Danae watched helplessly as the red jewels encased with gold slipped right through her fingers, almost as if they weren’t even there to begin with. They fell through her into some sort of dark expanse that surrounded her endlessly in this hellscape of a nightmare. All that was here was the empty blackness and the ghost-like gems that she couldn’t recognize. The girl willed her fingers to bend, her palms to close, her feet to move to stop this loss, but there was nothing she could do. She was practically frozen in fear.

But fear of what? A harsh voice whispered in her ear, she could practically feel the heat of its breath hitting her cheeks even though she knew that there was nothing behind her. She didn’t even need to look anymore.

Nothing was ever there.

Are you afraid of the darkness, little Danae? The voice was circling her now. Moving back and forth between her ears, but always behind her. A small shiver traveled up her spine as she was forced to listen to the disembodied voice of Lukos, her own personal monster for the past two weeks, taunt her with what he could have done that fateful day on his ship.

Her fear did not fail to capture his attention. Oh look, you’re shivering. Danae desperately tried to shake her head, to chase away the voice, but to no avail. It must be so cold down there. The ocean has never been a friendly place, has it Danae?”

With his words, the scene shifted from empty blackness to a stormy sea. She still floated above the choppy, dark waves that threatened to overcome her, but she knew it wouldn’t be the case for very long. Not when he felt the invisible arm of Lukos wrap itself around the hair she no longer had. He lifted the frozen girl by it, painfully pulling on the roots.

She swung about freely for a moment before the unseen force whispered one final warning in her ear, I know what it is you fear Danae and you can’t escape it. Not like how you escaped me.

With that, he dropped her and suddenly she was falling down, down, down towards the inky blackness beneath her.

“Get up Danae.”

Her eyes flew open with a start as a cold rush of air hit her. Startled and still sleep ridden, Danae fumbled for the blanket to hide under, not ready to face whatever intruder had rudely awoken her like this.

Though when she saw who it was, there was no point. There was no hiding from her mother, Circenia of Stravos.

A grumbled noise of confusion left her as Circenia’s words sunk in. Perhaps in other circumstances what she said would have been discernible; it might have been a statement made in disbelief at the news or maybe a question as to why their family would be welcomed at such an event given their sudden and disgraceful fall. However, whatever it was lost to the girl’s grogginess and the near gravel-like quality to her voice that had been brought on from the two weeks she had failed to use it. It was just an unintended consequence of what had been a necessary silence. At first, it had just been easier not to talk in order to let the shallow cut and underlying bruises on her damaged throat heal. That time in self-imposed silence though had allowed her own thoughts, fueled by the sense of shame from what happened with Lukos, to be lost to the self-hatred she always secretly carried within her. In the course of a few days she had convinced herself that if she ever mentioned what happened that fateful day when her family’s world fell apart, they would treat her as nothing more than a stupid, little girl who thought she could stand her ground against a pirate.

She had worked far too hard to let that happen.

All her life, nothing had brought Danae more pride than her name and how she was proving herself to be worthy of the legacy it carried. For years, the girl had held tightly to her secret belief that if things had been different… if she had the fortune to be born a boy… she could have easily displaced Elias as the heir to everything her family stood for. It was an easy thing to believe in given how she had always been the light in her father’s eyes; how naturally she had taken to the family business; how she had inherited the ambition that went hand in and hand with the Stravos name.

Now that meant nothing. Their family name was now just as worthless as the dirt they walked upon.

Though, not that mattered to the woman in front of her, who Danae had to fight to hold a neutral expression for. In recent days, the young girl had heard through the walls the many exclamations of how her mother was suffering the most from their loss of nobility. Did she not stop to even consider her daughters? They were innocent victims caught in the wake of their brother’s mistake and the two of them did not have the same promise of safety that Circenia held. So what if her mother now had to refrain from ordering jewels and dining on the finest food Athenia had to offer. She was still married to Keikelius. Her future was assured. The same could not be said for the girls.

Then, to top it all off, even in her self-confinement Danae knew that her mother was now doubling down on her former Xanthos identity, proclaiming herself to be a princess of their line as her true family fell apart.

In Danae’s eyes, through the limited snapshot she had, this was absolutely unforgivable. How dare she try to distance herself from her husband, her [i[children[/i], in order to save some extravagant lifestyle of idleness that if allowed to continue would easily run them all into the ground? Then to add insult to injury, she was trying to reestablish herself as a member of the family who had done this to them in the first place. The Xanthos family, as far as Danae was concerned, was nothing more than a house full of snakes and hellhounds that deserved to fall just as far as they had cast down Stravos… especially that perfect princess Persephone. Out of all of them, that gorgon deserved to suffer the most.

Why on earth would Circenia want to remind the people of her connections to such monsters?

It boggled the young girl’s mind and did absolutely nothing to raise the already fraught perception of the woman in Danae’s mind. Circenia and her youngest never did truly get along. She was too much like her father and had the misfortune of inheriting Circenia’s stubbornness as well. Perhaps it was this shared boldness that gave Danae the wordless courage to defy her mother as she slowly sat up in the bed, almost as if only to display the bedridden mess of tangles that used to reach the small of her back, but now barely reached the bottom of her ears at their longest part. But instead of climbing out of the bed to follow her mother’s implied instruction to get ready, Danae merely shook her head in disagreement while subtly pointing at her hair.

Without saying a single word, Danae conveyed countless messages to her mother. She expressed the shame for being in such a state, the anger at the people responsible, her apathy to the issues of the outside world… all in a single motion, they were made clear. Her mother may not understand everything that was going on in Danae’s mind and what she was trying to say without making a single sound, but she would understand one thing at least.

Uncle, King, Enemy. It didn’t matter who it was that died. It wouldn’t be enough to pull Danae out of her own misery.

She had no intention of going.

Circenia of Stravos,