The worst day of my life was the day I met you.

I know it’s tempting to say that the worst day of my life was the day I murdered my father, or the day it all unraveled, but those were just consequences. Inevitabilities. I deserved the pain I felt, both those days.

Meeting you? That pain? I’ll never forgive you for it.

It started with a bad decision, one of many I made that day. I had been warned time and again not to skulk around my father’s study when he wasn’t present, so of course that’s exactly what I was doing.

I’d been sneaking past castle guards since I was old enough to cast my first spell, so getting into the study without being noticed was quite literally child’s play for me. Over a decade of knowing that every patch of darkness could be hiding the crown princess had made the guards jumpier, but it hadn’t taught any of them to look up. I slipped from rafter to rafter, stepping through shadow, until I reached the study door.

The guards posted there would notice if I walked right in, so I transmuted my body to liquid darkness and flowed through a crack where the top of the door met the frame. On the other side I knew I had to act fast before the artifact went off, so I was already forming the spell in my mind, weaving together Shadow and Starlight. I envisioned plucking a star from the infinite darkness of space, stealing it away to be returned come next dusk. I murmured the incantation under my breath, too soft to be heard.

“Darkness vast and shadows deep, swallow the stars and drag them ‘neath. By my will these shadows seek: eclipse the light and make it sleep.”

I emerged inside the study and immediately unleashed the spell at the bronze helmet sitting on the central desk. Blue light was already radiating from the helmet’s eye-holes, the artifact alert to the presence of an intruder, but before it could finish activating it drowned in starry night. The spell consumed the artifact and pulled it inside my second shadow.

Candle’s burning. The artifact was kept stagnant inside the extradimensional space of my second shadow, pacified by the embrace of my soul’s pleroma, but I couldn’t hold it there for long. No artifact would allow itself to be imprisoned for even an hour’s length.

I set about my purpose with gusto. There was no specific prize I was after here, merely the satiation of curiosity. My father very rarely clued me in to what he was thinking, so I had learned to seek answers on my own time. I had filched from this study dozens of times, reading through reports and letters to try and decipher why he had said something or done something.

My father was a very organized man, which made my snooping much easier; he divided all his paperwork across different desks and partitions of desks by importance and purpose. This section for unimportant documents to be discarded, that section for important documents to be filed, the section over there for paperwork he’d yet to look at, and so on. I rifled through partitions until I found something in archival that shook me to my core:

It was a decree, a king’s writ. The good paper, the good ink, and all the royal stamps. The word of the king made law and enacted on the world.

And it was a knife to the heart.

The writ declared, in a great deal of words, that the crown princess Reska Ines Zelic Dawnbringer was to be stripped of her claim to the throne, with the title of crown heir passing to the king’s bastard son, Luka. I would still get to call myself a princess and I would benefit from the protections and privileges of the Dawnbringer bloodline, but I would be excised from rule and statecraft, excised from any position of power over the family’s most crucial holdings. Perhaps I would be sent off to some distant estate to brood in for the rest of my days, like happened to my grand-uncle after he disgraced himself.

The shock hit me first, and the denial. I read the letter, read it again, kept staring at the page.

This isn’t right. This can’t be right. Why would he- no, he wouldn’t do this to me! This is just… a draft. A joke! Haha, very funny, father. Please. Please just be a bad joke.

I moved to a separate partition where my father kept documents that he intended to send out to the castle scribes for duplication and distribution. To my growing horror, I found a second copy of the writ sitting neatly in the position for items of highest priority. The writ was real, and my disinheritance was already happening.

Why would he do this? Why, why, why!? I failed to choke back a sob and had to cover my face to muffle the noise. My hands were shaking.

I knew why, of course; in many ways this moment was inevitable, and had been since I failed to manifest the family affinity as a child. The clans had no use for an heir that couldn’t practice the bloodline’s magic.

Still, I kept staring at the writ. I felt like I was being disowned, though some rational part of my brain reminded me that there were much worse forms of disinheritance practiced by the sorcerer bloodlines. I would still keep the name “Dawnbringer” after all, which meant I was still considered a full member of the family.

That didn’t really matter to me. Rationality had no place in this; my father had immortalized on paper his immense disappointment in me as his daughter. He had given up on me and named me a lost cause. Undeserving.

