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You see her everywhere.
She's in the mirror, when you drag yourself to it every morning. She's in the strands of your hair, so long you spend near 20 minutes combing it. She's in your voice when you mutter uncaring answers to whatever the servants are telling you is on the agenda today. She's in the family portraits, twice over.
You can't escape her, not really.
You never got the chance to come to terms with it, after it happened. She was the heir to the throne, naturally. She was only a few minutes older than you, but it was enough. She would be stuck with the responsibility of running the kingdom, probably saddled with some man she hated, while you got to hide away on the sidelines and help her manage.
That was, of course, before.
You were young, the both of you. Neither of you had particularly understood the weight on her shoulders. The two of you would spend long nights laughing, thinking of absurd terrible traits for her theoretical husband to have. Making up childish policies to put into place - you had thought the 'no bedtime' law was genius. Somewhere, deep inside both of you, neither of you had ever considered that the day would truly come in the first place.
And then, she is gone, and the day comes anyway.
"As the eldest daughter," your father starts, and neither of you point out that you are the only daughter, "It is time you began coming into your responsibilities."
The days get fuzzy, around that time. It's a whirlwind of lessons you were never meant to take, meetings you were never meant to attend, parties and balls you were supposed to hide away reading during. You are 12 years old, but while the village children get to run through the streets and play, you no longer get to be a child at all.
Your eyes, which once shone with the same brightness as hers, dim. Dark circles form underneath them, and the polite smile she always had on her face dims into a frown, then a sneer on yours. Your hair, though - it remains the same. It looks just like hers, and this is your one comfort.
And then, you reach 16, and you meet your first suitor.
"It is such a shame about your sister," the older man says, with no sadness at all. "She was beautiful, always so friendly. She'd have made a great wife."
There is a part of you, of course, that hates this older man for talking that way about your sister. Yet another part of you hears the implicit meaning in his words, and can't help but be even angrier - at yourself.
She was beautiful, he says, and what he means is that you are not.
You do not care for this mans opinion. You do not want anything to do with him, and the next thing you say is just as much. Later, you'll be chastised for not acting as a proper lady should, but you don't care about that either.
No, you don't care for this mans opinion. What you do care about, is that when you next look in the mirror that night, you don't see her.
Instead, you see yourself. You see your tired, angry eyes, the permanent frown on your face. You know that your sister was beautiful, and you know that you are not, not anymore. The long, white, perfect hair that frames your face is the only part of her that truly remains.
You look in the mirror, and you see her in your hair, but you see her nowhere else. You see a portrait of her, vandalized beyond fixing, and you are angry at the vandal; you are angry at yourself.
You do not deserve to wear her hair. She does not deserve this ugly, angry thing wearing her hair.
A pair of scissors gleams on the dresser.
Your choice is without hesitation.