The Crown of Spheres

߷ C H A P T E R - O N E ߷

☁︎︎ C H A P T E R O N E ☁︎︎

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The night was clear of clouds for the first time in a couple of weeks.

The air was cold and crisp outside so the warmth of the fire misted the windows. I'd been staring out of them from inside the throne room for some time, my gaze fixed upon the mountains and the distant snow topped peaks behind the palace as the burning logs popped and crackled. Usually, it was only them that were blanketed in such heavy layers of snow, but for the last couple of months, like it always was this time of year, pearlescent white was all I could see on the other side of the glass.

A quiet clearing of throat caught my attention and I glanced down without moving my head, and felt my stomach sink once I heard the rustle of paper and remembered. I'd drifted out and made myself forget what I'd only just heard.

"How many dead?" I asked, my voice just above a whisper as my Maid of Honour and closest friend, Privi, stood beside me below the dais, holding a letter that had just arrived from the front lines. I'd asked her to come find me the moment she found out any new information.

I wasn't so sure that was a good idea now.

"About fifty-thousand," Privi murmured, her dark skin a little pale tonight, the two little horned bumps above her eyebrows only just hidden by her black hair.

There was a lingering silence in the room as I stared ahead now, holding one of the crown's symbolic white orbs with both hands.

The painter murmured that I should turn my head a little to the left, so I did, just as my thoughts rushed together in a blur inside my mind. My stomach twinged with a distant aching pain, whilst my cheeks turned cold and my mind threatened to run away again to protect me.

It had been three months or so since the battle had begun, and little slithers of information about the fighting going on in the far west was all I could obtain from up here. It was one that I was not meant to know about, if my parents had their way, but Prince Calder would've made sure I knew one way or another, whether it was by him telling me himself in one of his... letters, or one of his spies in the palace feeding information to my servants, who would make sure I heard it one way or another.

My usual blank expression twitched, and my lips quivered. I could feel an unwelcome pressure building behind my eyes.

Fifty thousand.

I'd done so well so far to take the emotion out of the information... done so well to not show how it was affecting me so that he wouldn't hear about it, but this was demanding to be felt like a nearing avalanche cascading down the mountain at break neck speed. I kept picturing what fifty-thousand bodies would look like, all... piled up next to one another... And that wasn't even the total death count, that was just in the past few weeks.

He was slaughtering thousands of innocents... for me.

A strange noise broke from my lips as my mind cruelly pictured all the bodies in front of me, piled up and bleeding, completely motionless, all their eyes staring at me... The smell was horrendous. I could hear the flies. There wouldn't be enough space in this vast room for all of them.

"Do my parents know?" I asked as the crown on my head felt particularly heavy now, as did my gown that ballooned up around my tightly corseted waist in a mass of soft white satin. It sparkled in the moonlight leaking in from the tall, arched wall of windows, glistening alongside all the jewels that lay around my neck, wrists and fingers. I could feel a numbness crawling up from my toes.