6 Secrets
Secrets
Sileas watched in awe and shock as Lotir’s flames barely touched her, barely even harmed her. The little flame danced around her and into figures. Faeries and tigers jumping through hoops like in circuses. Her ears pricked as she could even voices in her flames. The tiny giggles of the childlike fairies and the roar of a tiger and the voice of the showman shouting random words.
“You are a shifter, Sileas” Lotir said. Eyes filled with a seriousness that she hasn’t ever seen in her before. “I…want to prove your grandparents wrong.”
She frowned. Rattled that Lotir heard anything untoward about her grandparents. Not even about their untoward feelings of her are known. “How…did you get the idea that they think of me less?”
Lotir raised her brows. “Less? I do not think that! I only meant to say that they think of you as normal and human not less…Sileas”
Her face bloomed with mortification and horror at her mistake. She shook her head and smiled. “Yes, right. I thought wrong for a second there”
The archduchess stared at her face. Scanning every inch of it as if something would betray the young Sileas. “What is wrong?”
In instinct, she felt her mask slip through the crevices of the darkness. Replacing her casual expression into an amenable one. The lying one. “I just thought you think of me less.” She dangles the statement and couldn’t help but look down at her hands on her desk. Waiting for Lotir to take the bait.
“Why…I would never think of you less.” Lotir kneeled in front of her and still she was taller than the large desk. “I’m sorry if my words ever made you think that.”
She shook her head. Saddened by the fact that Lotir easily took her lie and relieved that she did. Slowly she tried to relax and smile again. “No, I’m sorry. It has been a hard topic for me” She reaches for Lotir’s hand and squeezed it with all of her guilt. “I’m no shifter nor a rider. I can’t become a mighty northern dragon, which is what my family is, and I can’t ride any wild dragon to add to any aviary. I have accepted that, and I would truly appreciate it if you would too”
“But—”
“Please” She didn’t mean to sound as if she’s begging, but she truly was. If she doesn’t stop Lotir, she doesn’t know what would happen in the future. “Let’s talk about something else? I heard you have been training with the knights.”
Lotir pouts. An expression on her face that she noticed Lotir does unknowingly, which made her look like her age. She was just nineteen but acted so much older. “Alright” she gives her a small smile in reply. “Well, the knights are deplorable. I wanted to put them into my standards.”
Lotir continued to tell her about the knights and how she trained them. Something about it being a mixture of humans and Draconi, but her mind was elsewhere.
Sileas is reminded of her Grandparent’s reach. Not even in the palace as an empress could she escape the fear of them. There is safety inside this walls, but it wasn’t foolproof. A conditional safety. A limit she fears would run out.
It was late into the night when she suddenly woke up for the sixth time that evening. She had pushed herself to sleep, but she doesn’t fully fall into slumber at all. Nothing seemed to work as she gazed out of her open windows. She’s sweating despite her efforts to make the room colder by opening everything even the terrace doors. At times she could tire herself to the point of being able to sleep in this heat, but tonight, it’s not the temperature of the palace that bothers her.
She sat up from her bed and slowly stripped every piece of clothing on her body. There are guards on the garden her room faced, but she’s deep into her room for her to see. As for the guards by her door, they rarely open her chambers as she laid on top of her blanket naked. She decides that she must sleep again and slowly beckoned into it.
The cold air rushing into the room from the open windows and doors. It touched her skin and cooled her sweat to the point of slumber. She didn’t think of the sudden rush of wind strange nor would she ever think of it as a dragon’s landing.
A dark and tall form enters through her terrace. The imposing silhouette towered over her sleeping body, but the smell of ash and cinder tickled her nose, enough to rouse her from her sleep.
“Great Aegir!” She jumped out of the bed and pulling the blanket around her, her hair in complete disarray as she gazed at the man supposed to be her husband. “M-My highness, I did not know you were returning from the front lines”
She noticed that the emperor is just as naked as her, but just as grumpy and dangerous as she remembered. He barely shown any emotion other than hate and annoyance, but now, he’s completely blank. Staring at her with the perfect hue of lilac eyes that everyone at court dream of having.
“Do you fear death?” He asked. Tone as serious as the question itself
“What?”
He stared at her. He doesn’t want to repeat himself.
She scoffed. Couldn’t help the laughter from escaping her throat. Her bare throat, and she knew she would be dead the next moment. She just laughed at the emperor’s question. He would not take that lightly.
