The air in the room was thick with the scent of spilled perfume and the jagged edges of broken glass.
Eliosa turned on Draven, her face twisted into a mask of pure, ugly hysteria. The "Saintess" had vanished, replaced by a woman who saw her world slipping into the void.
"Family!" she shrieked, her voice cracking as she pointed a shaking finger at the door. "I am your family, Draven! I am the one who stood by you! Not that woman... and certainly not that... that thing in the Academy!"
Draven's jaw tightened. "Eliosa, calm yourself. You are behaving like a madwoman. You shouldn't be jealous of a child. Valerie is a student of the Empire, nothing more to your life."
"A child?" Eliosa laughed, a sharp, manic sound that echoed off the stone walls. "She is destroying us! She is a curse born of the shadows, a stain on your legacy! She isn't your daughter, Draven—she is an anchor dragging you back to a woman who hates you! She is a curse!"
"Enough!"
Draven's voice didn't just fill the room; it shook the very foundations of the chamber. He stepped into her personal space, his shadow looming over her. The Cinderwisp Ring on his finger flared with a low, dangerous heat.
"She is my child," he said, his voice dropping to a low, lethal vibrato. "My blood. My legacy. You will never refer to her as a curse again."
"You will not speak her name with that venom. If you value your place in this palace, Eliosa, you will remember that even a Saintess can be cast out."
He didn't wait for her to respond. He didn't offer a hand to comfort her. He turned on his heel and walked out, his cape billowing behind him like a funeral shroud.
The moment the heavy oak doors slammed shut, Eliosa snapped.
She let out a guttural scream of frustration, grabbing a heavy silver candelabra and hurling it at the full-length mirror. The glass shattered into a thousand jagged pieces, reflecting a thousand fractured versions of her sobbing face.
She tore the silk hangings from the bed, threw books at the walls, and kicked the remains of her vanity.
Outside in the hallway, the maids and guards stood in a line, their heads bowed. They could hear the crashing and the muffled shrieks of the woman who was supposed to be their future Empress.
"She looks like a pathetic child," one maid whispered, leaning toward another. "Throwing a tantrum because she can't compete with a six-year-old."
"A future Empress?" the other murmured with a sneer. "The Grand Chancellor has more dignity in her little finger than this woman has in her entire soul. She's not a Saintess... she's just a spoiled girl losing her grip."
Eliosa heard the whispering through the door—or perhaps she just imagined it—but the shame only fueled her fire. She sat in the middle of the wreckage of her room, her hair disheveled and her dress torn, staring at the door with eyes that had turned from blue to a dark, vengeful red.