( act one ⎯ queen of peace ) the phantom menace ✶ 32 BBY ✶ 5495 Era IV
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The silence between the marble walls and pillars of the great hall was almost suffocating. She could almost feel her mother's imaginary gaze on her, materializing in rainbow rays of sunlight reflecting on each of the her features (piercing her soul, judging her fear, looking down on her uncertainty) as she looked up towards the Late Queen's stained glass portrait on the large window between her grandmother's and the blank space where, some day, hers would be.
The tail of her long violet dress (classically adorned by the yshtari emblem: A sun with ten points ⏤ one for each Celestial God ⏤ laced by golden threads) slid over the floor behind her. The jewelry, the several layers of fabric and the complicated hairstyle in which her long caramel hair had been pinned, all felt unusually heavy; But burdensome above all was the silver and pearl tiara that sat atop her head, neatly tied between the strands of hair that formed her many braids.
Solaria gave in to the weight and let her head fall down, surrendering to her feelings of failure and defeat: Agreeing with the crystalline and colorful image of her late mother and giving reason to the Maoran.
Ever since the dawn of Era One, Kas Attara had been a pillar for maintaining the greatness of the Thirteen Kingdoms ⏤ providing the guidance their homeworld could never provide anymore ⏤ but it hadn't been until Atheia I inherited the crown that she assured all allied lands the freedom to wander freely from Daltarion to Kryll and anywhere beyond. She had managed to shatter the walls of the invisible barriers that the founders had molded around the Eight Olympian Systems to avoid outsiders from stepping on their holy lands for millennia; There was none who dared confront them on the outside, but — seeing as they were on the verge of yet another civil war, barely ten years after the end of the last one — their sibling planets did not seem to share that same sentiment.
For Zeisan, watching her sister staring at the window as the invasion began ⏤ so sad, so serious ⏤ was an indicator of the true graveness of the situation they had at hand. Evidently greater than what Arwen had affirmed it was.
(The qualities that had always distinguished Solaria from among her five siblings were her restless joy and lively high-spirit ⏤ even as a girl, she had been known to be the most beautiful out of the Queen's five daughters. Dukes and Counts would put their sons to battle for her hand in a competition she was nescient to; Lords would feed her vanity with gifts, dancing attendance on her all her life ⏤ as did knights and commoners, Princes and Kings all throughout the galaxy.
She was always the center of attention, the soul of the party, the spotlight's favorite star, but in that very moment, a scared girl who could no longer rely on her mother for wisdom and comfort was everything that Zeisan could see on the young, seventh Queen Solaria of House Selaehra as she silently admired the scene from the foot of the steps behind the base and shaft of one of the Great Hall's pale-pink pillars while debating the appropriate moment to come out of her unsubtle hiding spot.)
