounds squeaking out in response. Her face flushed a dark rouge against her toned skin, bowing her head to Stymest, the girl appearing to be only a few years younger than herself, and her uncontrolled emotions making her look especially younger.
With a sigh and looser tone, Stymest spoke. "Very well, I must get this over with."
Gratefully, the girl raised her dark head with a flush of relief, her posture and features turning more professional. "Thank you, Your Majesty. Please follow me if you will."
Stymest stood from the black and gold-rimmed chaise couch she had been bracing herself on, while finding her balance with the diamond-encrusted pointed high heels and extremely heavy white-and-red gown that was apparently called fashion. Stymest had only been Queen for a year, coming from an entire legacy of Sixes, and was still not fully adjusted to the life of a Royal. Though when she finally found her grace, Stymest moved with fluidity and slenderness.
Stymest and the young maid walked efficiently, through the sculpted hallways and brass balustrades of the Palace. Silently, Stymest observed the young girl, avoiding the hovering topic that surrounded the Queen. The maid walked with a quick step, despite being quite shorter than Stymest, finally having tied her mahogany brown hair behind her ears. She was a pretty little creature, a young face and supple forehead without worry or wrinkles. Her skin was a shade lighter than amber brown, with mahogany brown eyes that rivaled her equally dark brown tresses, sickeningly reminding Stymest of her husband.
The maid brought Stymest into a large white room, with several vanities lined up against the tall granite walls. From the room, she could faintly hear the crowds of people grouped outside the Palace, waiting to hear her announcement.
"Nym, come please," a maid called to the girl by Stymest's side. Nym bowed her head to Stymest, then went to the other side of the room to brief with her supervisor, while another maid gestured for Stymest to sit in the seat of one of the vanities.
The voices of the crowd and the feeling of a maid's professional hands styling her tawny hair sent a chill down Stymest's spine. Still, she refused to let a single tear slip or a grimace reveal her feelings, adapting the solid, chilling delusion of a Hadron Queen. Unmoving while gentle hands brushed through her hair, styling the locks in soft waves. Another maid held makeup brushes, mascara, concealer for the dark shadows under Stymest's eyes, and palettes of eyeshadow and blush.
On a blue velvet cushion off to the side, laid a silvery crystal crown, which Stymest hadn't seen since her wedding to Ebony. The encrusted diamonds shimmered and flickered in flowery arches, a silver steel ring on the inside of the crown held the whole masterpiece of a headpiece together. As the maid styling her hair finished the soft waves, falling in gentle breezes, just enough that the tawny tresses didn't block her magnified blue eyes. She lifted the crown from its blue velvet cushion carefully and placed the shimmering diamonds on Stymest's head, the maid's fast hands weaving strands of tawny hair in and out of the crown to insure that it didn't fall off during her announcement.
Once they finished, Stymest stood with a click of her diamond high heels on the glazed Sivec marble floors. Silently striding to the exit of the vanity room, instantaneously flanked by two guards in Wimborne White guard suits and steely, alert eyes. The crowd outside the Palacd got louder and louder as Stymest approached the balcony where she would make her announcement. When she finally reached the marble door that led to the balcony, she stopped suddenly in her path, biting her immaculate red lower lip.
"Majesty?" The guard on her left murmured.
"I'm perfectly fine," Stymest said indefinitely with a hushed stammering breath. "Simply bracing myself for the speech."
The guards nodded their heads, making it unclear if they believed her lie or not. Stepping forward, they each took hold of a silver door handle, much to Stymest's mental argument, and pulled the door open.
Immediately, the force of thousands of roaring voices hit Stymest with a mighty blow, the pointed heels of her high heels shifting backwards. The warm Angeles air provided an adumbrate comfort, but the aura of suspense destroyed that notion. Regaining her strength and stability with a deep breath, Stymest stepped up to the anhydrite podium.
