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When she was a little girl, princess by blood and romantic by heart, she imagined herself seated on a throne coated in lush velvets or smooth silks, air thick with fragrant smoke. Birds would titter from their richly decorated perches, flowers would paint the hallway she’d use to hold audience in a dazzling spectacle of colours, and everything would be alive.
On her left she’d imagined sharply curved horns and shoulders squared with tension, the fidgety presence of Swiftfin a constant by her side as an advisor or an overseer.
At her right she’d dreamed the warm, dry laughter of her Partisan, her champion among men. He’d stand at her side agelessly, a steadfast voice talking her through endless days with quick japes and clever observations, and the young, hopeful queen she only ever became in fantasies long past would lean over the armrest of her throne and hang on his every word.
As an adult, a queen by right and worn to the bone, she sits on a throne of white marble. Her castle sprawls around her in a deceptively sturdy lacework of mother-of-pearl, windows and mirrors, bright and light and dishonest the way only a royal court can be. It has to be that way, she knows, to keep burdens away from those who need not bear them.
At her left, eerily still unless asked for, stands a young blueblood. She does not know his name, although she is sure he would tell her if she asked, but that is quite alright. Another face will take his place, quiet and white and invisible against the wall by the time the next day rolls around.
Swiftfin is beside her in spirit he says, but it is hard to imagine so when she knows he is somewhere in that tall, stark tower of his, guiding the children under his care into adulthood.
Sometimes she wishes she was young and selfish enough to doubt him still and pull him away from his work to stand at her side, but he is the Chaperon now, too busy to remember to nervously bite his fingernails and twirl his rings. He is solid, dependable, mature. His bones are no longer too long for his limbs, his eyes no longer wide and open and easy to read and his skin grafted with lines where hers is still young and smooth.
He is distant, cold and mortal, and one day he will be gone and she’ll hardly notice, because he has already closed his heart to her long ago.
On her right stands a ghost.
She’d been so young when she first met her Partisan, cheeks still chubby with youth and eyes still bright with dreams. Her hands hadn’t yet born the wear of building those dreams into a reality her subjects could live in then, as she’d clasped them with his and promised him the world.
But even though she was the one to promise, it was him who had delivered the world at her feet, stone by bloodied stone.
She still remembers his warmth, arms wrapped tight around her as she whispered dreams and promises into his ears, trying to chase war and bloodshed from feverish nightmares he couldn’t quite hide from her. She remembers stolen moments in between battle plans and massacres, dreams of sharing a world wherein she’d twine their fingers together without fearing the future.
She remembers the soft smile he gave her as he shakily pushed the oversized and dented crown on her forehead, metal still warm from her predecessor’s skin.
“You’ll do well,” he’d said, uneven, unsightly teeth smeared bright ruby. “You have to do well.”
“I will,” she’d promised in between heaving sobs. “I will,” she’d repeated, over and over, until Swiftfin came to pull her away from his cold, bloody corpse while proudly trying to hide the puffiness of his eyes and the quiver of his lips.
There is a part of her that regrets, even now, not letting the Partisan become the legend he should have been. She closes her eyes and imagines statues, proud and wide and cold, books that reduce a man whose heart had been a searing desert wind, an unstoppable force of nature to letters on a page. She imagines his heartbeat, continuing in song and dance as his body returns to become one with the world she lives in.
Instead he is a ghost beside her throne.
Warlords and martyrs have no place in her history, she knows. Bloodshed and violence and despair are things she wishes no child in her reign to know, and so she takes it and burns it and scatters the ashes in the winds of history.
He was a good man, beautiful and fierce and faithful, and twice she has scattered his ashes in the wind.
Her back aches from the hours she’s sat on her cold, unforgiving throne, but she faithfully listens to the jumbled story of an aging maroon who she loves, because she loves all her people. She listens and she plucks the woman’s burdens like flowers, because her love is large like an ocean, big enough to hold the woes of all her people.
Beside her the ghost snickers and mouths a dry comment she would give up the world and all of the love in her heart to hear.
He hasn’t aged a day and his eyes sparkle with mirth and hope and faith, and she prays that he doesn’t know the sweet lies she spins to her people to hide the blemishes and stains and scars of the world.
She hopes, as she forcibly draws her eyes away from the flickering shape of her ghostly companion to continue listening to the elderly woman, that he doesn’t know her name. That Her Imperial Reticence is not the name he whispers as his silent lips try to draw her attention, but instead something younger, more vibrant, more alive.
Her voice washes through the room as she speaks her reassurances to the elderly woman, soothing and calm and confident and every bit as rehearsed and fake as everything else in her castle.
The woman cries with relief, nearly bends herself in half in her hurry to thank her beautiful and gracious queen for her time and wastes no time in singing praise about her endless compassion and dedication to her duties.
The queen laughs and waves the compliments away, the very picture of delicate grace and demure composure. She lives, after all, to serve her people.
Her ghost, her dear Partisan, makes a joking little bow and whispers hopes and dreams into winds that never reach the ears of the living. She looks at him, a moment of weakness before her next subject enters for an audience.
‘I’ll do well’, she mouths at nothing, and the servants look away tactfully because she is ancient and powerful and flawless, and surely they were only imagining things. ‘I’ll always do well.”
She owes him the world, after all.
He grins at her with warm ruby eyes full of love, and she wonders, in the privacy of her own thoughts, which one of them is truly alive.