Candlelight flickered around them painting the room in shadows mingled with a soft golden glow. It gave the illusion that the princess could have very well been sleeping if not for the smell of decay emanating from her. Embalming fluid was always centered in the face and the hands, the parts of the body that others could see openly during their grieving. Those would be the last parts of Jezmerine to fade away beneath the cruel touch of time.
Strelitzia had never known the princess. They never got the chance to become friends, or enemies, or much of anything. But it was her story that Strel felt, so similar to her own that it should have ended differently. They had both been kidnapped and taken far from home, thrown into an unforgiving world that despised them for what they were regardless of who they were. Jezmerine's last moments were in a place that should have offered safety and security. They'd all failed her.
