#tbtpl

Prologue : Part One

A drop of crimson falls onto the once pristine marble floor. He can see it so well, the red footprints of his soles from stepping into his brother’s pool of blood. The emperor had taken his last breath just seconds ago, body still warm most definitely. There is not a single feeling expression on the face of his elder brother, jeweled eyes devoid of life. Absent-mindedly, Claude had wondered what his brother had thought as he plunged this sword into his chest. Did he resent him? Did he curse him? Did he perhaps think, ‘Ah, I deserved this’ ? Or maybe, just maybe, if there was even a fragment of the elder brother he once loved as a child in that corpse…

The seventeen year old blonde had smiled bitterly, the tip of the sullied red blade tapping against the hard floor with a scratch. Dwelling on the regrets of dead men won’t do anything. Instead, the now crown prince turns his jeweled gaze to the girl just a not so far away from him, sitting in the wrinkled skirt of her patterned violet gown.

Heavy with makeup, the lady with viper green eyes and a beauty mark beside her lips didn’t look up at him. No one would have believed you if you told them this boy and girl were fiancés, akin to lovebirds only a year or so earlier. What a bloody scene—the once second prince staring down at the second daughter of the Judith family, while his elder brother’s ever chilling corpse lays at his feet.

Penelope doesn’t even flinch when Claude’s soles echo against the hallway’s floor toward her. It was as if she was expecting this, somewhat. Or perhaps she had just resigned herself to the same fate as the one she had an affair with.

“Not a single word?”

“What is there to say, when I’m going to die all the same.”

Claude is in front of her now, just about three feet away. All the while, the tip of the sword has dragged upon the surface of the marble, scratching it surely. Even if the blood was cleaned, they would still need to get the tiles replaced.

“Then let me ask you this, before I send you to hell with him.”

Claude lifts the tip of his sword just inches away from his ex-fiancé’s neck.

“Why?”

With bitter eyes, like the child he used to be and the child she and the previous emperor once knew in their childhood, he looked upon her with frustratedly confused and undeniably upset eyes. It was as if he were on the verge of tears, yet those jeweled eyes had become dry in his fury.

“Why did you betray me? Did you love him?”

Penelope couldn’t help but scoff.

“Love him? You brother? No, of course not.”

“Did you…” Claude’s throat is dry, “ever, love me?”

It takes longer for her to respond this time, as if pondering on it herself.

“Yes, I did, and still love you—but not how you loved me.”

The grip on the sword’s handle tightens just a bit.

“Then why?”

Another pause.

“Anastasius, your brother—he promised me that if I bore his child, he would give me everything I ever wanted.”

Claude scoffs.

“Everything? Everything you ever wanted? What was it? Power? The throne?” The golden haired prince grit his teeth. “What did that bastard offer to be so enticing that you betrayed me .”

Penelope is quiet, uncharacteristically so. It’s hard to believe that this woman used to be the center of high society, and still will be until that soft neck is dyed red.

“Well?”

Claude’s desperate voice, his need for an answer—for a response—is like a roar. Like a child who’s on the verge of throwing a tantrum—or perhaps he already had, seeing the bodies he had left in his wake.

And finally, the barely older eighteen year old responds.

“… he promised me, the Ruby Palace.”

Appalled and even a bit offended, the blonde narrowed his eyes incredulously.

“… The Ruby Palace? You betrayed me, not for the Empress’ Place, the gilded gardens, the Emerald Palace, or even the Topaz—but for the Ruby Palace? ”

Just a bit, something inside the girl snapped.

“It is what lies inside the Ruby Palace and what it stands for that I craved!”

The younger of the two by only three months laughs with a harsh breath.

“What nonsense, all that lies in the Ruby Palace are…”

Like a chill wave, it washes over his overheating rage of betrayal as the slow realization settles in. For once in a long time it feels, he properly looks at the woman in front of him. After constantly avoiding his once unflinching gaze at her silhouette, ever since he found her entangled in the sheets of his brother’s bed with his brother, it felt like he finally had the courage to look at her completely.

The woman only barely moved her head, the tip of the blade dangerously close to her cheek.

“Claude, I could never love you or any other man, the way you loved me.”

“You—“ The tip of the blade trembled in his grip. “—for the Ruby Palace, for that reason, you betrayed…?”

There is a tear that falls from the porcelain woman’s cheek—or perhaps, she was just a girl. A simple girl who did what all girls did, longing for a dream they could never achieve. How hot it felt, like poison rain against her cool skin. Yet, the girl felt no shame, proclaiming her final regrets and answers to the only man she had genuinely opened her heart to.

“You as the second prince, never to become the emperor, couldn’t have ever given this to me.”

The last prince stood quiet, gaze shadowed from the moonlight pouring from the open courtyard.

“Last I recall, the ban of homosexuality is not in Obelia’s laws.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

The woman’s voice was like a whisper, drained of all her previous passionate glory. As if she truly had given up.

“There are unspoken laws, Claude. Ones that control society much more than those written in stone. This was no exception.”

“When did the Penelope I know—” The grip on his crimson coated sword tightens, ”—fall victim to others’ gazes and thoughts?”

A small sound that one could hardly call a laugh.

“I always have, Claude. Just because I appear as a wicked woman, does not mean I truly am one. Vulnerability is the best entertainment for those crows.”

Her green eyes lifted to meet his trembling jewels.

“You know this fact best, after all.”

Stillness between the two once again. Silence, a bit stifling as a drop of blood falls from the sword. Penelope turns her face away from her former fiancé.

“It’s enough now. Just end it all.”

Her eyes flutter closed for a moment, embracing death’s coming embrace. Penelope had never thought about her death, not once. Watching her mother and elder sister, she wanted to live a life without regrets. To shield her weak and fragile heart, she had to do what all women did—to fake strength, and to believe in that false confidence to fool herself as well. You can only truly play a convincing performance if it’s the ‘truth’, after all. And yet, despite her desperate attempts to live out this lie, every step she took seemed to be the wrong one. Deeper and deeper, sinning more just for the small possibility that she could have truly been happy. Happy, in the arms of no man, but someone like herself. Someone just as shrewd, yet just as lost.

Ah. It seems she truly met the end of the trail now, that forbidden trail of sin.

And yet—and yet—why does the blade not come for her bare throat?

“I am no longer that pitiful second bastard prince, anymore.”

Penelope’s eyelashes flutter open, twisting her gaze slightly. A cloud has overshadowed the moon. Just what expression is that boy making now?

“With his blood spilled, I am now the next emperor.”

The shadows begin to recede, light traveling up the crown prince’s limbs and gradually illuminating his resolute figure. As the moonlight falls onto his silhouette, his diamond-like eyes shimmer with a particular gleam.

“What you want—what you desire—if I grant it, will you swear upon the Sun and the Stars that you will never betray me again?”

…

Just a month shy of the new emperor’s birthday banquet, rumors spread among high society and what’s left of the nobility. That the boy once known as the crippled prince had fallen into depravity after seizing the throne, throwing himself into the hold of sin and lust—that even now, he has been expanding his collection of concubines and caging them within the Ruby Palace.

What can you expect from a bastard child?

Writing Claude and Lucas as characters that I’d actually like ✨