Being born a royal heiress to a villainous country meant my parents didn't have that much time to worry about me, and falling out of their favor could mean a quick death at the hands of a chaotic nation.

From a young age, I didn't expose any parts of me that could possibly make them dislike me. I quickly stifled the naïve innocence of childhood that would put the sinful adults around me into unease. I could become just as evil as I was supposed to be. I was the perfect image of my ambitious and clever parents, and I was welcomed wholeheartedly for that. If I made one misstep, I could be shunned by the allies my birth had brought me into the most natural affinities with. I could have died.

I'm not even saying I was innocent to it all. But it was adapt or die. Well... okay, maybe not really die, I'm sure after I secured the empty love and attention of my family there was a certain level of misstep I could have gotten away with. At least in my younger years.

But I think, somewhere along the line...I may have gotten...just a little...

Carried away, maybe?

"AHAHAHAHAHAHA! AHAHAHAHA! KEKEKE KEKE!! AHAHAHAHA!"

"M-my lady!!"

"AHAHAHAHAHA! AHAHA! AHAHAHAHA!"

A five year old girl dressed in an extravagant gown kicked her heel in a final jab against a much more peasantile-looking boy, red marks and scratches across his face, supposedly from the stick she swung threateningly behind him as he crawled submissively away like a kicked puppy. On the ground were the remains of a teacup and a beautiful porcelain doll, its face shattered beyond repair, some of the tea stained against the little girl's dress, though rather than have hunched shoulders and showing any trace of crying, she was standing upright and laughing with a strong and terrifying voice, her eyes ablaze with vengeance.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Basking completely in her own glory, not a shred of remorse passing anywhere inside her mind.

"Someday soon, ohohoho! They will behold my ascension!!!! Witness me! Behold my rising glory! I will riiiise!!!" She laughed, raising her opened palms into the sky, her immature, squeaky voice rising into a wholly overdramatic proclamation of her destined glory. "They will bow!! They will all bow!!"

"M-m-mmm-my l-lady!!!!" The shivering maid called from her place a safe fourteen feet away, much to terrified to retrieve the maniacal toddler as she ran after the fleeing servant boy, whacking him a couple more times with her stick, sometimes missing him altogether as though there was some other part of the stick that only she could see, as though it were a riding crop.

"Antonia!!!" Apparently alerted by the servants that something was going on, the child's parents rushed into the courtyard.

"AHAHHAHA AHAHAHHA" not even the appearance of her parents squandered the laughing child's soliloquy. She turned to them, still posed villainously, and jestured. "You, too, shall one day bow!! They shall all bow to me!" She widened her arms, spinning imposingly and staring connivingly up towards the sky, a mad little doll with red tea stains across her skirt and a terrifyingly unfitting expression upon her fiendishly contorted face.

The grand dutchess tucked her head against her husband and leaned against him as though she was about to fall from weakness. The grand duke held his gloved hand to his chest, holding onto a column for support with the other. In his eyes glittered tears of pride that shimmered as one dropped down his cheek and into his moustache.

Ah, those were the days. Being the daughter of a villainous family wasn't all the child neglect and unreasonable strictness as tragic backstories make it out to be. There were a lot of fun times that made one want to keep being a part of that world, as well. There was a lot of quirky bonding that just doesn't exist in any non-villainous childhood.

Yes, I wasn't wholly evil. Not by nature, at least. But the human mind is a terrifying thing. Before I knew it, I was genuinely numb to the consequences of my actions, and I could turn my emotions off and on at will.

Before I knew it, I, too, committed all sorts of crimes to climb the political ladder. And time slipped by until I'd risen from villainous daughter to a villainous queen.

The most villainous of evil queens to go down in history, of course.