And it all happened so quickly.

Sophia Elise’s own memory mashed through time like meat cuttings through a sausage maker, her head still left spinning even as she lies in her bed; trying to sleep through years worth of events crumpled into just a single week.

Well, a week plus one day if one wanted to be as exacting as possible.

The Imperium were masters at the craft; an entire stage play of love, sacrifice, and duty crafted in a single sleepless night by a crack team of the greatest in the Royal News Corps assembled by Beatrice and Alice and presented to the public like a measured drug to ill patients. A population fed the reeling announcement of an attempt on their consort’s life, from just one news release at five o’clock in the morning to filling the airwaves of nearly every radio broadcast at seven.

From Capital to the eastern coastal ranges of the Stygian Sea, even the great Metropolises of the Reichlands and the Border Provinces of the north; the Imperium convulsed in a blood rage.

Streets filled with cries and protests; from people once reeling from the atrocities of the Third Stygian War came the burning hot fire of vengeance, for a war of humiliation upon those who would harm them.

To them: Arden Marchand Elise, King-Consort of the Ensolian Imperium, had become more than just some mysterious body that sat next to their Empress. The Royal Family and their staff had, with great measure and precision, balanced the public images of rulers to the people; with Arden himself spearheading the measure. In the three decades since his ascension through his marriage with Empress Annia, he had played not the courts like his consort predecessors, but the people of the Imperium.

Radios, now mass manufactured across the Ensolian Belt and sold cheaply in corner stores, were found universally throughout taverns, public institutions, and inside the homes of even the poorest citizens. And through the grainy speakers of a cheap home radio, Arden crossed the once forbidden thresholds and into the common households of the Ensolian Imperium.

On the fifth day of each week at five o’clock sharp, citizens across the nation would tune into his one broadcasting hour. And for one hundred minutes each week; King-Consort Arden would play host to an uncountable diversity of the imperium and beyond.

They listened intently as he spoke with a humble Reichland Farmer, exchanging deploration at the inconsistencies in crop regulation; they listened with horror as he took a captured Eastern Axial Admiral onto the radio waves, and spoke about the inhumanity of war on both sides; and they listened with fascination as he spoke with his own wife, taking the opportunity to peer behind the Silver Veil and see how their nation was truly governed between the crown, local provincial courts, and national parliaments.

He was, as cultivated by him personally, the gentle mercy behind the cold Silver Throne.

And so, when they heard of how the (accused) Amorain Republic snuck ten pounds of explosives onto the Prophecy of Deliverance, it was as if their own patriarch had been struck low.

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He and his wondrous charisma and kindness that had brought the warm truth of the Imperium into the once cold, hollow rooms of the citizenry attacked by another? Unprovoked? Speculation whirled amongst the people: was he dead? Was he still alive? Wounded perhaps? If he was alive, then what was the empire withholding? It only could mean one thing…

Measured heads awaited, while others were already calling for an indiscriminate incendiary bombing of Kochi; a tension within the nation growing uncontrolled like a forest fire before Beatrice and Alice’s masterful stroke of propagandistic flair brought the entire imperium down.

In these desperate times, something better prevailed. A thing more beautiful than the ugliness of war on the horizon; something that each human held a locus of within themselves no matter how alien.

Their Fourth Princess, had, in the midst of her coming of age, discovered him.

A set piece painted of the royal gardens beneath the soft blue glow of their parent world, how when she retreated from the exhausting torrent of lustful suitors and playboys she met him. A young Prince of her age, who instead of seeking the pleasures of power and flesh went to observe the blooming lavenders, dahlias, and carnations of the gardens just outside the Grand Ballroom.

How that small conversation spoken in secrecy, witnessed only by the stars and the parent world, was a dropped match to a powder keg.

Sophia could see Beatrice’s own flair in the stories; speaking of some incredulous, entirely fabricated romance between two fictional lovers. Long, flowery words described long spiraling meetings in the secret places of the palace, of hopes and dreams and promises exchanged in the forbidden recesses of the soul; generalized to not be under scrutiny but powerful enough to tug at the hearts of even the most jaded of romantics.

How, when news broke of the most awful and the fires of war were on the horizon, Princess Sophia Elise the Eighth and Prince Zai Tianci made desperate pleas to their Empress and Lord. That before Princess Sophia would need to attach herself to her Fourth Legion (the implication being that somehow she was going to be on active combat duties like Naomi; some insane fiction that was), they could share a final fragment of happiness: a recognition before the Goddess and the gods of their lands.

And, in the most merciful of their Empresses’ cold commands, she blessed this lover’s union made beneath the light of the Goddess.

So even if fate denied their love in this life, it could still flourish in the next.

It was a masterful play of propaganda, worked through with the brush of hindsight and retroactivity. Sophia, while reading the entire press release in her room, almost caught herself abhorred at the idea of herself somehow dying in battle; leaving a grieving lover to inevitably waste away in a world without her.

It really was an incredible, yet believable fiction.

So when the officiated wedding announcement came from the Silver Throne, it was marred with the simplicity and dark foreboding of a war-time announcement. No roses were to be sent to the palace, no parades or street festivals for this union between two brother-nations.

In lieu of a royal wedding fire fed with roses, which many would ignite their own torches upon and carry with them the fire to their own weddings; the Crown asked for the purchase of immature war bonds and donations. Embedded, at least partially, was the implication that each coin spent here could somehow grow the chances of a reunification at the end of this embroiling conflict. That somehow each individual, in a united monetary goal, would be able to tip the balance not only of a war, but of a lover’s fate.

That it could be your gold penny that adds but a single millimeter of armor between the Princess and a bloody death by some random scrap of shrapnel penetrating the aerostatic’s command bridge; so spend that coin wisely.

She was certain Naomi penned that last part in.