But to her surprise, he just stared. Impassive and no empathy.
She sobered up. Tucking the blanket around her better and shook her head in reply. “There are more things to fear than death, my emperor.”
“And that is?”
“To you, the boredom of not being in the front lines.” She doesn’t know where she got the courage to be so impertinent and blunt. But she truly doesn’t fear getting killed by the emperor. It would be nice if she dies with clothes on if she was going to be marred by a shifter’s claws.
“I’m not asking about myself” she heard the slight irritation in his voice. Like a lion with a thorn between its paws.
She laughed. The vision of the lion was too much entertaining. Not even a lion would do this man justice.
He glared. “you’re not serious at all.”
“I can be, but it’s just a strange topic for our first night as husband and wife.” She motioned between them. “This is the first time I saw you since the wedding. I know you don’t want to do your duties as a husband or an emperor, but this is quite funny.”
“I’m not clear which is funny.”
“The state we’re in” She continued to laugh. Laughing at the face of the emperor. “we’re supposed to be naked in our first night, which we are now. Albeit in a different context, but we’re here.”
He frowned. The deepest frown that was ever possible known to man. “You are not making any sense.”
She slowly sobered up again, nodding as she did. “You are right. I am out of my mind, but you came here from the front lines asking about death. I am sorry my emperor, but somehow you are stranger than I am.”
He stared at her face intensely. She is getting used to deciphering between his glare or stares.
The silence bothered her.
“Sire is there anything else?”
“…”
Again, the quiet unnerves her, the quiet truly bothers her as it was always quiet in her grandparents’ home, and no one would actively converse with her apart from what is necessary for her to know. Every conversation is controlled. Manufactured and reported to her grandparents.
She lived with it for close to a decade.
The music and sounds of her home still haunt her at night. A fact she has come to accept.
He turned away from her and jumped out of the terrace. Her heart leaped up to her throat and for a moment she thought he was injured as her room was on highest towers of the palace. But a large northern dragon rose up and flew deep into the clouds before she could even reach the railing of her terrace.
A moonless night meant she couldn’t clearly see his dragon form, but she could see his large size that seemed to engulf the whole palace in one wing. How he was able to be so quiet despite it is a mystery.
She clutched the blanket to her chest till her fingers were numb. Admiring the cold air on her skin as she stared at the sky. Her husband was gone in a few handfuls of flaps of his wings, but she still stood there.
Her husband is different. Whether the good kind or not the other is still up for debate. Not that she cares or have any control of it whatsoever. Still, she stayed a few more minutes till her skin prickled from the cold and her nipples taut.
For the first time that night, she didn’t feel hot in the diamond palace. She wrapped her body in the large and thick blanket and slept peacefully. She dreamt of something that she won’t be able to remember the next day. But it’s mostly about a large Draconi who wondered if she feared death with an appearance close to an angel of death. Of beauty and a wildness the hypnotized her.
The next morning, she did her work. Feina served her well and did everything concisely and perfunctory. The aide and head butler Defin slowly unclenched his fist and let her do her job. She ignores his surprise at how fast she picked up all the clerical work or—at times—the work of the emperor as he is too busy in the frontlines.
Before lunch, she received two letters.
One from family and the other from the emperor himself.
“T-The emperor?” She heard herself utter before she even thought about what to say.
Defin, with the only green eyes on a Draconi, nodded. Looking surprised himself. “It was specifically addressed to you and not the princ—Archduchess.”
She takes the letters off his silver tray in one swoop. With the Emperor’s red enveloped letter on top and the other at the bottom. She remarked the golden seal on the enveloped and knew it was the emperor’s seal.
He really did send her a letter.
“you may go” She said to Defin with a smile. “I will finish a page of this week’s finances and renovations to the south palace before I read the letter”
“Your highness, what if it’s urgent?”
“Go” She firmly said.
Defin raised his brows in surprise. His weasel like features elongating. “Of course” he swept into a bow before finally leaving her alone.
“Feina” She only said her name and the servant was already curtsying and leaving her on her own.
Sileas wasn’t able to do what she said. She was only halfway through her work before she opened the emperor’s letter. She stifled the urge to gasp as shards of glass and ash poured out of the envelop as she pulled the letter.
It only had one line.
Prepare for death. For he is soon to come home