The silence of the palace wing was absolute, broken only by the whisper of dust motes dancing in the faint sunlight. Lyra, having spent the day exploring the decaying grandeur and overgrown gardens, now lay on her mattress. Her eyes were closed, though sleep was a distant stranger. Her mind, restless and honed by a sharper edge, churned with observations, impressions, and a rising sense of purpose. She was Lyra—a noble child of a forgotten house—but the soul within her remained Elara, the discarded bastard of another world.
The twin moons ascended beyond the crooked window frame, casting ghostly beams across her floor. As the room cooled, a different kind of darkness rose around her. Not one of dreams or rest, but memory—cold, sterile, and merciless.
She was no longer in her borrowed body. In the quiet drift of sleep, her spirit hovered above a hospital bed bathed in artificial light. Machines hummed and beeped. The scent of antiseptic, latex, and dying flowers clung to every surface. There, beneath sterile white sheets, lay her former self: Elara. Pale. Motionless. A gauze bandage crowned her temple. Tubes curled from her arms, her chest lifting and falling with the mechanical rhythm of a ventilator. She was in a coma.
The door creaked, and in stepped three figures: Julian, Thomas, and Clara. Her siblings. Impeccably dressed, their expressions strained with boredom more than grief.
"Still no change?" Julian asked, voice low, pulling at his cuffs.
"Several days now," Thomas replied, checking his watch with a sigh. "It's exhausting. The reporters won't stop calling."
Julian scoffed. "As if it wasn't humiliating enough. Shot in a dive bar. What was she even doing there?"
The door whispered shut again as Clara entered. She looked perfect—flawless makeup, couture dress, every detail calculated. Her eyes, sharp as glass, shimmered with manufactured sorrow. "Poor, dear sister," she said, placing a hand delicately on her chest. "All that effort to prove herself..."
She leaned over the bed, her lips curling. "And now look at you. Just another embarrassment. Father barely acknowledged your name, and now you can't even speak it."
Thomas chuckled humorlessly. "Mother would've called this poetic."
Julian added, "He'll probably pull the plug by next week. It'd be more merciful than this circus."
Elara's soul trembled, forced to watch. Their cruelty was not new, but now it was unfiltered, raw, spoken without the pretense of civility. They had never loved her. She had always been a stain—a living reminder of scandal, of shame, of something they could not control.
And now, to them, she was a silent corpse awaiting disposal.
Something inside her shifted. A splinter of defiance broke through the sorrow. It was not loud, not yet—but it pulsed. A beginning. A crack in the wall of her pain.
The memory cracked.
Lyra gasped awake.
Her breath came shallow, her hands trembling beneath the covers. The walls of the palace room surrounded her again, faded and fraying but solid. The moons glimmered beyond the windowpane, unchanged. But the voices lingered, sharp and fresh as a wound.
Burden.
Pathetic.
Undignified.
Her chest ached, not with grief, but with pressure. Pressure from everything she had once craved: recognition, kindness, love. Things denied. Things weaponized against her.
She swallowed hard. And then the ache twisted. Hardened. Became something else.
Resolve.
She would not suffer for their cruelty any longer. Elara had been the girl who begged to be seen. Lyra would be the one who left others blind in her wake.
But beneath that newfound steel, another storm brewed. As she drew her knees close to her chest, Lyra whispered into the darkness, "They left me behind. But I won't leave myself. Not again."
And then she moved.
She reached toward the nearby desk, fingers brushing across a shard of broken glass she'd hidden there—left behind after Marta dropped a mirror last week and never cleaned it. She took it in hand, studying her reflection in its jagged surface. The light caught her eyes, not yet glowing with power, but aware. Awake.
With a calmness foreign to the girl she once was, Lyra turned the glass flat against the wood and carved, slowly but deliberately, a single line through the layer of dust. Just one—clean, unyielding. A mark. Her mark.
She would remember this. She would remember who she was.
Across the estate, behind a larger, far grander desk layered in disuse and ledgers, the emperor frowned at a balance sheet. The lamplight flickered against his sharp, distant features.
"Has the girl visited?" he muttered, not bothering to look up.
Elms—the emperor's aide and commander of the scouts sworn to the crown—shifted uneasily. "No, Your Majesty," he replied. "It's been several days."
The emperor's brow lifted. "Strange. She usually pesters me by now."
"She had a fall, Your Majesty." Elms added quickly. "Marta has been tending to her."
The emperor waved a dismissive hand. "As long as she isn't dead. I've enough problems without planning a funeral."
And with that, he returned to his figures, thoughts of his daughter already buried beneath the ink.
In her room, Lyra sat upright. The remnants of the memory still scorched her thoughts, but she welcomed the sting. It was a gift—a reminder. That Elara had been erased. And Lyra had emerged.
There would be no more begging. No more weeping.
She would become something sharp. A blade honed not by forge, but by betrayal. As she sat there beneath the dim moonlight, she reached for the old, unused ledger on her bedside table—a remnant from the estate's better days. With a piece of charcoal, she began to make a list: names of staff, their schedules, the locked rooms she'd yet to open. It wasn't much, but it was control—her first quiet claim of dominion. This time, she'd watch, learn, and prepare. And when the moment came, she'd strike, not as a forgotten girl, but as a force no one saw coming. As she stared into the dark, her fingers closed slowly around the hem of her blanket—not in fear, but in quiet promise. One day, when they looked into her eyes, they would see not the forgotten girl, but the storm she had become.