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Aisha looses the last fuck she has to give at age eight. Eight and three hours, technically. It had been her birthday, and she’d spent it frozen at her parents’ side as she watched her only friend in the whole world and her entire family be forcibly removed from Andros for the sin of befriending her.
A princess does not belong to herself, body, soul, or mind. Her friendship is a commodity. Her attention currency. Aisha is told, her father’s disgust blatant and unhidden and her mother’s anger pressing her lips to a pale slash, that she has proven herself incapable of properly spending herself.
Her parents had been angrier about the dancing, but there had been an audience at the banishment, and even they wouldn’t dare call dancing vulgar in front of Andros’ most sacred and powerful wizards. Androsian wizards used their body as magical foci for rituals - dancing was one of many mediums through which they worked their great weather-spells and the like.
Eight-year-old Aisha is sharper than five-year-old Aisha had ever been - dance is harder to steal from her than a friend, when all she needs is to crawl out of bed in the middle of night and lock herself in her closet with a holo-screen and an internet connection.
Three weeks later she transforms for the first time, when Nereus picks a fight with Tritannus that ends with her younger cousin tumbling into one of the slick trenches on the ocean’s floor, the sort that kill all life near them. Nereus is a dick even then; Tressa and Aisha are left behind when he swims away cackling and preening.
It’d have been cool if Aisha had managed to save her cousin’s life or beat back what has been an unstoppable merfolk killer for longer than Andros has had twin thrones, but Tritannus swims right back out of it, a little unsteady and not at all merfolk anymore.
“I won’t tell if you don’t.” She says, and Tressa clings to both of them while Tritannus gives a shaky, spooked nod.
Aisha has never understood her body as a commodity until that moment, until she realizes what value Andros will place on an heir - two heirs, even if Tritannus is undesirable - with magic. Until she realizes what those hungry stares from Magix representatives will become, those shark-toothed smiles from her father’s bachelor friends.
So she hides her cousin’s odd impossible magic. And she hides her own.
If Andros ever hates her for denying it - she never knows.
And she certainly never cares.
X
Aisha grows used to her skin crawling with the watchful eyes on her, but her keepers - parents, guards, tutors and whatever else - do not watch her as closely when she is with her cousins. She is called dutiful and focused for her love for her family, as if she gives a single shit about her eldest cousin or her aunt or uncle, but she grins and bears the false praise.
So long as she’s not left alone with Tritannus, her minders turn a blind eye to her exploits, and it is the only taste of freedom Aisha gets outside of those sleepless nights spent in a by now too-small closet.
Tritannus has it worse than her; he’s too much of a freak, Nereus says flatly, and while Aisha’s aunt and uncle are not so bold with their words, they are never able to mask their unease or hesitancy around their youngest son, always just too far away to hear when a servant sneers something they shouldn’t or a guard shoves him.
“It’s my magic.” Tritannus says. Magic he’s not supposed to have, magic that acts like nothing Aisha has ever heard of. Between the three of them, they have the royal libraries of both thrones at their total disposal - and the closest Aisha has ever found to what Tritannus can do is witch magic.
She makes the mistake of telling him this. The Andros Royal Families do not approve of those not born into the correct body - they have a great-aunt whose death still lingers in recent memory, still inspires frequent lectures that boil down to either deal or kill yourself - and Tressa has to calm him down. Good news; Tritannus outright refuses to be a witch. Bad news; that puts them back at point zero.
For her part - Aisha neatly manages to avoid ever giving any indication of her magical talent or fairyhood, and no one ever thinks to test her with Tritannus and Tressa managing perfectly-timed distractions or covers. Aisha has no desire to raise her worth.
At fifteen she finds the trail, breadcrumbs and shadows - a trail made of omission rather than fact. Things unsaid, spaces where something should rest. It’s not enough to grasp the full picture, but it is enough to understand that something is not right. And she is not the only one who notices.
It takes months to begin tracking down archived versions of decrees and laws that make no sense without the context of that void, to find the names signing off on these things and tracking those names back to members of the Magix Counsel.
It isn’t her problem, or her cousins - Andros is too removed for that - but it sits heavy in the backs of their minds regardless.
At sixteen, Tressa sits her down and cups her hands in hers.
“If we want to get out of this alive, we will need to kill our parents.” Tressa says. She’s two years younger than Aisha, the baby of the family, and that title has protected her in ways Aisha never has been. Aisha sits through courting dinners and dances, allows men to put their hands on hers and tug her around ballrooms in stiff, ugly facsimiles of that which she loves, sits through eyes on her and her parents bartering her flesh as if she cannot hear them. But Tressa - Tressa is invisible. She manages Tritannus. His moods, his strangeness. She sooths Nereus’ ego, and redirects her father’s coldness, and assuages her mother’s guilt. But neither of them are under any delusions that there will not come a time when it is Tressa being sold instead of Aisha.
“Revolution.” Tritannus says sourly.
