If there was ever something that Verinia truly despised of life, its name was sentimentality.
Sentimentality made people irrational. It made their emotions blur their good sense. The heart had no room for the mind's sound logic where sentimentality was present, and it made people selfish. Stupidly so.
More than once she had considered that she was simply too bitter a woman to understand what it would be like to experience gut-wrenching, complex emotion.
But then again, she did not entirely care.
She sneered at the book in her hands and slammed it shut, holding it out for her maid to take away. "You'd like this. Take it, keep it, burn it, for Arcana's sake—just don't let it cross my sight again."
The heroine of the story was a sentimental fool. She was, perhaps, the most important piece to the grand scheme, and she threw herself into the waters of Sorhenzar, the water hell, dooming others who depended upon her. And for what? To save the life of a friend.
A very useless friend.
Within herself, Verinia knew that to a certain extent, her feelings were unjustly founded. It wasn't as if she herself were infallible to such a thing as sentimentality.
Should the life of her siblings ever be at risk, wouldn't she sacrifice herself for them?
She certainly would for Halen, but his purpose was greater than hers. No harm could come to him on her watch. Not even the slightest unhappiness.
Verinia turned her head away from the brightness of the lesser sun, Fahn. Shan, the greater sun, had not yet risen, meaning that the day was still early and she was already unhappy.
What she was promised would be a riveting tale of adventure was nothing more than a bumbling buffoon with a task too heavy for her frail shoulders.
It disgusted her. Women should not be weak.
With a flamboyant sweep of her robe, the First Princess stood from the seat of her private balcony and withdrew into her room to bathe. The long mirror in her dressing area showed the reflection of her curled hair, which was held back from her face with the silk sleeping scarf she tied to her head every night. Obsidian ink spilled down her back, glowing with a sheen as golden as the tint of her eyes.
She removed her outer garment and draped it over the dressing screen. Left in only her nightdress, the Su'Adrit shivered as a cool breeze of the early morning danced through the open balcony doors of her room. Her skin prickled.
"Your bath is ready, Serenity." Eva, her maid, announced as she entered the room. "I've added sweet rose petals along with the usual spices, per your preferences."
"Thank you, Eva." Verinia allowed her maid to put up her hair and remove her nightdress. The water of her bathing pool bubbled with a sound that both soothed and unnerved her.
She entered the pool with little reaction, even as a thin layer of ice instantly began to form over her bare legs and overtake her body the moment she stepped foot in the water.
A cube of nyera frost sat in the very base of the pool. It was truly a small thing, no larger than what could fit in her closed fist, but its infernal cold overtook the pool and made the Su'Adrit's body numb.
It was so cold that it made the water boil, as if it were made of the freezing fires of Nurenhim, the winter hell.
Her vision blurred with the telltale lightheadedness that came from the abnormal temperature. She raised a hand from the water which was covered in frost, and curled her fingers to break it.
Her skin had begun to pale from the cold, but as she moved, breaking the sheet of ice on her skin and lathering her body in the cleansing oils, the colour began to return.
Verinia rose from the pool, bath finished, with an otherworldly quality to her. She could feel nothing at all as her maids dried and lathered her in perfume.
The chill had seeped into her bones, slowing her function, keeping her body in a state of lethargic preservation. Her movements were naturally slower, though she could still move quite fast if she wanted to.
When she held a hand to the light of the lesser sun, it sparkled in an array of colours as if fire opals were buried in her skin.
"You're radiant, Your Sovereign Highness." Eva smiled as her nimble hands tied the straps of her mistress's breast band. "I couldn't survive such a daily habit. The frost would have surely frozen me."
"That's because you're too thin," the princess teased, bringing her hand back to her side. "Look at you, even without the nyera freezing your little bones, you could be blown away by the wind."
Eva's face flushed red and she scowled. "Your Sovereign Highness, please don't be cruel."
Verinia smiled but granted her little handmaid some mercy. Even though she did think Eva was too thin, but perhaps that was just motherly habit.
Verinia thought everyone younger than her was too thin, and that only she alone was robust enough to withstand submerging herself in sub-freezing waters every day.
It was a habit that she alone practiced and it was something taken from a book of customs of the old world. The concubines and wives of the Sovereign would freeze themselves with nyera frost until their skins glowed like divinity.
It also slowed their bodily functions and preserved their youth for a very long time.
Verinia could see its effects clearly. She was eighteen, but still looked comparable to her younger sister, the Second Princess.
She was of the thought that her younger appearance was the only thing keeping her from being married still. Her father would never look at her, but if he saw her face and saw that she looked her age, he would have thrown her into the hands of any first man who asked to be married.
Her face pulled into a dark look as she thought of this. Once dressed and properly groomed, she emerged from her room and set about her duties, the most important of which was the greeting of the arriving Empress along with her personal party.
A strange sense of repetition overtook Verinia as she stood by the grand entrance of the main hall with Sur Ka'iser to her back, awaiting the arrival of yet another troop of carriages.
She felt like a servant, and that only served to sour her mood even more.
Honestly, what was that muddle-headed father of hers thinking? She understood standing outside to wait for the empress, but she was still the Su'Adrit.
What did it look like for her to personally stand outside and greet a lowly null blood Su'ni and a bastard son?
The memory of it enraged her.
It was humiliating.
"You're frowning."
"I'm not frowning, I'm inverting my usual expression."
Sur Ka'iser's mouth twitched. "Hence, a frown."
Verinia shot him a venomous look over her shoulder. She usually took so much care to appear magnanimous in front of others, but her resolve to remain a blameless beauty seemed to have miraculously vanished.
"Eva, confine Viola Grandpire to her room until the Sovereign welcomes her with the rest of the unmarried concubines to the Hall of Wonders."
"At once, Serenity." Her maid bowed, then hurried off to do as her mistress had said.