- Nymeria
It’d been two years since she was home, but all she felt was dread as she yanked the horse’s reins and it neighed pulling to a stop by the stables.
“Not on the hay!” Coral, the stable’s master yelled, stomping his feet as he approached her. “Do you have any idea how long it took to gather those, peasant?!”
Nymeria narrowed her gaze at Coral, and she pulled off her hood.” Repeat that again, Coral.”
He drew up short, halting with such suddenness, one would think there was a wall barring his path. His lips parted and his maroon gaze widened. With a yell that shook the stables, he announced, “The Princess has returned!”
************
“Where is father?” Nymeria asked as the servant fixed her hair. Stupid lot. She missed her first chambermaid, Lysandra. She was as useless as the rest, but the woman did have a way with her hands. Apparently, they’d all assumed she had run again and her room had been cleared out, her servants relieved from her duty.
It wasn’t a lie. She had run from home. From the castle, from her cold father and vain mother. From her responsibilities as heir. It was her way of making her parents bend to her demands. Disappear for a long, long time. Whenever she returned, they’d be more receiving and complacent with her requests.
She was after all, their only child.
Only, this time, her fleeing had gotten her dumped in the dungeons of the Neredian Castle.
1/6
Nymeria
+25 BONUS
“H–he is in his study-”
“Ow!” Nymeria cried out when the comb’s bristles bit into her scalp. She turned, her eyes flashing with anger, and it didn’t matter that she had spent years learning how to control her temper. Her composure shattered in an instant as her frustration got the better of her, and her hand connected with the servant’s cheek in a sharp slap. “Careful!”
The woman held her cheek and bowed her head. “Forgive me-”
Nymeria brushed past her. “Fix up my wardrobe here. I like this room better.
Everything looked the same. Huge statues and antics adorned the halls and passages. Torches were lit through every hallway to keep the castle warm in the horrid winter. A stranger would find the glass ceilings to be fascinating, but Nymeria never really cared for it. Often times, she had nightmares of the glass collapsing on her.
She stopped walking upon reaching her favorite statue of the Sun Goddess, who held an orange orb in her hands. Nymeria smirked, lowered her head and gave the Goddess her middle finger. “Screw you, bitch.”
As usual, the statue remained what it was. A fucking stone. She’d made it a habit since she was a child to flip the Goddess, in hopes that the Goddess would be riled up enough one day to respond, but that never happened.
Nymeria neared the study, and she could hear her mother’s distressed high–pitched voice. “She left because of your obsession with a life that no longer exists. Our family is falling apart because of you, and all you care about is this stupid letter!”
Nymeria sighed. Two years, and it was still the same argument. Her hands trembled and she fisted them, relishing in the
tore into her palm Nu
+25 BONUS
- Nymeria
her eyes, and she breathed in deeply before entering the study.
Her mother looked back and her eyes widened with shock. “Nymeria!”
But Nymeria wasn’t looking at her mother. Her body turned cold as ice when dark eyes pinned her to where she stood, and the tremors in her fingers spread to her whole body. The air grew tight and her father’s aura suffocated her. He had that effect on people. He didn’t even have to try. He was the embodiment of power, the kind that paralyzed and crippled. He didn’t have to raise a finger to have you on your knees.
All he had to do was think, and one stopped being.
Her father stared her down, and not in a thousand lifetimes could she hold his stare. She looked down, sweat dripping from every pore in her body. “Father.”
“Tara,” her father called her mother. “I will have a word with Nymeria.”
Nymeria’s fidgeting worsened, and her mother’s pale blue eyes had fear in them. “She’s just a child. There’s no need to-”
“Tara.”
Her mother bowed her head and left the room, squeezing Nymeria’s hand tightly as she did.
The King of Dawn stood, and Nymeria fell. Her legs couldn’t carry her anymore. He was angry and his aura was beastly. She saw his black boots as he approached her. Not a speck of dust stained it. Polished and elegant. He crouched in front of her and she felt his fingers graze her chin as he lifted her head gently. She stared into his dark eyes and felt the entire world around her dissolve into nothingness.
