WMMAP: нєανєη'ѕ ¢нιℓ∂

1: ʜᴇʀ ʙᴇɢɪɴɴɪɴɢꜱ

She lived as if she were dead.

The unloved princess. The forgotten princess. The princess with the rightful immortal name to take the throne, but with no love as her backing- she was a sitting duck for the people who pushed for another child. One they all loved. The one that wasn't her.

She lived as if she were dead.

Until she really died.

Athanasia watches the crowd as they jostled against each other to gain a better view of her beheading, un-wanting to close her eyes until the very last moment alive, and her hands shake almost imperceptibly in the wooden shackles.

Small sparks of blue flicker at her fingertips before they die away with the rain that soaked her to the bone.

What was the point of trying to escape from these shackles that her own father had laid down upon her with such an order? She can still hear his cold voice as she tried to plead her innocence, how she had begged for mercy, how it wasn't her.

"Wretch-! I don't care if it wasn't you, in my eyes, you're nothing worth my time." 

He glared down at her with the blue gem eyes that were the same as hers and Jennette's, but only Jennette's would be looked upon with any favor.

He looked at her with eyes that told her she was nothing, she was but a mere waste of air for him in his palace.

The man who had gotten rid of his elder brother, and was worshipped by the people he ruled over? How they didn't know that the man that had replaced the tyrant was one himself?

Her lips parted, body shaking with a devastation that failed to make her stop feeling. "Please, father-" she looks up at him pleadingly, unconscious tears falling from her eyes as she trembles with a fear that could not stay hidden.

He speaks one last time as she tries to speak up. His cold words stab into her, piercing through her thin skin- for she could never bring herself to get the thick skin high society needed to survive. 

"Die already."

She couldn't even cry as she blankly stared at his back, his uniform the same shade as her grief, and she didn't feel the pain of her knees scraping against the floor as she's dragged up and to the dungeons by the guards.

A life that was filled with pain, and suffering from the moment she was born. Because of her- her mother had died, and so had any love within her father.

For he had loved Diana of Siodonna, and not the child she had chosen to give birth to and died for. In time he forgot about her existence, choosing to give his all towards Jennette.

Jennette who had once been just a foster of the Alpheus family, until she had unveiled her eyes at Athanasia's debutante.

When Athanasia breathes her last, she thinks, surely, this would be the end of it all. But it wasn't.

Even before she opens her eyes, she can feel the sheets around her, the way the air was almost damp with fog, and she feels her chest move up and down as she tries to understand what had happened.

She finally opens her eyes to the all too familiar Ruby Palace, the ceiling of her bedroom, and her eyes wander around, testing if it was just a dream. But then she remembers. She had been beheaded- this couldn't be a dream.

She jolts from her bed and her feet fall onto the threadbare carpet as she stumbles over to the mirror, moving her hair aside to get a clearer view. It was her. Athanasia. But- younger.

She breathes shallowly, as if wanting the air to not fill her lungs with it, and she coughs as the dust from the curtains blows into the room. That's how Lilian finds her a few hours later.