Chapter Text
Amara’s coronation is only weeks after her mother’s death.
Realistically, she had known the Queen’s passing would lead to her succession. But that is her mother, and she’s still only nineteen - two facts the entire country seems to have forgotten. She grieves. She cries. She is dressed up in fancy robes and jewellery and coached through what will happen on her coronation day. She cries some more. They re-apply her makeup.
After the festivities are over, and she is finally, blissfully let go from her duties - she does not go to her husband, the new Prince Consort, who has been by her side throughout the ceremony. She goes to her sister.
Ga’ran lays with her head in Amara’s lap, so terribly indulgent to her sister’s wants to ‘go back to normal’. Amara’s hand trembles atop her head of sleek, dark hair, but the familiarity calms her more than anything.
The public don’t know she can’t channel yet. Perhaps they will never know - she is soon turning eighteen herself, and it is possibly the palace’s best kept secret. One she’s been desperately trying to correct in private since she was but a girl, but still a secret nonetheless. Now their mother is gone, the only souls to know about the deception are Amara and the two older acolytes still attempting to train her.
“I can’t do this,” Amara murmurs quietly, the lump in her throat sounding anything but regal.
You’ll have to, is the unspoken word, though Ga’ran is kind enough not to say it.
“It’ll be okay. You’ve been training for this your whole life,” she says instead, still slightly unsure. She has just lost her mother too, Amara supposes, and neither of them are taking it particularly well.
“I don’t want to,” she sniffs, childish and upset. “I want Mother. And I, I don’t want…”
Her hand drifts to her stomach, miserably moulds to the shape of the small bump there.
The Queen’s death had been unexpected, to say the least. She was healthy, active, had barely been through her forties at all - and so Amara hadn’t been expecting to be Queen for many long years yet. She’d thought she would have so much more time with her mother in her life; so much more time as a princess: with her husband, her minimal duties, her training for the role. So much more time to take it easy with her baby on the way.
It had seemed the perfect time. She and Dhurke were married a few months prior: it was a beautiful occasion, for her and for the Khura’inese people. The day was joyous, incredible, and if her wedding was an indication of how the coming years would go, she would be happy to have a baby in this golden stage of her life. She would continue the royal bloodline, after all. She would be Queen, and so would her daughters when the time came.
Her mother’s health declined quickly, and intensely. Amara hadn’t even had a chance to tell her the news before she passed, and after that didn’t have time to come to terms with her death before they were planning the coronation. There were a few measly weeks she was allowed to grieve in peace, and even then she was petrified of what was soon to come.
Ga’ran stills, looking up at her with wide eyes. “You’re…?”
Amara nods with a sniffle, the words simply too much to speak aloud.
“I didn’t know.”
“Nobody does, except for Dhurke and I.” Her face crumples. “We didn’t want to rush into telling anyone. It’s a royal baby, after all, and it’s still so early on. But- but now I’m to be Queen, and I’ve never even held a baby, apart from you!”
Ga’ran rises to sit atop the duvet, and wastes no time in wrapping her arms around her sister. It feels more comforting than anything else could, knowing that this is all the blood she has left in the world - aside from the baby, but the little one isn’t due for a long while yet.
It’s scary, as embarrassed as she is to admit it. She had wanted to go to her mother for guidance more than anything - and now she has departed to the Twilight Realm where Amara cannot reach her, not even aware she had her first grandchild on the way. It’s frightening knowing that only she, Dhurke and Ga’ran are aware of the little one’s existence, and that she holds a secret she will soon have to announce to the public, so soon after her coronation.
She had been excited to be a mother for the first time. And she still is, she supposes - she just hadn’t expected it to be like this. Not being Queen, not being an orphan, not feeling completely alone and terrified. After seeing the positive on the test for the first time she had been more than elated, but now…
“I just- I thought I had more time,” she says, her sob dissolving into a quiet whimper into her sister’s shoulder. “I don’t want this. If- if I could give you the throne, you know I would.”
“I don’t want it,” Ga’ran murmurs kindly, tucking a stray lock of Amara’s hair behind her ears with those long-nailed, manicured fingers. “I just want you to be happy.”
The princesses Amara Sigatar Khura’in and Ga’ran Sigatar Khura’in are seven and eight when they attend their father’s funeral.