"Hello Illéa," she began coolly, silencing the crowd below. "I have come to address the rumors surfacing around my husband King Ebony." Stymest was suddenly exceedingly aware of the hovering cameras that were filming her every word and movement. "It saddens me to the upmost remorse to announce the untimely death of our beloved King Ebony Trig Hadron—"
She was quickly interrupted by the screaming assemblage below the balcony. Stymest didn't expect the people of Angeles, or all of Illéa, to take the news well. She didn't even believe the man who first informed her gravely that her husband was dead—murdered, it seemed, when she first heard. It took many hours and glasses of champagne for Stymest to calm down, and she could barely imagine what all of Illéa's reaction would be. But it was what she was faced with. Head-to-head.
"Please. Please!" Stymest urged into the microphone on the podium. "I understand your outrage, and I will inform you all that we are doing everything we can to find out how King Ebony was murdered—"
Clearly that was the wrong choice of words.
Another surge of infuriation and atrocity swept through the spectators, high pitched screeches and shrieks accompanied rough shouts and howls. A mix of all sounds rang through Stymest's ear drums, none sharing sentiment or empathy, only wild screams of abhorrent citizens.
Millions of blank thoughts controlled Stymest's mind now, as she gripped the anhydrite podium with her tattered and scarred hands—from her many years working as a Six, the only unchanged part of her from that time which seemed so long ago. She felt herself slipping again, down that dark hole which only Ebony, her love, could pull her out of.
The two guards that had previously opened the marble doors for Stymest's entrance to the balcony rushed to their Queen's side, ushering her back inside the Palace. Though Stymest pushed past them coarsely, aggressively attempting to escape on her coercive high heels. Once inside the marble building, Stymest took off sprinting through the foyer, as much as she could in those completely unnecessarily high heels, having had lost the two guards far back.
With tears streaming down her face, entirely ruining her perfectly done makeup. A façade—like everything else in the stupid, horrible Palace that Stymest was stuck in. Ebony was the only true, real person in the Palace, maybe in all of Illéa, and the only person that Stymest knew she could fully trust.
But now he was dead.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Her husband and soulmate was gone forever.
And Stymest could do nothing to change it.
While still running, Stymest stripped herself of the heavy coat with the stitched blood-red ferns and the diamond high heels, dumping them with an echoing clank on the marble floor of a room that was unrecognizable through her tear-filled blue eyes. As soon as Stymest was relieved of the heavy coat and high heels, leaving only her tanned bare feet and simple tulle dress, she was able to truly sprint, reminding her of the days when she working delivering everything from timber trees to the daily mail, along with her job as a secretary.
Yet Stymest would have preferred to continue those days of such simplicity, where her only worry was if she had enough money to pay for her family's rent and meals. As horrible as her past sounded, never knowing when she would get her next meal, she would crusade for that life rather than be caught in the constant web of lies and manipulation that Illéa called a government. Without Ebony by her side, her every aspect was worth nothing to the power hungry Lords that she was surrounded by.
Stymest harshly stopped in her path, ruggedly throwing herself into the closest chamber with an open door. Completely sick to her stomach, she didn't bother to scope the chamber for others before she spotted a toilet. Getting on her knees, ignoring the sound of a loud rip from her tulle dress, Stymest opened the seat of the toilet and gutturally emptied her entire stomach's contents.
"Queen Stymest!" A familiar voice rang out perspicuously from behind Stymest. "Your Majesty, what are you doing in here?"
Gentle hands slipped under Stymest's weak arms, her throat sore and tired, and ears still ringing with the sounds of millions of thousands of people screaming bloody murder.
"Your Majesty," the voice called softly. "Can you hear me?"
"I don't want..." Stymest mumbled, taking hold of the gentle hand holding her shoulders, attempting to pull the hands off. "Please leave..."
"I don't think that you are in the most stable condition right now, I suspect it would be unwise to leave you alone." The voice, a girl, reprimanded calmly with a sense of maternal gentleness.
