***
{Outside The Projection}
Of course, all eyes slid toward Layla now.
The story had shifted to her; the first threads of his truth's end were beginning to weave themselves into being as the same light caught her face here and now, more than two hundred years later.
Though instead of it further revealing her beauty as it once did, the light only highlighted her tragedy.
Once, she had been dressed in silks the color of desert twilight, hair loose and shining, but now, here in the same hall, before the very place she wed, she wore the somber black of mourning, feeling like mountains on her shoulders.
It was a time when she stood before the Golden Throne as a potential wife, essentially a stranger, and now, she stood before it once more, just as estranged as before, a mirror revealing the essence of their relationship.
