She became a creature of spite. She would sit for hours in the dark, refusing candles, letting the darkness press against her eyes. The light hurt now, revealing the monster she was becoming. She resented the healthy, the whole, the unblemished. She hated her husband for his smooth skin; she hated her children for their bright, unclouded eyes.
“Why me?” she asked the darkness that night, alone in her chambers. Her voice had changed. It had harmonics now, undertones that vibrated in the bones. contamination corrupting queens body and soul
As a result, the queen begins to experience a range of debilitating symptoms. Her skin, once radiant and unblemished, becomes dull and acne-prone. Her eyes, once bright and sparkling, grow tired and sunken. Her joints ache with a dull, persistent pain, making it difficult for her to move with the same ease and poise that once characterized her every step. She became a creature of spite
Her name was Elara, and she had been crowned at seventeen, anointed with chrism that had been blessed by three successive popes. She had ruled for fourteen years, her reign defined by compromise and careful mercy. But mercy, she was learning, leaves doors open. And through some door—a crack in the cathedral’s foundation, a rusted bolt in the aqueduct, a piece of bread from a starving village—something had entered. She resented the healthy, the whole, the unblemished
It always had.
The darkness answered. Not in words. In memory .
She remembered a day when she was seven years old, playing in the palace gardens. She had fallen, scraped her knee on a broken flagstone. The gardener—Tomas, the same Tomas, though he had been young then, with clear eyes—had knelt beside her. He had pressed a handful of soil to the wound. This will help , he had said. The earth remembers how to heal .