The King's Wife |Kylo Ren x Reader|

XXI-To Felucia

The carriage wheels clatter along the dirt path that winds through Felucia's intriguing landscape. It is a cacophony of rattling wood, dirt and rocks spraying up beneath the carriage's weight, and the rhythmic clomping of horseshoes.

Despite being snug against the coastline, the air is warm here. It infiltrates every crevice of the coach and forces you to shed the layers you had piled on when you were still on the ship. Suddenly, you are quite grateful that Eda had packed an assortment of handheld fans for you to use. Just so, you are equally grateful for the lightness of the dresses she had selected--the very ones you'd battled against, thinking it would be bitterly cold on the coast--and thinner underclothes that you'd never dream of wearing back in Exegol.

Today's dress is seafoam blue for House Felucia's official colors, with no sleeves and a sheer cape that hangs from your shoulders and brushes over the floor when you walk. It is beaded with crystals and pearls that dash and dive over the fabric. The fan that sits in your lap is equally as intricate, with the same seafoam color and pearls that climb up the head and the ivory guard.

Bothered by the heat that seeps through the light layers, you fiddle with the fan, considering whether or not to open it and bother Kylo with the incessant rustling of it.

"We're close to the sand-lands." His deep voice pulls you from your thoughts. He nods at your fan. "Go on."

Grateful, you splay it open to reveal the blue-green leaf detailed with lace and its ivory ribs. It rustles and thumps as you fan cool air onto your face. It is cold during the summers in Naboo. Not quite cold enough to bring snow, but the storms the far North brings down are bitter enough for frost and icy mud.

"I shouldn't have fought so hard on these dresses," you admit as you flutter your fan from below your breast.

"Summer in Felucia can be quite unbearable," he muses, though if he is hot beneath those dark layers of his, he does not show it.

You shake your head, glancing out of the window. "The ocean is just over those cliffs. We can feel the coastal breeze from the castle, but there's hardly any wind here. It's so still."

"I take it you're not fond of the heat?"

"I'm not used to it," you correct him. "Even our summers have rain."

Kylo hums. "Then you will be prepared for what winter will bring to Exegol."

It sounds almost ominous, the way he says it. As if winter will bring some horrible storms that you have never experienced before. As if it will bring monsters that creep behind snow banks and slip through the blizzards.

"I assume it has never snowed here." You raise your brows.

"Only once. It was recorded hundreds of years ago before my family sat on the throne."

That must have been at least two or three hundred years ago. Kylo Ren's family had possessed the seat of Exegol when the capital was still anew. Back when the palace was only halfway built and the city was thrice as large. You would have liked to see it at its height beneath Kylo's great-grandfather.

Even before there was Anakin the Conqueror, there was Palpatine the Cruel. The things he'd done; the people he had killed, the tortures he enacted, the cities he burnt, the civilizations he had wiped out. Exegol was ruled by an ancient, peaceful family before King Sheev Palpatine crossed the sea and seized the city from him. He destroyed every last member of the ruling family--every relative, every bastard they had sired--and brought them all for slaughter in the city square.