Elma, six months into her involuntary second life, lay flat on her back, staring at the perfectly sculpted, corniced ceiling of her nursery. The room was a pale, sickening shade of blue—the color of peace. Peace was an insult.
This. The thought rasped through her like steel on stone. This is an obscenity.
She had been forged to be a weapon: a machine of war, capable of closing five hundred feet in a heartbeat, regenerating from a snapped spine in seconds, tearing a man's head from his shoulders with a flick of her wrist.
And now she was attempting to roll over.
The noble, pristine silk sheet beneath her—something D-66 would have used as kindling—bunched under her shoulder. She poured every scrap of veteran consciousness into the task. Contract the left serratus! Torque the hips! Use the momentum of the head to—
The effort ended in a puff of infant exertion. She flopped back onto the mattress, the only result a slight, useless wobble of her cheek.
Rage swelled, cold and precise, a familiar pressure pressing behind her eyes—the first stirrings of the ravaging instinct. Unleash! We tear the ceiling down! We rip the lace from the window! We consume the crib!
Then, Christa's gentle voice floated in from the hall, humming a soft, utterly useless nursery rhyme.
"Restrain!" Elma's rational mind slammed on the brakes of her rampage. She had thought this through—if she wanted to survive, she would have to act compliant whenever others were present.
The repressed energy had to go somewhere. Her tiny, soft hands closed into absurdly small, trembling fists. She opened her mouth and latched onto the nearest available target: the cuff of her own cotton sleeve.
She chewed with grim, singular purpose. She was trying to tear the weave, to test her new teeth, to exert some shred of control. But the cotton was surprisingly resilient, and her gums were pathetic. It was a futile gesture, and utterly humiliating.
"Is my little doll playing with her clothes again?"
A maid, a plump, smiling woman named Leta, leaned over the crib. She had the audacity to coo.
"Such a strong little girl!" Leta gently disengaged the chewed sleeve from Elma's mouth and offered her a brightly colored wooden rattle.
She settled for clamping her jaw down hard on the rattle, glaring daggers at the maid who continued to smile obliviously.
Elma found the sheer scale of the manor a strategic waste of space—but it had one immense, saving grace: her father, Lord Valerius Altheris, was almost always absent.
Lord Valerius was not a man of quiet authority. Towering and broad-shouldered, draped in his House's gold, richly embroidered silks, he was defined by a single, deafening characteristic: his laughter.
It rolled endlessly through the halls, a booming, joyous proclamation of his confidence and his House's ascendance. Always too loud, too frequent, and utterly devoid of genuine merriment.
The occasions when Lord Valerius Altheris remembered he possessed a daughter were terrible.
It happened roughly once a week. Lord Altheris would appear, freshly armored in his civilian silks, and sweep Elma up from the arms of her panicked maid.
"Ah, the little jewel! Come, little Elma. Your father has matters of state to attend to, and you, my treasure, are the final piece of this glorious puzzle!"
She was strapped to his chest, usually in a cradle that reeked of expensive leather and her father's metallic, ambitious scent. From this vantage point, she became intimately familiar with the gilded cage of high politics.
They had gathered in the Grand Study—the room where important people traditionally sat around a heavy table to negotiate Important Things. Borders, alliances, grain taxes, troop movements, trade disputes… the usual parade of dreary statecraft that nobles pretended was thrilling.
It was the place where House Altheris and House Kresnik typically hashed out their delicate balance of power, where every word was weighed and every pause was a political maneuver.
And today was no different—except for the fact that the infant in the crib to the side, Elma, was the entire reason both Houses bothered tolerating one another.
The council meetings in the Grand Study, tense as they were, proved to be merely the ante in the high-stakes game of Veraxys politics. Elma was present at several such discussions over the span of two intense months.
At first, the tension, the stifling silence punctuated by her father's booming, meaningless laughter, and the sharp scent of ambition were worse than the cold oblivion of the coffin. They were an insult to the memory of the simple, honest brutality she once knew.
But today, the political theater evolved into its next, more exhausting stage. The ministers had come and gone, leaving behind their usual wrangling. But this time, the Great Lords of the other Houses were gathering—a far heavier, more perilous audience.