The beauty queen

Prologue: The Crown & The Cage
The spotlight was a physical weight, warm and blinding, as the crown settled onto Ella's raven-dark hair. The roar of the Everstar City Grand Ballroom faded to a muffled hum beneath the frantic drumming of her own heart. *Beauty Queen of Everstar*. The title tasted like spun sugar and ashes. It meant escape from the cramped, damp apartment she shared with her ailing mother. It meant security. It meant the adoring gaze of Dr. Aris Thorne, heir to the Thorne Medical Dynasty, watching her from the front row with eyes like polished obsidian, filled with a possessive awe that had thrilled her... until tonight.

For as the diamond crown touched her brow, a different kind of light flared - unseen by the cameras or the cheering crowd. The towering glass skyscrapers visible through the ballroom's panoramic windows *pulsed*. Not with reflected city lights, but with an inner, ephemeral glow, like captured moonlight swirling within steel and chrome. Ella gasped, a sound lost in the applause. *She saw them.* The veins of Everstar's hidden magic.