After the whole fiasco that had reigned in the church, the cardinal had called for a gathering.
Athanasia and Claude holding the court as they begin, and they adjourn with Jennette tossed in front of them, trussed like a pig being led out to be slaughtered after it's been fattened up.
She wouldn't be able to survive swimming against a current as thick with evidence as this. Even an original protagonist would find themselves in a stiff bind if they were caught like this with nowhere to hide or to run to.
Athanasia's hair flowed down her back, small opals glinted in her curls. Her ears adorned with luminous diamonds connected to dangling opals. Her tiara sat atop her head, golden spikes with large four-pointed diamonds in their centers.
Her makeup was lightly applied, but the brushes of silver glitter upon her eyelids enhance her natural beauty even further, her blonde lashes long and thick, and the faintest of red gloss shone on her lips.
She sits upon her throne as if it were a cloud instead of gold, and many couldn't help but look.
Her dress with a detached golden collar that interlaced with the bodice, a golden star with delicate designs of gold veins.
It all created an illusion that she was unfathomably unreachable, her standard of beauty pierced the clouds and reached the heavens- but yes, she was truly unreachable to them.
For she was not yet crowned, but anyone gazing upon such a wonder would no doubt believe she was already Empress Regnant.
In front of the royal court, people are called to testify. Some are too scared to even breathe the same air as her, even knowing there was no evidence of contagion between people and black magic.
The entire thing had left Jennette temporarily numb to everything, she couldn't feel the envy nor the despair within her, the jeering fading into the background as white noise to her ears.
She wasn't the emperor's daughter.
To be precise, she was his niece, his brother's daughter. She wasn't Athanasia's half sister, and she had less claim to the throne than before, not that she ever had much in the first place. It all made sense now.
How they avoided her bit by bit, then outwardly. How she was always the butt of the joke with the maids. How she had felt that pull to the portrait of Anastasius that time in the gallery, chalking it up to mere curiosity about the tyrant.
And black magic?
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Chimera?
The terms were all insane- a fantasy, made up- how could she, a living breathing human be something like that?
Something only talked about in academy lectures, and written down in magic textbooks that were hundreds of years old?
She didn't want to believe it, even as her vision narrowed, her head heavy from extra weight she was still unused to. That time in the church, she was called it.