The Prince Regent had not been a particularly old or physically unhealthy man, yet there they were nonetheless - staring down the ornately decorated tomb whilst the country roared in commemoration around them. A royal funeral was a big affair, Amara already knew, but it didn’t make it feel any less inappropriate for their time in mourning.
Ga’ran looked tiny in those black robes they dressed her in. She had barely so much as moved since his death; she’d always been an independent girl, asking to dress herself even though they had handmaidens paid to do such a job, learning to speak formally and acting more than mature for any girl her age. The morning of the funeral, she had merely sat on the bed and let herself be dressed. She slumped like a doll when they brushed her hair. It frightened Amara more than anything.
The ghostly apparition of her sister sat beside her at the tomb, silent. She had a lifelessness Amara had never seen in her before: her soft green eyes were dull, her sweet face slack and empty, the flowing black silk of her robes swallowing her up.
Not that it was a surprise, of course. Ga’ran had been the one to find him.
Amara hadn’t been privy to the details. She had been told what happened in a rather clinical manner: that their father had gone to the Twilight Realm and would not be coming back, but that he loved them both very much and would continue to do so from the transcendental plane. He had passed in his sleep, they told her. It was a tragedy, both in its abruptness and its prematurity - but they would be okay. He was at peace.
Ga’ran hadn’t spoken a word of it. Amara hadn’t seen their father when he passed, but she had heard her sister’s terrible, frightened scream.
She had crawled into Amara’s bedchambers that night, the first initiative she had seen her take since that horrible day. She looked much more like herself in the nightclothes Amara had seen on her before, but that deadened look on her youthful face was still there. It was unsettling, how ill-matched it was.
“You’re scaring me,” Amara couldn’t help but find herself saying. It wasn’t like it was much of a secret; anyone would be able to see the anxiousness in her face, even with how young Ga’ran was. She didn't see much point in hiding it.
“I- I keep seeing father,” her voice trembled, hands gripping in the bedsheets. “How he- he looked, in his room, and I can’t stop seeing it.”
“Oh, Ga’ran,” she murmured quietly, in the gentle way the servants would use with her when she was upset. “It’s okay. He wasn’t in pain. He was asleep.”
“He wasn’t,” she sniffled, shoulders trembling. “I- I saw him, on the floor all bloody, and they- they said I couldn’t tell anyone.”
Amara frowned. “What do you mean, all bloody?”
“They- they said no one was to know and I don’t know why, and I don’t know why they told you he was asleep because- because he wasn’t, and I don’t understand why I had to- to lie about it. Father was hurt, and- and I took his hand, and it, it was all, all…”
“Ga’ran, what do you mean? What happened?”
She shook her head profusely, face scrunched up in fear. “It- they told me not to tell because we- we’re royals, and nobody could know. But, but I called for help and I went to hold his hand and it- oh, it- his- his arm was all-”
She trailed off in a panic, clutching at her own wrists and starting to shake with the fear. Amara didn’t know what else to do but to hold her the way their mother had done when they were very, very little, so long ago that it felt strangely foreign; she just wrapped her arms around her sister as far as they could go, and clung on tightly as she rested her cheek on top of her head.
“Do they think somebody could have done it?” Amara whispered.
“They- they said it definitely wasn’t that. And that it was shameful, and wrong, and I was never to mention it ever again. Not to anyone, not even to you.”
“...Does Mother know?”
Ga'ran shook her head again. “I don't know. They won't tell me anything. They said that- that they won't speak of the matter any more.”
At that, Amara went still and wordless; their small age gap meant there was a negligible amount that she knew and her younger sister did not, but she couldn’t bear to think of what had truly happened to their father, behind the lies and cover-ups and the clouded mind of a scared daughter.
Of course, she believed Ga’ran’s word over anyone else’s, no matter whether they were a palace official or not, or what the public was told to believe. Ga’ran wouldn’t have lied about that, and even if she had, Amara didn’t think she could conjure up such a heartbreaking sob on her own: something terrible had happened to their father, and there was only a small handful of things that would make the attendants forbid Ga’ran from talking about it. Even smaller when Ga’ran had told her about the blood on his arms, and how ‘shameful’ it was to speak of in the royal family.
She held her sister tighter to quell the nausea that was brewing in her own stomach.