“If you didn’t want to marry Darrock, you could’ve said so. You have embarrassed your mother and I by fleeing from your duties.”
“I’m not ready for marriage, father.”
- Nymeria
+25 BONUS
“Clearly.” Her father’s nostrils flared as he picked up a scent on her. ” Neredia. Why there?”
Tears formed in Nymeria’s eyes, her fear a chokehold on her. “I-—| thought I’d find her.”
A lie, of course, but it was all she had up her sleeve to save her from his wrath. He rarely ever got angry. Cold and aloof were more his style, but on the days she saw his anger, she understood real fear.
Her father’s hand dropped from her cheek and something flashed behind those dark eyes. “And?”
Nymeria thought of the woman who had saved her from drowning. The woman she had recognized the moment she laid eyes on her. She looked just like her mother; Dawn’s most reputable whore.
The woman who was her father’s only mistake; one that had destroyed whatever warm and loving prince he was before he took the throne. Nymeria had heard stories of her father. He wasn’t always like this. He loved the people wholeheartedly, and there was not one person who didn’t love him in return.
But one woman destroyed everything. It was the story of the decade. Her father had gotten involved with a whore.
And he’d been ready to give up his throne for her.
Even now, the ghost of the past hunted them; Nymeria and her mother. Her father only married her mother because the council demanded it of him; because it was the late king’s dying wish. Growing up, knowing her father never wanted her or her mother in the first place was disheartening.
Though he never acted like it. He gave her everything she wanted. When she fell, he tended to her wounds himself. When she had nightmares, he’d sleep in her tiny bed with her. If someone hurt her, he’d become
4/6
her vengeful angel. He never smiled for her, but he was the best father in the entire world.
One day, he did smile at her. But he’d called her a name that didn’t belong to her. In the language of Dawn, he’d called her, Jasmine. Nymeria knew who bore the name. She’d snuck into her father’s study once to steal the only thing item he held dear to him. A letter, handwritten by a child. Jessamine. Jasmine. Same thing.
It was then Nymeria understood why her father didn’t smile for her. He didn’t love her, couldn’t love her. He lived and existed for two people now. One of them was dead. The other was her half–sister. The child he spent a long time searching for in the villages. It hadn’t occurred to him to check the castle. It couldn’t have. Not just anyone could enter the castle, and Nymeria was thankful for that. Else, he would have found her and made her his true heir. He would have given her the life Nymeria owned.
She hadn’t just run from home to find the symbol of her father’s mistake. She planned to kill her. The Goddess wasn’t in agreement, seeing where her plans took her.
Nymeria had tried to do it with the dagger the woman, Jessamine, gave her. She’d had the dagger poised for her neck, ready to slit her throat, and she’d struck. Only to get stopped by the Alpha King who she still considered too young and pretty to be a ruler.
His hazel eyes had burned her as he caught her wrist. “She saved your life, and you would kill her to repay that debt?”
Nymeria had tried snatching her hand back, but the Alpha King disarmed her before she could so much as move, or touch a hair on the sleeping woman’s head. “I do not share Jessamine’s sentiments. You’ll lose your limbs the next time you try touching her.” A golden ring had glowed in his eyes then and his aura had grown so vast, it mirrored her father’s. And until Nymeria left the cave, the Alpha King had kept watch
5/6
+25 BONUS
- Nymeria
over his sleeping lady.
“Did you?” Nymeria’s father asked again, bringing her back to the present, and tears gathered in Nymeria’s eyes at the hope she found in her father’s eyes. He didn’t even care where she had been, how she fared, why she looked so thin and gaunt. All he cared about was if she’d
found her.
So, Nymeria sobbed, taking her father’s hand. “I did, Father, but she’s dead.”
It’d break him, she knew, but she’d rather see her father broken than have her life given to a whore’s daughter.