“Survival.” Aisha corrects.
X
Survival is enough for her. It’s not enough for Tritannus, or for Tressa.
Tritannus is more noble than the world gives him credit for. He calls himself selfish and violent for wanting to tear the whole damn system down, but Aisha sees the way his fists clench and his fins snap and his teeth bar when a child flinches or a girl lowers her head around him. They have a duty to do better than their parents, he says. To make Andros better.
Tressa has too big a heart. The Andros Royal Families are harming Andros. Have been for generations now. Tressa is a fairy, like Aisha, hidden, like Aisha, but instead of practicing spells for violence and defense, Tressa lingers over her homeworld and drops herself deep into studies of the heart and soul. She has a purpose, she says, and she would not advocate the death of their families if it was not necessary, but she cannot see another way.
Aisha is - none of those things. She wants the crown in the same way she wants to sink her teeth into the throat of the men her parents parade her before; with a desperate hunger and rage so beyond her that it hurts. She wants everything that has been taken from her, everything Andros has denied her, everything she has been told she should not want. She will keep her crown merely to prevent any of the monsters who want to bed her for it from taking it.
She doesn’t want to lead. Doesn’t want to rule. But, oh, how she wants to kill.
X
Her parents are eager to sell her off, but determined to get the best deal, and their waffling protects her for longer than it necessarily should. Aisha is twenty when she is summoned to the throne room and embraced by a man she does not recognize. Nabu is older than her, but only by a few years. Her mother looks at her with a conspiring little smile, pleased to have taken her daughter’s preferences into account.
Aisha’s face is as impassive as ever, too stern to be pleasant despite her mother’s admonishments, as he puts his hands on hers, his arm around her shoulders, her waist, as he pulls a chair out for her and tucks a stray curl behind her ear.
“I’ve been watching you.” The future King of Andros says, as if that is not the most horrifying thing she has ever heard in her life. He tells her about her favorite books, her favorite deserts. About what hobbies he has gleaned she enjoys from his spying.
Her skin is crawling long before she’s ushered aboard a royal ship - today is the solstice. It is often her favorite of the bullshit royal ceremonies she’s forced to attend, if only for the sheer morbidity of the portal.
She’s found records, buried in the back of the royal libraries. The Omega Dimension used to be a proving ground for the magically-talented of Andros, those who sought excellence in combat and battle. She doesn’t know when it was stolen, when the portal was sealed by the Magix Council and the challenge inside turned into a prison, but -
It’s a couple hours poking around a ruin with her cousins while her parents are too distracted by the wizards and their spiritual bullshit to stop her. The most tolerable of the shit she has to do.
It’s - it makes Nabu easier. Not that anything about him, about dealing with him, is easy.
“Tonight.” She says, when she embraces Tressa. Tritannus looks relieved, when she whispers the same into his ear, and Tressa smiles so brilliantly -
Nabu has his arm around her, hand pressed to her hip, when there is a blaze of white starlight.
And everything goes to wonderful, glorious, shit.
X
It isn’t like Aisha is against killing her parents. She’s made her peace with that years ago. It isn’t like she’s against killing her aunt and uncle, although that’s - more uncomfortable.
But it is nice to have that responsibility taken out of her hands.
The man who steps out of that blaze of light flings a scarlet-clad arm out, coat billowing around him, and a spray of sickly grey-purple bolts of jagged magic scythe into the royal procession. Aisha eyes those coming towards them, and very neatly steps behind her apparent betrothed.
He goes down screaming. So do the Kings and Queens of Andros, and Nereus, and most of the guard. A second spray comes with another wave of the man’s hand, and this Aisha combats directly - she steps in front of her cousins and casts.
The intruder’s eyes land on her, and there is nothing in them that she has not seen before in any of the men her parents have considered selling her to. He is, for the moment, safe to ignore.
The cursed rise up in screaming, twitching waves, weapons jerking and slicing indiscriminately as their flesh withers and twists, as fins shred and fingers turn to claws.
Behind her, Tritannus sucks in a sharp breath.
Curses like that - Aisha remembers, from long nights spent pouring over old tomes of magic for his sake - leave lasting damage.
They’ll be able to avoid the bloodshed of a coupe, and the stigma of kin-slaying. Andros has always been ruled by magical folk, and if this curse does not permanently eat at their bodies - it will at their magic.
Valtor, he calls himself.
He’s just given them the keys to the kingdoms.
Aisha thinks she’ll owe him a drink before she carves a smile into his throat, right up until the most deadly coven of witches since the Ancestral Coven itself step out of that light behind him, and the light dies.
A coven - an unconfirmed coven - whose sentencing is as wrapped in void as everything Aisha has been hunting for years now.
Aisha is a sharp woman. She is cold and rage, the worst of Andros, the darkest depths.
And at the sight of those three witches -
She thinks she catches a glimpse of the sunlight through those dangerous waters.