Worthless.

I wanted to scream, but the guards were still outside, and I dimly recognized that I was running out of time before the artifact escaped its bonds. I dragged my nails down my arm, hard, to force myself to focus. Slip out unnoticed, then scream. I took a deep breath, directed a tendril of my shadow to rest on the central table, and released the helmet at the exact moment I transmuted back to liquid darkness and escaped through the door seam.

As I slipped through the rafters back the way I’d came, the fear and grief turned to anger. Betrayer. Liar. I shook with the weight of it, the absolute enormity of what my father had put to paper. For a sorcerer, inheritance was everything. No matter how many children a sorcerer had, only one could inherit the family legacy. The deepest secrets, the accumulated resources, and the sorcerer Crest that was the crown jewel of every bloodline.

To be chosen as heir meant you had earned the air you breathed. It justified the years of feeding you and caring for you and teaching you sorcery. It was the only sign of value and worth a sorcerer could respect. To be passed over meant you had failed your ancestors, your parents, and even yourself. You were dirt.

I didn’t deserve this. I deserved better. I wouldn’t let my father just throw me away like a broken toy. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t broken!

Without consciously choosing to, I’d brought myself to the grand doors that led into the throne room where even now my father was holding court. I watched the door in silence, seething and stewing in my own negative emotions. I clenched my fists, I gritted my teeth, and I felt a deep yearning to storm into that chamber and give the whole court a piece of my mind.

It would be another rule broken, but what did that matter now? If I was nothing, the dirt beneath a better sorcerer’s feet, then why care what they thought of me? Why care what anyone thought of me? My father had already made up his mind, and his was the only opinion I wanted to know.

Fuck it. Let the beast out.

I dropped from the rafters and landed gracefully in front of the two guards posted outside the door. Terror immediately crossed their faces as I rose, still wreathed in darkness, and growled at them, “Out of my way.”

The guard on the left, scrawnier, eyes like gleaming amber, paled at my demand. The guard on the right, stockier, eyes gray like storm clouds, hesitated but stood his ground. “I’m sorry, Your Royal Highness, but His Majesty’s orders were explicit: no one is to enter while court is in session, and that includes you.”

My fingers twitched and I had to restrain myself with a hiss. I wanted to lash out, I was aching to lash out at someone, anyone, but it wasn’t their fault, it wasn’t their fault, don’t hurt them, please don’t hurt them. I saw the fear on his face, his gaze flickering to my hands, to the darkness still heavy around me.

I forced myself to channel that energy in a different direction and focused on eviscerating his argument. “No one, you say? No one at all?”

The guard slowly nodded, mute.

I bared my teeth and leaned in. “Well, that’s very interesting, isn’t it? Because ‘no one at all’ means that even if the castle were under attack from night horrors or a rival bloodline, the two of you would hold your posts and let not a peep of that through to the king and his guests. Is that correct? Or were your exact orders a little bit different from what you just told me?”

The guard on the left nervously shuffled a step further away from me. The guard on the right, the one whose personal space I had been invading, gulped audibly but didn’t answer.

“Let me take a guess, then. I’m going to guess that you were actually told something to the effect of ‘no one gets in unless there is an emergency,’ am I right? Tell me I’m at least close, aren’t I?”

The guard on the left cracked. “Yes! H-he told us, ‘no one is to enter while court is in session, including the princess, unless there is an emergency that cannot wait.’ Please don’t eat me!”

Eat you? Really? Is that what you think of me? Pain flared in my chest, but it was an old pain, nothing compared to the still-sharp betrayal of the king’s writ, so I set it aside. The fear was useful. The fear was a weapon. “See?” I remarked to the other guard while he glared daggers at his compatriot. “Was that so hard?”

The second guard let out a tired breath. “No one can enter while court is in session unless there is an emergency. I have not been informed of any emergency, Your Royal Highness.”

I snarled, “Well I’m informing you! There’s an emergency, and it can’t wait, so get out of my way before I lose my patience and just blast the doors open.”

The gray-eyed guard was tense, fearful, but his resolve held. “We can’t let you do that, Your Royal Highness. We have our orders.”

The amber-eyed guard did not hold his resolve. He protested, “What are you doing, Karlo? Just let her through!”

