**Prateria—Mattia Turzo**
"Not a war… but a reckoning."
She stood up from him and stepped closer to the piece, drawn without willing her limbs to move.
Her painted self was not sitting idly, she was leaning into something unseen, chin lifted, lips parted. Her hair caught the light like molten dusk, and her lashes framed eyes that looked as though they could set entire courts aflame with a single glance.
She was not a victim. Not a monarch-in-training.
She looked like something far dangerous. Like something plucked out from the flames of ruins, and then dusted back to resemble something mortal when it in fact was not.
Then she remembered his words; t he same thing I saw the night you took my hands amidst the flames that burned your world down."
Was this… what he saw?
Something inside her unraveled.
This was not art.
This was possession written in oil.
He wasn't painting her likeness.
He was painting the version of her that belongs only to him.