“I don’t think I believe in the Twilight Realm,” Ga’ran murmured through her tears, shivering even underneath the bedcovers as Amara stroked her hair. “I don’t think I can believe in any of it anymore.”
Ga’ran flourishes as a Queen.
Amara hadn’t ever expected to see it - the line of succession meant that if Ga’ran was Queen, then she would be dead, just like their mother, their grandmother, their grandmother’s sister, and every woman who had come before them. A succession always came with grief, no matter who had passed and who was ascending. And after all the loss that had graced their family, where Ga'ran had been a first-hand witness to it all, Amara wasn't expecting her to take it so... well.
But now she is ‘dead’, too, and her tomb stands magnificently right in the middle of the palace gardens she used to envision her many children playing. She’d wanted three, at least, when she pictured her future family as a girl - but now Dhurke was gone and Nahyuta with him and she never, ever wanted to have any other family, ever again.
Ga’ran was there throughout it all, however. She had even lent her own skin to temporarily draft over the wound Amara had received in the fire; until her body was strong enough to donate her own graft and heal her extensive injuries without killing her in the process. Amara now sports a rough, uneven scar spanning across her chest and torso, a deep and fleshy red she’d been told would fade slightly in time. Her sister has a similar, muscle-pink wound on the left side of her stomach from where they’d taken the graft.
“You don’t… blame me, do you?” Ga’ran asks her nervously one night after coming back from a royal conference. She wears the royal robes splendidly, and the crown suits her sweet little face; she’s good at donning regalness and just as good at taking it off to see Amara. She arrives at her sister’s bedchambers dressed down and gentle, with not a guard to speak of by her side. “I know it must be dreadful, watching me take over what you loved.”
Amara’s heart aches. It’s not technically her room anymore, either - it is a guest room on the far side of the palace’s west wing, where all of the guards and royal subjects are forbidden from entering for her own safety. Nobody can know she’s there. Ga’ran had so quickly enacted a plan to keep her safe from harm, and whilst she was already so incapacitated from pain and injury, how could she not be grateful for that?
“Of course I don’t blame you,” she says, reaching her hand over to squeeze Ga’ran’s palm. “You did what you had to, and you’re protecting me. Don’t be silly.”
The sigh of relief that leaves her is obvious, and Amara is half expecting her to droop to the ground with the almost extreme way her shoulders deflate.
“I just get so scared,” she murmurs.
“That’s okay. I got scared too, especially at first.”
“Scared that- you won’t like me.” She ducks her head, face coloured a deep and shameful red. “You were a good Queen, and I’ve taken it from you. And having the throne wouldn’t ever be worth you hating me! You have to believe me, that I didn’t want this to happen! I-”
“Ga’ran! It’s okay, I promise,” Amara quickly interrupts, resting a soothing hand on her shoulder and wincing when it jostles the burn site, still not fully healed. “It’s not your fault this happened, I know it isn’t. You’ve done more than I could ever ask of you.”
Not that she could have asked, since she was unconscious for days after the incident. But Ga’ran had stepped up so graciously, forgoing her dream of being Khura’in’s Minister of Justice and taking over in her sister’s stead so the country didn’t fall into chaos without a ruler. Amara didn’t understand it; she had certainly never done something as selfless as that, even though the people had deemed her the most merciful queen Khura’in had ever beheld.
Ga’ran had the added fear, too, that her secret would be exposed, and the country would find out about her inability to channel. Of course, Amara would have to come back to the throne, rendering her hiding completely fruitless - but she hoped a long time would pass until that day, and Holy Mother willing, it would not happen at all. Helping her with channelings to keep their (now shared) secret was, really, the least she could do.
Ga’ran raises her head to look up at her, and Amara sees a mirror of her own eyes, her face markings, the intricate queenly headwear she has yet to take off. It’s almost like seeing a version of what could have been; she remembers her life before all of this terror had happened, a much-loved Queen with a beautiful husband and son, and the short couple of years she had looked like that. A round, bright face and eyes not dampened by hopelessness or fear.
“...You still think I’m good?” She whispers, as though saying it too loud would break everything apart, and shatter the gentleness Amara had given her.
“Of course I do,” Amara says back, just as quiet. “You’re my sister.”