“The king’s orders were clear, Neven.” Karlo’s voice was tight, controlled.

“I’d rather take my chances with His Majesty than with the-” Neven broke off, swallowed his words, and finished, “with the princess.”

I knew what he had been going to say, before he caught himself: the Shadow Fiend. The people in the castle whispered about me, when they thought I wasn’t around to hear them. They called me a monster from old myths, a demon wearing human skin. Sometimes, they said that I had crawled out of the Abyss and into the king’s wife while she was pregnant.

They said it was my fault the queen had died.

The shadows pressed in, curling around me and creeping across the floor and up the walls. Darkness licked across the guards’ boots and caressed their bronze-tipped spears. The dark vibrated with my anger and my pain. It seethed with my frustration, and it longed to lash out. Only my full force of will kept the shadows from tearing into the two innocent men barring my way.

I kept my voice quiet and low. “Just step aside and this will stop being your problem. Please.”

Neven had already pressed himself against the nearest wall, desperate to be out of my way, but with my earnest plea it was finally enough for Karlo and he slowly, hesitantly stepped away from his post. I breathed a little sigh of relief, too soft for either to really notice in their panic, and threw open the throne room doors.

“Father! I know what you’ve done!”

My father sat on a masterwork of bronze sculpted with imagery of the rising sun: the Sunlit Throne. He wore robes in our colors, green and gold, and carried in his lap our family’s sorcerer Crest: the Sunlit Scepter, a golden rod ending in a stylized sunburst that held all the power of our ancestors. He did not look pleased to see me, those eyes of pale gold seeming to burn into me.

My half-brother, Luka, sat to the throne’s right. I noted his presence with distaste; it was no secret that Luka attended these councils while I did not, but before that day I had avoided thinking about the implications of that. Now I felt the keen awareness of how deeply I had already been excised from the operations of my own clan. Panic flared in his burnished gold eyes when he saw who had barged in unannounced.

Six others were arrayed in seats around the throne, the king’s council that he spoke with regularly on matters of policy and governance. I knew their names and faces, had even spoken with them regularly when I was younger. The Master of Coin, Branko, had taught me numbers and found me a quick learner. The Master of Letters, Emil Posava Zelic Dawnbringer (named for the same ancestral Zelic as I was), had tried to teach me etiquette and the art of influence. The duchess of our kingdom’s second major clan, Ruzica Kadic Bladesinger, had tutored me in the sword before dismissing me as destined for the pen and book instead.

As I stormed into the throne room, shadows curling behind me, it was the Master of War, Viktorija Dawnsworn, who acted first. She rose from her seat, hand already on her sword and keen vigilance in her citrine-yellow eyes. Her gaze swept over the entrance and settled on me, and what was initially cautious concern melted away and became irritation at the presence of an unwanted pest.

“This is a closed court, Highness. You should know what that means.” There was a dangerous edge to her voice, a warning. I did not care to heed it.

I kept stomping forth, darkness spreading into the room. It occurred to me then, dimly, that I was still in my sneaking clothes–soft-soled boots, gray silk trousers, gray silk tunic–and not anything remotely appropriate for court. I vaguely wished that I could have thought to wear something more dramatic and theatrical, but in the end it was just another meaningless embarrassment to add to the ever-growing list.

The Master of Pigeons, Mislav, chuckled at Viktorija’s warning. “Of course she knows. Sit, Warmaster, and let us hear what brings the girl before us.” The king’s spymaster was a secretive man, and I had never much liked him; of all the keen-eyed folk in the castle, he was one of only two that I could never fool when creeping about the castle.

Emil frowned at my approach. “Your Highness, these theatrics are ill-timed. Interrupting court will only earn His Majesty’s ire.”

I hissed at the Master of Letters, “I don’t care. That doesn’t matter anymore.” I marched around the table, the Warmaster glaring but not stopping me, and came before the throne.

Luka stepped in front of me, raising a hand to ward me back. His voice was low, and he met my gaze with those damnable golden eyes. “Reska, don’t do this. I know you can be smarter than this. Just walk out now and all you’ll have to face is being chewed out for impropriety. Don’t go making things worse for yourself.”

