Above is a drawing of Lysandra, by the brilliant @JaxCreation

Lysandra's Point of View

Many siblings have a tendency to dislike one another. Even more siblings might have a rivalry when one is heir to a great empire...and the others will have to listen to them for the rest of their lives.

Very rarely, however, does this dislike and rivalry escalate to murder.

It makes sense, of course, that it was the Empress of Kallias's children who were involved. It seemed very typical of the empress, to have children who would then proceed to try to kill one another. Such was Lysandra's situation.

Her mother, the monarch in question, had no living siblings, no living parents and no living grandparents. She had no cousins, or nieces, or aunts or uncles. Her husband was long dead, and she had never particularly liked him anyway. There were even rumours-rumours that seemed more like facts with every passing day-that she had killed him and her parents-in-law. So, as much as one might try to trace the lineage of the Crimsons for any who drew breath outside of the empress and her children, one would fail tremendously.

You would think this might be enough to prevent family drama. If you only had Mother, and her seven children, things were unlikely to get complicated, correct? Wrong. These seven children were Medea's, and Medea has a habit of making things complicated when things had no need to be complicated.

To start off with, the six eldest children possessed magic. And not just magic: a dark and cursed shadow magic that Lysandra's mother had bargained with witches for. To make things more complicated, nobody knew that Lysandra had magic at all.

All these siblings were royal, and many of them were bored, because the relevancy of fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh the children was disputable.

Lysandra's oldest brother was Markus. Markus' one remarkable trait was that he could lie very, very well.

After Markus was Erik, who's one remarkable trait was his utter lack of conscience. If he hadn't been the second son of a queen, people might have noticed he seemed to enjoy stabbing people.

Lysandra's third-oldest brother was Tyton, who's sole remarkable trait was ability to play chess.

After him came Perseus. Perseus' sole distinguishable trait was that he could imitate an ape most impeccably and unknowingly.

Lysandra's second-youngest brother was Theseus, and his single remarkable trait was his ability to give up. A hissing cat, a toddler...he carried the white flag with him everywhere and had begun numerous projects in an attempt to become a relevant fifth son, only to give up within days.

Her youngest brother, Aaron had many remarkable and distinguishable traits. He had entered university at fourteen and had a degree in medicine and mathematics. But better than all of these, Aaron knew alchemy.

At the age of sixteen, he had turned lead to gold. A year later, he created the immortality elixir, meaning that they no longer aged.

But better than that, Aaron was perhaps the sole being on earth that Lysandra's mother actually liked, with the one exception of her black cat, Lady Sabran Crimson the Third, who had also received the immortality elixir.

All this and more made the Crimson family a very eventful one, despite the fact there was only eight people and a cat in it.

Take this dinner for example:

The cat was glaring at Markus from its position on her mother's lap. It felt, Lysandra was certain, that it should be the one to inherit the throne.

Markus was glaring at Tyton, because he had just lost sparring. Tyton, in turn, was glaring at Erik because Erik had ignored his suggestions about army training. Erik was glaring at Theseus because he felt that he should have tried harder when they had magic-sparred that afternoon, instead of surrendering in the first minute.Theseus was glaring at Perseus because he was barking at the cat in an attempt to scare it. Perseus was glaring at Lysandra because Lysandra's dog had eaten his shoe yesterday afternoon. Lysandra was glaring at her mother when her mother wasn't looking at her, because she hated her mother. Her mother was glaring at everyone but Aaron and Sabran the Third.

The dinner went by without discussion.

When Tyton and Erik left the dining room, they got into a fight, which was rather entertaining, given they had abandoned soberness a few hours ago. When the cat jumped down from her mother's lap, Markus kicked it, and then lied to their mother about it. Perseus stole Theseus' shoes and Theseus did not complain. Her mother tucked the eighteen-year-old Aaron into bed, then went to sleep whilst Sabran the Third stood guard. Lysandra went to her room and began plotting the death of her five older brothers.

Such was a normal evening in the Crimson family.

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At nineteen, Lysandra was preparing for five murders and one utter crown theft.

If she'd had other younger siblings other than Aaron, she might have killed them too, lest they try to do what she was doing to her elder brothers. But the thing was, she was fond of Aaron. In fact, in the will she had written at eight, she left: 'the best seat she had' to him. Little did anyone know this meant the best seat she was planning to steal from the rest of her family along with a head band-Lysandra was enjoying her pirate phase at the time-stuffed with jewels.

This was, at eight, what Lysandra considered the crown and throne to be. The best chair, and the best bandanna. She had thought them very 'fashonable.' Until she was seven, she had been saving up to buy them, when she realised it wasn't quite that simple. It would be far more fun to pay for them with her brothers' blood anyway.

Lysandra's room, much like her youngest brother's, had become her laboratory. However, instead of it being a laboratory of alchemy, it was laboratory of murder.

It was stocked with books containing reasonably confidential information about the elves and valkyries and about the Pre-Crimson era of the Deserted Lands. The bookshelves also contained the latest non-fictional texts about economics and politics along with helpful advice about not getting one's head chopped off by tyrannical empresses, her mother among them.

Her bedroom was also stocked with the normal things: novels and dresses, pens and paper and very poisoned, very serrated daggers.

But her most important stockpile in her bedroom lay behind her three concealed and locked vaults.

The first vault contained a huge cabinet of poisons, complete with instructions, uses and helpful advice about who to use them on.

The second vault contained a large amount of blackmail material, nearly fully covering Medea's court, and stretching into the elfin and valkyrian courts.

The third and most important vault contained Dark Mirrors and enchanted parchment. Dark Mirrors were a clever piece of Witchairian sorcery. All the owner had to do was look into the Dark Mirrors and they would absorb their pain. They didn't take away that pain, unfortunately; but they would remember it. If anyone else was to look into the Mirrors, they would feel that pain, in a razor hot blast that could even kill. They made excellent weapons and were impossible to steal. Lysandra had three of them.

The first, she had bartered a fortune for from a trader who refused to tell her how he had first obtained it. The other she'd paid barely a penny for from a particularly stupid lord with a particularly small territory and a particularly large store of heirlooms. But the third had been Made for her. The third had found her, across centuries.

And the enchanted parchment? That would allow her to communicate with a person that the world believed was dead within seconds.

The person that Medea thought she had killed decades ago.

The last of a race that had killed the gods and almost destroyed elves, valkyries and humanity.

There were still witches in the world. One happened to be Lysandra's pen pal.