"It was a long time ago, a few years before your sister was born. Your father was dealing with the nine lords, two of which did not trust your grandfather. My father ,Ronan, did not trust your father's resolve to end the hunting of shifters. It was a dark time. Imperial guards slaughtered anyone suspected of even giving good or shelter to a shifter, more or less trading with them.
Many innocent people were targeted due to vendettas, or refusing to kill children of the shifter race. It was a very dark time in our lord dom because my people refused to be part of a senseless slaughter. You see we were on the opposite side of the forest from the other cities and during the cold winters we could not support ourselves, nor could we trade with the our sister cities.
The shifters of the forest, The Forest Knights your lovely wife is now the leader of, often brought us food and cold fruits and herbs we could make into food for our people. It was a harsh way to live, but it was how we survived. So we had watched shifter children grow up. We knew they were not a danger to us and we refused to be murders of friends. Too many had died on our soil despite our attempts to protect those we could. Many of our own people were slaughtered by imperials, including my three sisters.
My father was angry, and when the emperor got reckless and your father took over the.war effort my father and four of the nine lords were preparing to revolt. The Emperor had known, but he was no longer our Emperor. We wanted his family to pay for the slaughter, and we were going to make it stop either with his head, or our own deaths. Fortunately, your grandfather realized he could not beat us. There was no future for his empire with his four strongest lords saying no more. He offered to stop the war if it would appease us.
My father refused because your father could easily have continued the war after we became disorganized. Their solution was to make the Empress someone who would never allow such a war to happen again. The Emperor agreed, and the Four decided on me, Ronan's only remaining daughter. I married your father and became his rock. Your father was young only fifteen and I was seventeen.
However, unlike him I was never sheltered and learned early how war and bloodshed affected my people. I was his voice of reason, I knew how to run a house and a lord dom. A kingdom or a empire is just a lord dom with more people's lives on the line. However, because I was so busy helping, he took a second wife as is customary. The first queen who should have helped me with my duties as Empress.
That queen, as you well know, was Fay. The problem was she had no intention of staying Queen. She began convincing your father I was trying to take over the kingdom. I would change and modify processes so that he wouldn't drown under the workload, but it gave me more power. From the outside, it seemed like I was actively weakening his title. I never saw it this way because honestly, I just saw work getting done. Who cares if it was me or him signing the papers? I had just found out I was to give birth to Vella. I didn't really care about much between work and morning sickness.
Well, when he spoke to me about it I became angry and asked him why he was letting her turn him against me. That was the very reason I didn't want a queen. When I tried to move past her in the hall, she fell back and hit the ground hard. Problem is, I never touched her but she began bleeding, badly. She miscarried, and though it was deemed an accident, he never truly came to forgive me for that child's death. That started the doubt.
Over the years, I divided up the control of Empress and let the First and Second Queens help me with my duties. It eased his fears of me trying to take over. It also gave the first queen a chance to make outlandish claims to the Emperor. Soon your brothers were born, and then I had you. Things got complicated but I realized early on you were not a fighter. That's when your father broke my heart. He focused so much on your older brothers because they were what he wanted, macho sons to show off. Every time your brothers hit or picked on you, your father defended them. If you got into a argument and you won, you were wrong for showing up your elder brothers. You were too smart so to protect you and Vella I stepped back.
It turned out to be the wrong decision, but I didn't realize that till much later. You know the rest." She replied sighing deeply.