As Athanasia watched in awe at the sunrise, her father's smile seemed to pale for a microsecond before falling down entirely.
It was the usual for him, his normal expressionless face, but had Athanasia looked closer, she would have seen the darkness haunting his gem eyes.
For those gems were not his own.
Athanasia felt his hand caress her neck and she looked up at him, smiling. "What is it?"
He paused, his face awkward at her question- as if it didn't quite belong. Then, he squeezed.
Athanasia choked, her eyes looking at him with terror in her eyes, her magic failing to activate as she scrabbled at his hands, struggling to breathe- being raised into the air with his strength.
"W-why- papa? Why-"
This couldn't be happening- she had planned it all out so well, what had gone wrong? This was wrong- everything was going wrong- why was papa- why was he killing her?
He couldn't be- but he was, and Athanasia felt despair and grief and rage, and her hands dropped from his, and she hung, lifeless, once again, her end had been met in his grasp.
He let her go, her golden hair fluttering around her, as she crumpled onto the ground. He left her there, letting the flowers around her slither towards her, wrapping around her as her grave.
Again, she had been killed by her father. Perhaps it was of some consolation that it was not by the one she knew.
Claude's face seemed to shimmer as he walked back to the palace, he took off the ring on his right hand and tossed it away with a scoff.
His eyes, cold, his hair the same shade of blonde, and yet- it all melted away as Anastasius de Alger Obelia stood at the top of the hill. Not Claude.
Never Claude.
He had managed to escape from the mirror with the help of the black magic that had escaped from its vessel and right before Claude had seen anything coming, he had grabbed him.
Oh, his little brother had fought him off alright- had even killed him once, but not this time.
As Anastasius stabbed Claude over and over, watching his magic fail to reach him, he slid down and held Claude's face in his hands.
Claude's eyes were unfocused, on the brink of death, his breathing shallower still.
Anastasius chuckled. "So, this face is the one I will don?"
Claude's eyes narrowed, and he managed to spit blood onto Anastasius' face.
Anastasius only smirked and wiped it away, leaving a bloody smear. "With your face, dear little brother of mine, I will kill the person dearest to you- and with this face, I will make her suffer a death by your hands."
Claude's face grew pale, life leaving him by the second, and he groaned, his hands scraping at the floor through the puddles of his blood, agonized by the thought- not by his death, but by the pain she would have to go through.
His last thoughts were a bubble, hardly conscious as he left for the realm of the gods, despair and wrath in his heart as he whispered a single name in his pitiful end.
"Athanasia-"
Anastasius de Alger Obelia took the Imperial throne again, and all were unwilling at his hands.
Yet the corrupt took up their swords, aligned themselves to him, and created a world where death and poverty reigned.
A world where the palaces held balls on every full moon, where the empire's vaults were emptied and spent until the peasants had to sell themselves for money, where the tyrant emperor once again gripped the whole of the Obelian empire in an iron fist that would never let it go again.
Until the empire succumbed to the neighboring countries and their alliance until the lasting nobility had taken over the reins, until a silver-haired boy- now a man- wrote down what history had occurred over those decades, and laid down a foundation of what was no longer an empire.
He stands there, at the entrance to the tombs, where no bodies lay. He stands there, alone, and the breeze brings the scent of roses to him.
He stands there in an empire that had fallen, and he weeps for the dead that were no longer living.
For "resurrection" had taken it all away.
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