Essentia

Gossamé really, truly hadn’t intended to make this big a scene when she arrived at the capitol, but Tenacetta had forced her hand. They could have all sat down and talked things through, but the moment Gossamé, not the executioner, had emerged from the ground jet at the foot of the staircase in the palace’s courtyard, Dimantu had come screaming from the sky.

It was, of course, going badly for Tenacetta. Under the pale sun and teal sky, Apolonique had almost fully dismantled the other Magisterial despite being a third the size. They had taken the Crown Princess by surprise, what with Gossamé having assigned each part of the Sync Rite to corresponding rings so that it could be carried out in a single gesture, not to mention the shock of her having a sync bond at all, but ultimately the real difference was just sheer power.

Tenacetta screamed agony, the metallic debris of Dimantu’s frame showering down like defeated comets, each cracked plate or crushed chunk of armor slowly sinking into the ground as if it were thick water and not solid earth. A part of Gossamé mourned the loss of such a grand Magisterial, but she valued her own life—believed much more strongly in herself as an asset to the kingdom than she did Tenacetta, no matter how fierce a fighter Dimantu had been—and thus she continued to hold her hand before her face, fingers in splayed formation and crackling silver light whipping out around each ring as she and Apolonique fought together.

“You’re a demon! A traitor!” Gossamé’s half-sister howled at her as it ended. Apolonique’s energy scythe bisected Dimantu’s helm horizontally, the two halves of the maroon head falling in separate arcs until they hit the ground. Seconds later, they had vanished, and the sparkling sync screens of the Crown Princess’ circlet went dark.

If Gossamé had felt saddened by the extinguishing of Dimantu’s existence, she held no such emotion for Tenacetta, who had attacked not only a fellow royal, but also a person who, for all the Crown Princess knew, was completely defenseless. A pathetic thing to do, in Gossamé’s view—the action of someone who had never seen actual war, never come to understand that the most dangerous threat was the one that could not be seen, only guessed at.

From the high whitestone outer walls, guards stared down at Gossamé in stunned awe. From the top of the long staircase, members of the court who had come to gawk, attracted by the clamor of screeching metal and shrieking boosters, looked down on her in horror.

She’d just created an almighty power vacuum, one she almost wished Immaylin were here to capitalize on. But it was the fact that the Crown Prince was not here, instead endeavoring to shape himself into a worthy candidate for the kingship, that endeared him to her, so she would just have to make do with her contradictory feelings on that matter.

“Gossamé!?”

The crowd of people at the entrance to the palace parted, and Gossamé’s mother pushed through. Gossamé watched her hand fly to cover her mouth. But she shrunk to the side a moment later, the rest of the court likewise drawing back as the king appeared.

He took in the sight expressionlessly: one daughter, sentenced to death and yet present and alive; another, a humiliated, sobbing heap halfway down the stairs. And, above it all, the gleaming mech whose presence made Gossamé worthy of the throne—a gleaming, superior figure strong in the sun.

“Come, princesscia,” was all he said before he turned and walked back through the grand doors to the palace.

And so it was that Gossamé, rings still twinkling as Apolonique took up Dimantu’s station atop the tallest spire in all the kingdom, came to stand before the same council that had condemned her to death.

“There is a saying,” her father began. “That no one who witnesses the falling of the sky makes peace with the sea. Do you know what it means, Gossamé?”

She shook her head from the upholstered wooden chair where she sat, in the center of a circular rug dyed an all-too-familiar azure blue. Arrayed in a half circle about her position, a gallery of faces both stoic and mottled by rage, dismay, fear, or all the emotions at once flanked the king.

All this, to determine the fate of a princess who, yet again, had refused to serve her country in the precise way she’d been ordered.

“It is a warning,” he continued. “No one who sees a nation end, whether her own or another, can remain unmoved with in tides that come after such a collapse. No matter how grand or how wicked an empire, no matter how foolish an enterprise of mankind, a country that falls marks an era’s end. Not even the victors of war find true serenity in the conquering of their enemies. The sea, once stirred by the fall of the sky, never fully returns to rest.”

Gossamé didn’t particularly see what the saying had to do with her situation, but judged that saying so would not help her cause. Being before the council that had already tried and failed to destroy her caused no fear, knowing that if she asked it Apolonique would split the palace itself in two to save her, but she had not come back for retribution.

Why had she come back?

This was the puzzle she’d wrestled with as the ground jet sped from Macator to the crown city of Wheyš, even as Apolonique annihilated Dimantu in a silver-and-gold blur. Once she’d escaped, she could have abandoned the kingdom that had, in some sense, betrayed her. She could have razed it to the ground with the Magisterial at her side. And yet, all she had done was present herself back to the status quo, albeit with right to the crown that she had hidden for years now in the open.

“This is why you and your brothers and sisters have been sent throughout our lands,” her father was saying. “To understand that a nation is the sky in which we all dwell. In its firmament, you, Gossamé, are a bright star. You will perhaps even one day shine brightest of all your siblings. But that day is not yet here, and a star that leaves its place may shatter the heavens for its own selfishness.”

“I have only ever tried to love the kingdom,” she said, not intending to lie, but still wondering if what she said was true. An uproar erupted in the chamber in protest, but her thoughts had gone elsewhere.

She had tried many things since syncing with Apolonique—destroyed entire hostile regiments in the dead of night, leveled mountains weeks before armies could arrive to pass through valleys, redirected remote rivers toward dying farmlands, foiled assassins with snap of her hand, sat in the towers of cowering aristocrats who had no idea how the twenty-fourth princess had discovered plans to divvy up a border district between themselves when the meeting had been conducted in the depths of a forest impenetrable to human sight.

Gossamé had done all this to try to understand not only the kingdom, but herself. Love the kingdom. Be loyal to it above all. These were the commands she had heard as a child, but she had watched so many of her siblings act as if they were themselves the kingdom., behaving like stars.

And then, as if the realization had dropped from the heavens, she understood that her father was wrong. She was no star. Perhaps he wished to dwell in the firmament, teaching his children to shine from regal distance, and then winking out to leave only the teal sky in his wake. But she was different.

She almost laughed, recalling the executioner’s final words to her. So the answer had been there, at the end of the spear, after all. Now, it painted itself over the canvas that had remained undefined for so long in the depth of her soul.

Gossamé felt something shake itself awake within her, a sensation she remembered from the day Apolonique had emerged from its star—a real star—in glory. After all this time being commanded to love something apart from herself, she finally understood: she was sunlight. Her, and Immaylin’s people, and the maid, and everything she had done, and even the land that was the sky. Together, they were an everlasting parade, ascending truths lapping forward into the future like waves on a beach of white sand.

Unnoticed by the feuding chaos around Gossamé, her rings brightened, and she smiled.

“You did say,” she whispered into her hands as she brought them together and lifted them to cover her mouth. “That it would be the last time you addressed me as princess.”

When she spoke again, her ringed hand returned to the familiar position. Although she could not see it herself, she knew what all the kingdom would: a piercing beam of pink light lancing into the heavens.

“To all gathered here,” she said, the entire room falling silent as the princess who had returned from the dead spoke, silver light brilliant between her fingers. “Gossamé, princess of the realm, requests her claim to the crown be acknowledged.”