I seethed with anger, and the shadows seethed with me. The dark crawled up the walls and the four pillars of the throne room, finding the sunstones and smothering them. One by one they went out, plunging the room into greater and greater darkness until only the light of the throne illuminated the grand hall.

Luka still barred my way, unflinching. “Please, Reska. Just walk away and accept whatever punishment he gives you. It’s not too late to salvage this.”

“Piss off.”

The crown prince to-be sighed and stood aside, returning to his place at the king’s side. “On your head may it be.”

At last I stood before my father, King Kresimir Vincek Dawnbringer, with no one else standing between us. He stared at me with that implacable disapproving gaze, still silent.

I clenched my fists, met his gaze, and gathered my resolve. “Father. I know what you’ve done. I read the writ.”

My father showed no reaction, and I couldn’t see any of the councilors to know their minds, but Luka’s mouth tightened at my words. He knew. He’d known, and still he tried to stop me. Liar. Betrayer.

My grip tightened and I whirled on the assembled court. “Did you know? Did you know that my father, our beloved king, has cast aside his own daughter and disinherited her? I will be of the blood in name only, an embarrassment to be exiled to nowhere and left to rot. And Luka”–I spat the name–“is to be your future king, the crown prince of Sun and Sword.”

The spymaster Mislav’s reaction was inscrutable as ever, and the same held true for the court’s Master of Lore, the wizened crone Zdenka of the Lidless Eye. War and Coin, Viktorija and Branko, both showed the dull surprise of learning something that had been neither known nor unexpected. Emil and Ruzica had known, of course; they had both been close with my father before he claimed the title of crown heir from his cousin, and to my knowledge their friendships had only deepened in the two decades since. Both displayed their foreknowledge openly, though one showed what I took to be false pity and the other showed blatant contempt.

“So you knew, or a few of you did and the rest are unsurprised. Do none of you care that your king is betraying his own daughter?”

The duchess snorted at my words, silver eyes shining. “Whingy little brat. A few hard knocks and you come crying before your betters. What a worthless thing you turned out to be.”

“Your Grace,” interjected the Master of Letters, “perhaps it would be more constructive to offer arguments instead of insults.” He turned to me and continued, “Your Highness, there is significant precedent for a writ of this nature; precedent of which I am sure you would have considered had you the time to process this revelation. Neither your father nor Duchess Bladesinger were the trueblood heirs to their respective clans, but rather earned their crowns through great effort and achievement. It is traditional for the crown heir to be whoever holds the strongest tie to the clan’s affinity, and for any child who cannot manifest that affinity to be exiled from the clan entirely. Your father has done you a great mercy with this decision.”

I knew that. Of course I knew that. Rationally, intelligently, logically, I knew that.

The shadows sharpened and I heard a sunstone crack.

My father spoke. “Zdenka, please recite what you know of the lore of spontaneity.”

The ancient Loremaster intoned smoothly, “The spontaneity tendency is a phenomena observed only in children, most often in children who have yet to evolve their innate affinity for Chaos into a more coherent affinity. A child whose relationship with dreamweaving is yet instinctual, untempered and uncontrolled, will sometimes manifest magical effects without meaning to cast any spell. This spontaneity is considered to be a response by the child’s magic to internal impulses and desires that the child is struggling to express conventionally. In the majority of cases this spontaneity tendency is resolved by the early teenage years, and in no known cases does spontaneity persist past the onset of adulthood.” The crone’s face split into a smirk and she added, “Barring one.”

A flush began to heat my cheeks as the old woman used a great many words to call me, in essence, a child.

“Thank you, Zdenka,” was my father’s calm reply.

I turned from the council and back to my father, anger now mixing with mortification. I tried to control the shadows, tried to reach out to them and guide them back to my side, but they just wouldn’t listen to me. As I guided one tendril of darkness to my feet another slipped from my control and curled around a new object in the room.

They watched me fail. They all watched as I tried and failed to control my magic, like a child with affinity still unformed.

I swallowed hard and tried to hold on to my anger, to my righteous indignation. “You can’t do this to me, father. You can’t abandon me like this. I know I’m not- not perfect like Luka, not the golden child who fits your perfect mold. But I’m powerful. I may not have our family’s affinity, but I have something stronger. I have a power that no other bloodline on all of Svijetstakla could ever claim to grasp, a power that no human has ever even touched before me–at least not without dying a painful and immediate death. You can’t just ignore that. I deserve more respect than that!”

