Auspice
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
This takes place in between the events of the War of Darkess (FE11) and War of Heroes (FE12). Slight spoilers for the latter.
It took three days of preparations to make Nyna ready for her marriage. No detail mandated by tradition was spared or altered for this, the most elaborate ceremony since the joining of Cartas to Artemis a century before. She went into seclusion with her women, received the ritual bath and purification. She was undressed, poked and prodded to ascertain that she came to her bridegroom a virgin intact, that she carried no man's child. And once she had been reduced to nothing more than an empty vessel, a shell to be filled by others' expectations, she was assembled again, piece by piece.
Her ladies fitted her with the girdle that, once fastened, only her husband might remove. They draped her with layers of white silk and cords of gold. They anointed her head with myrrh and bound her hair with satin ribbons the hue of a peacock's breast. Her hands were taken and spread, the nails given a triple coat of lacquer. They tipped back her head and applied carmine to her lips and kohl to her eyelashes. She lay through it, weighed down by all finery, by the ornaments that dangled from her belt and her sleeves.
"May I have a mirror?" She felt that if she moved her lips more than a fraction, the mask of white-lead on her face would crack like old plaster.
"Not yet, Princess. We haven't quite finished."
In the old days, the days of decadence before shadows rose in the south, the priests would select peacocks, blue and white both in their most splendid plumage, would paint their beaks and claws with gilt and fit them with bells and jeweled collars, then lay them upon the temple altar as an offering to the gods. And when the blood no longer flowed from their headless necks and their fans of bright feathers adorned the central shrine, the bishops would slit the birds open, place their entrails in bowls of alabaster and look therein for portents of the future.
She closed her eyes when they came at her with small instruments, shaping her brows and plucking stray hairs from above her nose and beneath her chin. She had no more will in that moment than did a child being swaddled at birth or a corpse being wrapped for burial.
"Have a look at yourself, Princess."
It was Linde's voice that asked Nyna to open her eyes. The vision in the mirror Linde held up for her was alarmingly normal. Nyna recognized herself beneath the paint and the jewels and the silk brocade, and after three days of being Nyna the Bride, she expected not to know herself in the least. And yet, there she was, nothing more than Princess Nyna done up for another grand occasion.
She looked down at her lacquered nails, at the weight in gold and lapis on her fingers, while her attendants laced heeled shoes upon her feet. She would not be able to rise or walk unaided, but that was after all the intent. She would be escorted gently to the high altar and there delivered into the hands of her bridegroom.
If the bishops were to lay her open and hold her innards to the light, what truths, what omens, would they see?
"Linde? Would you have them leave me alone for a moment? I just want to think."
Linde smiled and brushed her fingertips against the back of Nyna's hand, then rose to send the attendants scurrying from the room... if only for the space of a few breaths. There was nothing unusual in a bride- one with no mother to comfort her, no father to lead her to the temple- wishing to collect herself before the veil was draped across her eyes.
But Nyna, in the moment given to her, did not think of her parents, of how her hair was pulled back too tightly, or of how the unfamiliar shoes already pained her feet. She thought of Princess Artemis and that last grand wedding, of how Artemis went from the nuptial day to the tomb in less than a year, a brief circle broken by the cries of her newborn son.
When she'd looked into the mirror, she'd expected to see Artemis staring back at her. Seeing nothing more than Nyna in the silvered glass somehow did not quiet the flutters in her heart, the sense that some doom was already inscribed upon her flesh beneath the white silk and gold embroidery.
"Call them back in, Linde. I'm ready."
Nyna closed her eyes.
The End