Jannali decided to die on the day she discovered the truth.
Ghost Queen, they called her. A shadow of what they all were. She even looked the part: her pale skin and hair were nothing short of ethereal. She seemed to float, not walk, skimming through the corridors of the palace with the air of one who was not entirely sure where she was going.
She remembered giving birth to two daughters.
She could not remember their names.
She recalled a time when she had been lively and free-spirited, a time before she met him.
He had used her. It made her sick to think about - the fact that she'd been used as nothing more than a means to an end.
No one would believe her, she knew that. No one would believe that it could be possible.
But Jannali knew.
And so she found someone willing to do it. It would be easy, she told them. The bioelectricity of shells could not be manipulated.
If only she had been a shell.
Two lives. Two deaths.
She had sealed her fate.
It was poetic, in a way. As if she were truly in control of her story for once. No - not poetic. Ironic. Ironic, that she'd been manipulated her entire life, and now, the one thing she had control over was her death.
Jannali appreciated the irony. It offered her a twisted source of comfort.
She was strangely calm in the hours preceding her death. Onlookers later recalled that she had laughed for the first time in years. They remembered how she seemed strangely free.
Looking back, people would use the word "fey" to describe her.
It was as if the Ghost Queen had finally come alive.
Jannali had few regrets.
She regretted not knowing her daughters. If she had spent time with them, had tried harder, it could have been different.
She did not want to leave them.
The older one would be queen; Jannali did not trust her.
The younger one was scheming, manipulative; Jannali did not trust her either.
She wished she had struggled harder.
She regretted her weakness. It had been her weakness that started it all.
She could not control the weakness, but she should have hidden it better.
She regretted not being the one to kill Marrok. She would have reveled in it. Gloried in giving him exactly what he deserved.
But she knew. She could not live after him.
They must die together.
Jannali had few regrets, yet dying was not one of them.
She regretted that no one would know her story afterwards. No one would know the story of the Ghost Queen. She would exist in people's memories as she had existed in reality: a shadow, a reminder of a dark time.
She was, of course, right.
No one missed the Ghost Queen.
No one would know her story.
Yet she had won in the end.
The Ghost Queen died triumphant.