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Her room was a prison cell dressed up as finery. A gilded cage that was in many ways worse than the bare bars of Dorgon. There were guards outside the room, even though the crown on her head held her better than they ever could. She had no doubt her every movement was watched. She might be allowed to switch into her leopard form, but that was all.

The worse thing about this place, she decided, was the colours. Everything was bathed in red and black, matching her cursed crown. The bed, the wallpaper, the cupboards, the decorations, the jewellery, and a thousand little red and black glass figures...everything bore the mark of the empress.

A thousand reminders of everything that Myra would be forced to do, forced to betray. She quietly prayed her people would see through the illusion. Prayed that they would understand she would never have chosen this.

Myra reached out to Lyra for guidance, the comfort that She who Knows All had given her these past five years in Dorgon, as the darkness taught her to listen to the whisperings of the goddesses. But Lyra was gone, as though she could not bear to watch.

What would the Empress make her do? Publicly supporting her cause and denounce whatever resistance was gathering? Use her to break spirits? That would only be the beginning. Perhaps Myra and Layla would be forced to fight against their own. She had only ever spilled valkyrie blood once before...but that had been to a great warrior under the unbreakable control of a MindWeaver. It was a mercy killing.

This, though...a slaughter.

Again, the question came to her again: how had Jasper survived this for so long? Fighting for the empire he hated after betraying the rebellion?

The very name sent a surge of helpless fury through her, as her very soul roared against this and she reached for the glass figurine closest to her and sent it crashing towards the ground. It splintered into a thousand pieces.

She was half-surprised Medea had let her do that alone, and she knew that if she tried to bring the glass towards her throat, then the semblance of freedom would end entirely.

Even though she knew how pointless it was, she reached for the next one and threw it across the room and into the wall. It shattered completely.

Another one. Another.

She pushed every shelf and cupboard to the ground, clothes and books pouring out and onto the floor. Vengefully, she reached for the last glass figurine and made the mistake of holding the figure so tightly it shatters in her hand. A thousand jagged glass pieces dug into her skin, thin rivers of red pouring down her palm.

She didn't mind. In fact, she was so far gone that she no longer cared. Carefully, she uncurled her clenched and bloody fingers, letting the black-glass pieces fall to the ground in a shimmering, red-stained pile.

The general stood alone in a room lost to chaos. The floor was littered with a thousand useless red and black figurines, half of them shattered beyond repair.

Still her eyes glistened with unearthly rage.  She let out a primal, half-animal roar, before the strength left her bones and she collapsed onto the bed.

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Layla

Empty. The world was empty. Her eyes...empty. Crimson red and shadow black stared at her at every turn. Only emptiness looked back at them. A great and terrible silence lived within her. A great and terrible void.

The void had been eating into her from the moment she learned her parents were dead. Void that left no room for rage or grief, for vengeance or tears. There was only emptiness, and it was swallowing her whole.

Music was a distant thing. This emptiness, all-consuming and all-ending, tore a great gaping hole within her.

And when she walked onto the balcony overlooking the desert kingdom that had stolen everything from her, Layla began to sing. Not capital letter Sing, but the quiet, unassuming kind of song. A song that did not end worlds but brought colour and life into them.

Layla sung to the world, to herself, to her dead, to the kingdom that had stolen everything. She sung of the emptiness within her. The hollowness, the void. And she sung of the grief, too, and the vengeance.

She sung of everything in the world that she had loved. Sung of music in the Veron square, the rivers whistling in Celeste, sung of a mother and father who loved her, a sister that was a part of her as much as her beating heart, sung of an aunt that had betrayed her.

She sung of how they had been stolen from her, torn from her. Layla sung it all, in a song as old as the world itself, and when she was done, there was nothing left for her.

She collapsed onto the floor, her eyes wet with unshed tears, the life drained from her completely.

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Kestra

Far away, deep within the mountains, she dreamt of a woman with a crown of chains, hair as red as blood and eyes as blue as the sea, crushing glass in her hand, and bleeding onto a red marble floor.

When she woke up, she woke up screaming.