1 The Tower
As kids, most girls dream to live in a majestic palace. Princesses, marry princes, wearing crowns, beautiful dresses and, the smart girls, remember the heavenly food.
Unfortunately for Yelizaveta, or Veta for the intimate, this dream was more like a realistic nightmare.
Let us start from the beginning. Our tale takes place on a snowy land. Many might think about the beautiful, tall and mighty mountains. Stalactites, snowflakes. The breathtaking frozen lake with all the frosted grass and trees. The hibernating animals and the cute polar ones.
If that's what you thought well... to some extent you're not so wrong.
Not that Veta would know. She has only seen the view of outside of her window.
The tallest tower, tallest window, furthest from the world. And to bad for her, the sight from her room shows only one thing, white.
As far as the eye can see. Pure white. Immense whiteness. Every time, everyday, always, for 19 years straight. All white. Not a single tree, she has never seen a tree. She has never seen the blue sky, her's is grey/white and straight to black night.
Let us not forget the cold. It's freezing, gelid, ice cold and get worse at night. That's why after some years she just stopped opening the window, there wasn't anything new to see and it spread the chill. Not. Worth. It.
She hates snow. She hates white. She hates cold.
Something that Veta doesn't hate? That's tough considering that she hasn't really seen, met, tried or experienced much of anything. Yet we could say she likes to read.
She's been on the Tower since she can remember. She has only ever been in her room and has never left. She does have a portrait of her mother. Her father...
The room is simple and plain. No one has ever given her the choice of redecorating it, so it remained what it has always been for a few years. That's until Veta got so bored she started to draw what she thought the outside world would look like on her plain walls.
The walls have blue paint to represent a sky and no clouds, for Veta has had enough of white. There are three suns, for she has changed her mind about how the sun might look like over the years. Let us just say that the first version of a blue eyed with red lips sun wasn't suiting for her.
She made her best to make it look like her room was from something she's only read about. Summer.
Apart from walls we have plain bed, plain bathroom, plain floor, plain fireplace, plain curtains.
There were only two things about her room worthy of any attention. Okay... besides her abstract walls.
The room's door and bookshelf.
The door was huge and made of dark iron. The lock is on the outside. And because of its material, the door is always cold.
The door is something that makes Veta hopeful, it means freedom and change. Yet, it also represents everything she hates, the cold.
Her father has never paid her a visit. He won't allow her mother to go through the damned door. And after she no longer needed the helping hands to dress, bath and such, even the maids stopped entering. She misses someone to talk to. Sometimes she feels like she's going insane. Sometimes, even when the fire is burning and she's all covered up, it's so, so, so cold...
If you're wandering, the door had a covered entry for food to be passed by and that was it...
That has been "it" for 19 years...
About the bookshelf though... That was Veta's ray of sunlight. It was gigantic. Veta learned how to read at the tender age of 4, she barely ever repeats books and still haven't finished all of them. It takes an entire wall and half another. It's a floor to ceiling shelf, wooden based and the books are color organized. Sometimes she drools looking at it...
The books opened so many doors for her, maybe except for the one in her room, but they did help. They took her to places with green glass, rain and insects. Things she has never seen, don't really know if are real and yet find reassurance within. The books talk about family love and loyalty. Romance, adventure and comedy. The world can't be that bad if it has people writing like this, right?
It really goes to show that Veta's life will never be anything like that. At the begging she thought it was fate's way of rubbing salt at her wounds. But now... those stories became her getaway, they made her company. When she had no one to talk to, no one to play with her, be her friend and even be her lover, she had the books. She lived through them.
Some would say she's the definition of a damsel in distress. She wouldn't. That would implicate the necessity of a gallant knight. She did waited for a while and even though about growing her hair and escaping R*punzel style... Unfortunately she had no luck. No white horsed prince and no long blonde hair.
Veta had the palest skin with brownish hair and dark eyes. Her lips were red to the point of being purple due to the constant cold and her cheeks had a light blush. She was tall, had no curves and if you look fast you will mistake her for a femboy. A pretty femboy.
Who cares? No one's seeing her and the books never judged.
She stopped seeing them as just the constant reminder of what she couldn't have. They were her private world.
...
But why? Why was she locked up? Why can't she leave?
The most important question is: who is she?
To that, I'll have to tell you an older story.
The realm of Allegra.
King Pyotr Oleg Petrov and queen Arina Petrova are Yelizaveta parents. That might have given you a tip about who she is.
Now it's royalty class time!! What's the king's main duty?
- is it to make the people happy?
Absolutely not.
- to improve the economy and the relations between realms?
Why would he do that? He has his royal court, that's their job.
- maybe to represent the kingdom?
Hmm... his face indeed was printed on the coins and paper money... but no.
The king's main duty is to produce an heir.
Male heir.
The next king.
That also made the queen just an incubator ready to be used and discarded once no longer needed.
That's actually part of the law. The king can only take in concubines after his first *son* is born.
By the way, that doesn't mean he can't/won't cheat. It just means that it can't be public and yet, it is not a secret. He won't try to hide and if the maids know everyone knows.
Either way, daddy gets the crown, has to marry mommy and make baby boy to keep on going with his life.
And as I said that is what is expected of him. The main thing. He can be a despotic tyrant all he wants, as long as there's an heir on the oven he got freedom card.
Now, imagine that 30 years after his coronation there was still no son... people got concerned.
The court, remember? They weren't happy. And neither was Pyotr.
That was until the day mother finally got pregnant.
The thing is, the pregnancy is supposed to be kept a secret until the child's birth. And it's not like the secret affairs of the adulterous king, this is a top tier secret, if and when leaked the involved must and will be hanged.
That was to avoid building up expectations on the subjects just for the newborn to die a couple of days after the birth. The heir was the main symbol of hope, it meant that the gods were blessing them, it meant that the king did his job. It meant that good times were to come.
And, unfortunately, newborns indeed died most of the times. The cold, the lack of milk, bad hygiene conditions, bad water... It was truly surprising if they did survive.
But hold on your horses if you think that this baby was our Veta, I'm sorry to disappoint you. It won't be the last time..
