The Fourth Princess of Ensolia is torn from her bed as the third sun rises from the horizon. Awful, shadowy figures; her screams of help ignored by the passing faces of servants she could not recognize. Begging as she’s thrown onto the cold, tiled floor of the washroom, her bed clothes stripped from her by two merciless pairs of hands. A naked body doused in a bucket of stagnant water; dried off by a rough, half damp towel.
Forcibly told to dress, barked orders from the uniformed woman as she slips into cold, barely opaque silken undershirts.
She wishes she wasn’t alive, she wishes that this humiliation would stop.
Sophia Elise cries, sobbing as she holds onto what was left of herself; of that lost innocence fluttering away with each passing second in this chamber.
What had these people turned her into?
“Oh Goddess, stop being so dramatic.” Beatrice rolls her eyes. “No way would you have gotten out of bed on time without us.”
She brushes her sister’s gorgeous blonde hair, several attendants joining her on this arduous task of taking out the various knots and split ends that had somehow developed over the past four days. “Your face is gonna get puffy if you actually cry!”
“I’m not crying…” Sophia gulps out, her sense of smell still getting used to the results of her rose water bath.
Alice, on the floor of this sitting room, lies with her sundress flayed out and a face buried in a thick leather bound book titled simply Introductions to Social Conversing, Beyond the Ensolian Belt. Unread since its purchase eons ago as part of the Royal Library Collection, it was subsequently pulled for this most arduous task and now was instead mostly unread.
“I don’t think I get this…” The youngest begins as she tries to decipher what was meant to be a fully academic article of reading. “Why is Tianci so different than us? Aren’t they only a couple hours away on an aerostatic?”
Naomi, currently musing over a small diagram of foreign greetings at the corner of the room, doesn’t even look up to answer Alice. “The Wailing Fang mountain range acts as a natural barrier to exchange. With the average peak height being around thirty thousand feet, contact between the Imperium and the Dominion has historically been reduced to naval exchanges through the Stygian Sea and Adranic Ocean.”
She uses the polite term for the two nations’ two naval wars fought early in the Ceramic Era, trying not to make offense with their newfound sibling-country at their southern border.
“Only during the Second and Third Stygian War has the Imperium really allied itself with Tianci. Common enemies with the Eastern Axial powers; across the Sea for us, and for them, a direct border. The Dominion took the brunt of the heavy fighting on their soil while our navy took them by the Harrowing Isles.”
Always the military analysis with her. Sophia thinks.
“It was, of course, our Aerostatics that ended that.” Naomi pauses as she gives credit to its owner. “But in the end, without the sacrifice and honor of the Dominion’s Rifle Guard Regiments that war would’ve been much bloodier and victory not as… decisive.”
From outside the sitting room through an ajar door Natan chimes in, his physical presence forbidden for propriety’s sake in this room of sisters and women. “And they paid the price for it.”
A nation still wounded, recovering; attacked again not from the enemies of the state but the natural order of the universe. One bout of bad weather, one fungal infection, and simple circumstance brought an entire nation of a hundred million souls into the mud and death.
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Beatrice untangles a knot in her sisters’ hair with an ivory comb, calmly planning out topics of conversation from this partially developing history lesson. “Yes Sophia, remember: the good Prince lived through the Great Starving. So make sure to try and avoid that topic.”
Natan mercilessly corrects her. “Avoid food all together, some say that they’re still at the tail end of the famine.”
“Yes, as we discussed prior.” Beatrice recounts, trying to ignore the grim tone their brother was taking. “Now, what topics are ok to discuss Sophia?”
Come on, you must’ve got something from the last five days of this intensive study.
Like some sort of War Council the siblings had one of the palace library’s reading rooms reconverted into a lecture chamber. Tables arranged in a half-circle, one sibling for each quintant; facing just one single chair.
With imperial summons (which their mother begrudgingly signed with much pleading in the midst of court), the five heirs of the Imperium had forcibly brought in experts of the Tianci Dominion into the room like war criminals to a tribunal.
A professor of literature and culture from the Imperial University was ruthlessly grilled on his understanding of Tiancian politics, from the structural biases of its noble houses (they didn’t, in fact, have noble houses as they had here in the Ensolian belt which required quite some explaining to unravel), all the way down to the mannerist taboos of behaviors within the court.
A mildly famous Tiancin singer, who just happened to be hosting concerts here in the Capital in the midst of her tour of the entire Stygian Region, answered questions with a quite thoughtful flair. Detailing her own personal affairs (in both senses of the word) with the misunderstanding that any possible lie would be punished by a swift beheading by an imperacutta legionnaire's power sword. So much detail that even Naomi and Beatrice felt slightly bad.
And, in-between almost a dozen others from simple parents to even an immigrant imperial citizen running a herbal medicine shop, they also happened to invite the Palace’s sole Tiancin chef. Who, in her usual elderly kindness, brought almond cookies for all the siblings while detailing her escape from the Dominion as a refugee during the Second Stygian War (this was the nicest session, more of a tea party than an interrogation).
In the end the five siblings had a generally good idea on what the Dominion was; its governance, its culture, its food, its people.
But this game wasn’t theirs to play, and to be more specific it was Prince Zai’s heart that needed to be measured and earned in these next few months. From newspaper clippings to even Natan’s own fleeting encounter; they could only barely get a sampling of that young man’s own life. From his time as a youth during the Third Stygian War, to growing up in the midst of the Great Staving, the loss of his mother at his birth; it seemed that his public persona yielded more dark secrets than truth.
No one can truly know another’s heart, afterall.
“All done!” Beatrice announces alongside a series of long exhausted sighs from the attending maids.
Princess Sophia Elise’s dress for this occasion was personally prepared by Beatrice in the current summer fashions of the Ensolian belt (it was literally Beatrice’s, the 4th Princess didn’t exactly have a princess’ wardrobe). No fancy clothing made to represent imperial policies or outrageous suspicions here (like how Sophia’s ceramic coming-of-age dress was in theory bulletproof); in the Palace propper the Elise family ruled in perfect presence without need for following the trends of high fashion.
A simple sundress made from a soft, light-gray wool sheared from sheep fed in the fatty grasslands of the eastern coastal provinces; interlaced with small embroideries of silver thread producing blooming flowers and the longing shapes of rolling hills. The wide sash of silvery-blue satin ties together at the back, cinching her already dastardly thin waist (Beatrice’s comment and thought on the matter) while adding a gentle sheen that elevated its status to something more befitting an Imperial heir.
From the supportive shoulders down to the cutoff on her ankles, the dress in its fully complete form was something that toted the lines between the old peasantry and a new nobility; perfect for a casual yet unspeakably important gathering such as this.
Not a gathering. This, by all definitions, was a date: a first encounter. Impressions had to be made, understandings made clear.
Oh Goddess please let this go well.
“Give it a twirl!” Beatrice stands back.
The dresses’ embedded silver threads catch the light streaming in from the distant window in an appreciable glow, drawing eyes towards its owner like a shooting star across the galactic gap.
Naomi gently golf claps, while Alice leaps up with joy. The youngster’s observation uncensored, a thought that they all shared at once. “Wow Sophia, you actually look like a real princess for once!”