When she finds herself yearning for dry heat and desert sands, Ming’er sits with her birds and thinks of home. 

Listening to their chatter; deafening and cacophonous, she journeys beyond the horizon. Past the forests and the mountains and the deserts; towards her palace, her courtyards, her chambers. Towards the aviary where she spent so many days listening to sweet birdsong. 

“They’re not as dumb as they look.” Second Brother once told her, after she’d gently mocked her doves’ vacuous gaze, “If you took one of them far away and freed it, it would find it’s way back here. No matter where they are, they’re always able to come home.”

Sometimes, when her melancholia weighs too heavily and she considers the sharpness of her hairpins, Ming’er frees a dove. 

When the dove disappears into the skyline, Ming’er remains, wistfully imagining it making the great journey to a familiar aviary within a familiar garden. A small piece of her to inhabit a home she may never see again.

Ming’er loathes this place. She hates him, with his pitiful gaze and misplaced paternal instinct. That he has not yet found his death at the bottom of a bottle. 

Ming’er loathes his son, as blameless as he may be. Resentful that his childhood was preserved and cherished, while hers was put to an end, sudden and unmourned. 

She loathes his mother, with her tutting at the emptiness of her womb. She loathes the etiquette that confines her to chaste courtesy. That prevent her from informing her dear mother-in-law of truths she gravely needs to hear.

(Ming’er can see herself standing over the Empress, the delicate features she so treasures twisted by disdain, unmasked and unbridled. She sees herself sneering through grit teeth. That she cannot conceive if her son does not touch her. Does not look at her. Does not think of her as a man should his wife.

That he will die, drunk, and heirless. That she hopes he dies, just so she can be free of him. So she can return to a place she should have never left.)

The bastard brother, she loathes less, if she does at all. 

There is a strange comfort, in the way that he looms over her, his toothy smile never quite reaching his eyes. In the way that those eyes burn not only for the throne but for her. In the way that he holds her-kisses her as if to etch his touch into her skin. 

In the way that, in the dark, forgotten halls of this grand bastille, she is not a child, to remain untouched and pitied. Not an exotic beauty to be marveled from afar. Not simply a vessel for heirs, or a stepping stone toward a higher purpose.

Here, with her duplicitous lover, Ming’er is a woman. To be held and cherished; loved and desired.  

It is all she needs, she thinks. 

Until, the fool, hidden with her in a long-forgotten corner of his garden, whispers his intention of assassination.

A realization comes to her, then. This, all of this, cannot end without tragedy. 

Or, maybe, it can. As the future is uncertain, so is Ming’er.

Perhaps, Vezian’s dreams of fratricide will come to fruition and she and the throne he so desperately craves will be his. That even in the most wicked of deeds, Ming’er will find some contentment. Or, perhaps, she will find that Vezian is best enjoyed as a lover than a husband, and will grow to hate him as well.  

Perhaps, her husband will finally drag himself from the depths of his alcoholic misery. That it would be as her father said, and some affection will blossom between them. Or, it will be that his back finally snaps from the weight of so many unnecessary burdens placed upon his shoulders.

Or, widowed or not, she will find some way to find beauty and joy in this foreign land. That the homesickness threatening to rend her asunder will dull to a nearly forgettable ache. 

Or, freeing her doves will cease to be a balm and she will finally appraise the sharpness of her hairpins. 

Or, the whole of Essenia will sink into the sea and they’ll all perish. 

Who’s to say? All the soothsayers here do not use bones and she does not trust them.

What is assured is that; when the disquiet edges towards intolerability and her yearning for the desert sands sets to undo her,