Luka shook his head at me and I almost hissed at him before stopping myself. I had to stay calm. I had to stay in control.

Father watched me through every word, through every motion, and through my forced restraint after. He watched, silent, as the tension rose in me again, and it was only when I made to speak once more that he stood from his throne and cut me off.

“You throw a tantrum in my court,” he began, his voice low and cold and calm. “You make demands of your king like a child begging for sweets. You insist that you be treated with respect, and yet, when you make your way to this most-hallowed chamber–unannounced, uninvited, unwanted–and interrupt an important meeting, you can’t even control your own affinity. That behavior wouldn’t be fit for a child half your age, let alone an heir to the Sunlit Throne.”

With each word I shrank in on myself, anger withering as I was scolded like a misbehaving little girl. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to pretend that I had never walked into the throne room, but still the last embers of that rebellious flame flickered inside me. I had a right to feel this way. He was abandoning me and he wouldn’t even tell me about it before telling the rest of his court. My shadows grew spikes and geometric patterns, undulating in strange waves as my control slipped further away. “Father, I–”

The Master of Sun and Sword lifted his hand and a new sun was born, a blazing orb of white-hot light that scoured every shadow from the room. Every writhing, seething, twisting tendril of darkness was burnt to ash in an instant. The whole of the room was cleansed of my magic, purified in the light of our clan’s true affinity. The sun dimmed, becoming a single pinprick of light, but the shadows did not return.

When he spoke, my father’s voice carried the edge of violence that I knew and feared. “On your knees, child. Hand outstretched.”

Cold terror consumed the heat of anger and humiliation. Nervousness bubbled in my chest and I had to fight to keep it down. I couldn’t let it escape, couldn’t let it burst from my chest as terrified laughter because if I laughed then I would just make it worse. “I- I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I–”

“Now!” he snapped.

I dropped to the ground in front of him and held out my shaking hand, still stammering apologies with every other breath. He lifted his foot and held it in the air, watching me with cold anger frozen on his face.

Sternly, as if teaching a lesson, he told me, “If you insist on acting like a child, then you shall be disciplined like a child.”

My father was always a careful man, even when he did not need to be. There was little he could have done to my hand that castle healers could not have fixed in minutes or hours, and yet he was always so precise with his violence. He stepped on my hand and ground it down to the point just before permanent injury would have been caused, allowing me to simmer in the pain and anticipation, and only when my apologies gave way to wordless crying did he relent.

He turned from me and settled into his throne once more, watching with those cold, furious golden eyes as I shook upon the floor of his hallowed throne room and stained the stones with my tears.

When he spoke again, his voice was dispassionate. “Out of my sight.”

So I ran. I bolted from the throne room and melted into the shadows of the castle halls, trying desperately to stifle my sobs lest someone hear and the shame rise ever higher.

I fled to my chambers and slammed the door shut behind me, emerging from darkness to crumple in a heap upon my bed. My self-loathing was growing teeth, my fear and shame and grief mutating into something darker and viler.

Weak. Worthless thing. Just a broken toy. A failure. A whingy little brat.

I stumbled from the bed into my washroom and stared into the mirror, gripping the sink tightly with both hands. I stared into my own eyes, my own awful, hideous, disgusting eyes: dark like frostbitten fingers, dark like buzzing flies, dark like long-dried blood, dark like the monsters that creep from below through the cracks in the skin of the world. A demon’s eyes, they whispered when they knew I could hear. And I stared at a face that was, in every way except those accursed eyes, the spitting image of every portrait I had ever seen of my mother.

My fault. All my fault. It was my fault she died. It’s my fault they all hate me. I am the thing that stole her life and stole her child and ruined everything for everyone. It’s my fault. It’s my fault.

I screamed wordless anguish and punched the mirror until it shattered. The glass shards sliced into my hand and opened my skin and blood dripped out, drip, drip, drip, onto the pale porcelain below. Warmth blossomed and spread from my hand across my body, pain and relief in equal measure. The agony of a dozen lacerations drowned out every thought in my head and finally, finally, finally…

…there was only silence.