Charlotte's Journal

When my parents died, I tried to fight. I knew I wasn't alone. It didn't matter how many people tried to tell me I invented the fight. How many people insisted no one before me had ever felt uncomfortable in their skin. Had ever felt elation with a new name. I knew I wasn't alone, because I had met Amelia. I knew then, that our childhood dream of marrying and starting a family could never be. Not in Potestia. Not with a king and a god who wanted to wipe us from history. A slave could never marry a noble. A woman could never marry a woman. And the man they would insist I was could never marry the man they would insist she was.

I understood once I grew up. There were mountains in the way of my dream. It was just a childhood crush in any case. But it still weighed on me. It wasn't a dream that should be impossible. Some things are too simple to remain unachievable forever. So I searched. I searched until I found others like me. Slaves. Commoners. Minor nobles. I was the house of Renatus, I had the power to look. And I found them. A few. Men and women who looked in the mirror and knew what they were seeing wasn't right. Even one person who would accept neither label. And we each fought, in our own way.

We all had Erics. Amelias. Deaths and banishments of the ones we love. Accusations of abuse, spit at anyone who cared about us and coming straight from our actual abusers. And we were all determined to stop it. I tried to petition the king, but was never granted an audience. My father would have been seen. But the only person anyone was interested in listening to was Charles Renatus. And I wasn't him. I didn't understand how I could be acknowledged and dismissed at the same time. I would never be a woman in their eyes. I would only fit in the role they had designed for me.

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But at the same time... they did acknowledge me. They did treat me like a woman. Or, the same way they treat women. Contempt. Dismissal. I had to live in the body they demanded or I was challenging the Collector himself. I had to use the name they gave me, wear the clothes they assigned. In the ways that made me loathe myself, I was a man to them. In the ways that made them loathe me, they knew I was a woman. Not to be entertained. Not to be listened to. To be treated as an ornament of their power.

I could not change things. Or... If I wanted to change anything, I needed to give up on myself. I still hadn't hurt enough. So we had to fight. Just to be seen. Just to be heard. Just to exist, every single day. We had to weather interrogations, glares, sneers. Contempt from all directions.

I hired doctors and alchemists to help us. It looked like something could be done. Like there was some way to move closer to bodies that fit our souls. Sadie, a friend and former servant was the first to try. The potion that was supposed to start the change. But... everything fell apart. Just as they were starting to come together. Just as we started to hope. The more public we were the angrier everyone else was. And if we were happy? Well. That only upset them more. Sadie was the first to die.

That was when a silent war broke out. I had a friend named Rose with fire in her blood. Fire, and rage, and grief. She killed Sadie's murderers. And it was too late. Violence and counterviolence. Sadie inspired all of us. But I was the only one who could really fight. One by one our friends died following her plans. And then Rose died. And I was alone again. And no one even knew we had been fighting. No one knew my friends were dead. Because no one cared. And anyone who did cared just enough to make sure it was silent. Forgotten. Everyone was forgotten. Everyone but me, and I would only ever be heard if I used a name that slid off my tongue like bile. When my friends died, I stopped fighting. I'd seen what it would lead to.