I opened my eyes to a very familiar ceiling. intricately designed leaves crisscrossed over each other, roses with prickly thorns and in the middle of it all was my name in golden letters.
Azora Median Kaiser.
I haven't seen this ceiling in years.
I sat up straight and realized this was indeed my bedchambers in the Egaerus kingdom, where I was born and raised for nineteen years. I looked at my hands and legs... covered in bruises.
"Your highness," a maid entered. "Would you like to wash your face now?"
I didn't reply. Wasn't I dead? I remember the pain of gauging out my own eyes quite clearly. What was happening? Didn't I fire this maid? Why were my hands tinier and my nails shorter? My bruises looked quite fresh and new too. Why does it feel like I am back in the past? Is this a dream? Or the time I spent in my marriage with Duke Lain was?
"Am I... dead?" I slowly asked the maid who looked startled by my question.
"No your highness!" she exclaimed in surprise. "Did you perhaps have a nightmare?"
A nightmare, huh.
The feelings and pain I'd felt were too real to be a mere nightmare. "What year is it?"
"It's the eight hundred and seventy second year of the imperial calendar," she said as brought a towel for me to dry my face after washing it.
I was seventeen.
"Is my seventeenth birthday ball around the corner?"
"Oh no that happened quite a while ago," she answered. "Are you perhaps not feeling well, princess?"
I dismissed her and laid back down on the bed. This made no sense. I clearly remember poisoning myself. Why was I back in the past?
I don't want to suffer again.
The moment I'd thought this I heard a commotion out in the hallway in front of my chambers.
"Your highness she's-" I heard the maid I'd just dismissed shout but it was cut off by my door flying open from the force of magic.
I noticed a small figure enter and then pause as if searching for something.
"Alastair," I breathed. "Brother, why are you here this early in the morning?"
He looked at me but his gaze didn't meet mine. His beautiful gray eyes didn't have any light in them. His expression seemed pained and as he approached me I realized I couldn't see my reflection in his eyes. His eyes were as dull as lead, vacant of any light.
They looked dead.
"Brother your eyes-" I started but before I could get my entire sentence out I was engulfed by his arms. The warmth of his body against mine brought tears to my eyes.
He has never hugged me like this once until today.
The memories I had of Alastair were all painful. For some reason up until now he had always avoided me like the plague. The day I turned sixteen... since then he hadn't come near me once. If I tried to talk to him he would push me away. When he became the emperor I knew I couldn't ask for any help from him because he hated me.
The Alastair hugging me now can't be barely over fifteen. It all added up. He was two years younger than me so that meant I indeed was seventeen like I'd initially thought.
So I was really back in the past.
He silently leaned his forehead against my shoulder and I felt him shaking beneath my touch. "Brother."
He pulled away smiling sadly at me. "I wish I could see you right now. I bet you look as radiant as ever, Azora."
"But..." then it hit me. "Your eyes... what happened to your eyes brother?"
"A wizard cursed me," he touched my face affectionately. "I've permanently lost my eyesight."
What?