Meet the Empress
Full Name: Meg (Megumi) Ottavarima, aka “The Empress”
Appearance: Meg, or “the Empress”, as she calls herself, is an unhealthily scrawny, short Chiaroscuran. Her face is half black and half white (the separation runs diagonally down), and her yellow eyes have a far off, dreamy expression.
Likes: History, shiny things, being important, memories, Augustus
Dislikes: Being forgotten, putting forth effort, wind
Occupation: Historian, thief, prisoner
Favorite Food: Black jelly soup
Spirit Animal: Jellyfish
Spirit Vegetable Fruit: Blueberry
Little Known Fact: She saw Sebastian in his cat form in the hall a couple times, when he was on his way to the Council Chamber. She thought he was pretty adorable, but didn't think that was the sort of thing you should tell a king, especially when his adorableness is due to a curse.
Meg once worked in the palace, studying all she could about Chiaroscuran history, as well as the writings on the Empire that had been copied and recopied from “The Academy Collection” over 260 years since the Ancient Shadows had first come to Chiaroscuro. Even though she had her own apartment in the palace (her father having been vanished during a Shadow Incident, her mother dying during the outbreak of the great sickness that ravaged the city during her childhood), she couldn’t help but long for the things she had heard about in the Empire, and the things she imagined. While all architecture in Chiaroscuro was black and white, the Academy Collection spoke about vermillion palaces, green-tinged copper roofs, and mosaics in every color of the rainbow (rainbows were something often mentioned in books of poetry and art, but never described. Meg supposed they must be something like blown glass sculptures, with lots of colors twisted together). She was certain, too, that all of these buildings must be surrounded by flower gardens—because who wouldn’t be surrounded by gardens if they could—and spent long hours imagining what it must be like to live in the Empire, especially in the Imperial Palace, home (or once home) of the Empress Hypatia Mbaga, a just and noble queen by every author’s estimation.
The longer she walked the white walls of the palace, the more she imagined life in the Empire, and the more lonely she felt, spending hours immersed in the world of a far away and long ago country. She wondered how it must feel to be the Empress, loved and adored and looked up too, and began to visit memory merchants, asking specifically for memories to be concocted of what she imaged: gardens, beautiful gem-encrusted houses, life within the walls of the palace—the Imperial, not Empyreal one. The more time she devoted to these, the less and less she cared for real life. Food tasted like ash in her mouth, and she only ate enough to stay alive… or not? What was life—the white walls she found herself in, or the colored ones she could remember? Eventually, she had taken so many memories that she forgot which were her own and which were fabrications. She forgot if she were the Empress, who she knew on a rational level had died hundreds of years ago, or Meg Ottavarima, who seemed never to have lived at all.