After a few tries, the girl managed to get Stymest to turn around, though the Queen refused to look the girl in the eyes, mimicking a drunken state with stumbling and random mumbles. While gripping Stymest's arms, the girl reached out a leg to hook around the leg of a stool, scraping the stool across the marble floor for Stymest to sit on.
Pathetic. That's what Stymest was.
She wasn't the cold, indivisible Hadron Queen which she was attempting to portray.
No. She was a young Six from Kent with dreams and expectations not bigger than spending all her days working for a world much too mentally incapable for her to ever understand. It was some sort of miracle that Stymest was ever Selected, and an impossible dream for her to ever become Queen of a divided nation.
All nothing but a dreamscape of a shadowy fragment that glimmered brighter than Stymest could ever think possible.
Dead. Gone. Façade. Pathetic. Delusional. Insane. Incapable. Divisible.
Yet her situation was completely real.
"Your Majesty! Please! Someone help!" The female voice yelled with a shriek, viciously shaking the Queen's shoulders.
"Stop—please—stop," Stymest insisted breathlessly, grabbed the girl's shoulders, snapping back into reality.
Her name was Nym. The maid from earlier. A pair of mahogany eyes and tresses wild and frenzied, with small amber brown hands tightening on Stymest's shoulders. Releasing a breath, Nym calmed along with Stymest herself, both young women letting their bodies relax.
"I'm very sorry, Your Majesty," Nym said quietly, her head tilted down. "I saw your coat and high heels sprawled across a hallway floor and I was worried that something happened to you."
Stymest gave her a soft half-lipped smile, though it slowly dropped as she reached to take Nym's hands of her shoulders, gripping them in her own hands. "Back in Kent," she began gently, "I was prone to panic attacks."
Nym looked up to Stymest's blue eyes in shock, a couple locks of her dark brown hair falling out from behind her ears.
Stymest nodded her head stiffly, reliving the memories. "All the pressure of taking care of my family, with five younger siblings, a drunkard mother, and a constantly working father. I had three jobs a day, sometimes taking on extra hours for a free meal or more tips. Some days, I just couldn't take the pressure anymore. I would break, crack down. I learned that even the simplest things can set a person off, from a morning shift at Five A.M, to being called up to answer a question in class. All it takes is the small push off the iceberg built of growing anxiety."
"And to think," Nym mumbled. "I once complained of my employment here as a maid."
"No, no, no." Stymest insisted, lifting Nym's eyes to face her own. "If we compare our individual problems to each other then it will turn into a competition of 'who had it worse.'" She took a deep breath. "And that never gets anything done, does it?"
Nym sucked in a breath in agreement, with cheeks blooming dark rouge. "May I ask, Your Majesty, what will happen now that King Ebony has died? Please forgive me for intruding, if I am, but it is well known that the King has no siblings or close family to take the Throne now that he has passed."
Biting her lip, Stymest foraged an answer. "Honestly, I have no idea what will happen next. But...I do know of someone who is eligible to take the Throne."
Wild-eyed, Nym was confused. "Who? The only person I could think to take the Throne would be a high-ranking Lord, but that isn't possible. Is it?"
Stymest looked deep into Nym's mahogany brown eyes with a solemn face, her hands gripping Nym's tighter.
"I'm pregnant."
Royu Trinity Hadron was born a King. After his father's untimely death, only three months before his birth, many nobles hoped to control the young King, regardless of the child's legacy and ultimate power. Though with his mother's own power, as the Queen Regent, until King Royu came of age to take the Throne, she protected him from the political unrest in the nation of Illéa as he grew up. Now, Queen Regent Stymest is dying, though unknown to the public, and like her husband Late King Ebony before her, the cause is unknown. She will soon to be leaving King Royu, her only son and child, with an unstable nation and without a Queen of his own, if a cure is not found for her illness. With the Queen Regent's final months closing, and no sign of a cure, King Royu sets to announce his own Selection, with a dozen nobles and a nation at his back, sharpening their knives at every corner.