Damon June Iondora was squatting on the ground.

The imperial crown sat slightly askew on his dark brown hair, its seven violet-jeweled points catching the pale winter sunlight and scattering it across the frozen grass.

The mantle of the emperor, heavy with threads of true gold, pooled around him on the dirt like a discarded picnic blanket. The hem was definitely getting stained, yet he did not appear to care.

In one hand, he held a small wooden stick. The stick had probably come from one of the skeletal trees lining the garden path, a fallen branch snapped to size. He was using it to scratch a grid into the hard earth.

Two lines across. Two lines down. A game board.

Across from him, also squatting, also with a stick, was Princess Gertrude. She was frowning at the grid, intensely concentrating like a general surveying a battlefield. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

To Damon’s right, squatted Prince Jove. His eyes were bright and alert, fixed on the game board. To Damon’s left squatted Prince Reginald. The Second Prince’s shoulders were hunched against the cold, his breath misting in the grey air, his gaze flickering between the grid and his eldest brother’s profile.

No one spoke.

Damon drew a circle in the center square.

Gertrude, after a moment of deliberation, placed her X in the corner.

Damon placed his next circle. Gertrude countered with an X. The game proceeded in silence.

Jove shifted his weight, the frost-crusted grass crunching beneath his boots. He opened his mouth as though to speak, then closed it again.

Reginald watched Damon’s face. Not the game. Damon’s face. The way his violet eyes, the Iondora birthright, tracked the grid. The way his fingers held the wooden stick with the same careful manner he used to hold a scepter.

They did not know why their brother... Well, their emperor now was doing this.

They had seen him ascend the obsidian steps. They had seen him kneel and rise with the crown upon his head. They had seen him condemn a baron to ruin with the same flat, cold voice he had once used to offer their mother mercy.

And now he was squatting on the frozen ground in his imperial robe, playing tic-tac-toe with a stick.

They did not know why.

But they had joined him anyway.

When they had first spotted him from the garden colonnade, this strange, solitary figure in violet and gold, crouched in the dirt like a farmer testing the soil, they had not consulted each other.

No words had passed between them. Gertrude had simply walked forward, found a stick of her own, and squatted across from him. Jove had followed. Reginald had followed.

No one had asked permission, nor did they offer explanation.

They had simply formed a circle around the grid, four Iondora siblings squatting in the winter garden, and the game had begun.

In the past, up until very recently, they could only see him as the Crown Prince.

That was what their mother, Lady Vera, had taught them. He was a rival. An adversary. A threat to be managed, feared, and ultimately, though she had never said the word aloud, eliminated.

His death would have been convenient.

They had believed her. Or they had tried to. It was easier to believe her than to question why their eldest brother sometimes looked at them with something that was not quite indifference. Something that might have been, in another world, in another family, concern.

But since Jove’s incident the lens had shattered.

They could not see the Crown Prince anymore. That figure had been a construct, or a political convenience, like a necessary fiction for a woman who needed her children to see a monster instead of a man.

And the man was squatting in the dirt, playing tic-tac-toe with a stick.

Their real elder brother. That was what they had started to see. In the days since Jove’s wounding, since Lady Sees’s elixir, since their embrace... they had begun to see him as something other than a rival.

And now this.

Damon drew a circle that blocked Gertrude’s row. She scowled and Reginald’s lips twitched.

Now, seeing him squatting on the ground in his crown and imperial robe, the hem of his mantle stained with winter dirt, a child’s game scratched into the earth with a broken branch—

Somehow, they were able to see him as their emperor.

Easier than before. Clearer than before.

Why?

Why would seeing him like this, so unguarded, undignified, silly and strange... so unlike the image of imperial majesty they had been taught to revere, make the crown seem more natural on his head?

It should have diminished him, right?

The crown was supposed to be worn on a throne, not on a frozen garden lawn.

The emperor was supposed to be distant, untouchable, a figure of awe and fear and incomprehensible authority. He was not supposed to play tic-tac-toe with sticks. He was not supposed to get dirt on his mantle.

And yet.

And yet the crown had never looked heavier than it did right now, balanced slightly askew on Damon’s dark hair while he considered his next move. The mantle had never seemed more real than it did pooling in the frost-crusted grass.

Strange, Reginald thought.

Strange, Gertrude thought as she watched her eldest brother block her second row and realized he was going to win.

Strange, Jove thought as he watched the game unfold.

Why would this unguarded human moment give them clarity?

Could it be because they finally see him as their brother?

And because they wanted whoever they saw as family to be the emperor, they could finally see him, their brother, as their emperor?

Someone they could call their protector. Someone who was blood among water, solid ground in a world that had shifted beneath their feet?

Someone who would squat in the dirt with them and play a child’s game and never once ask why they had come?

"Visit your sister in the dungeon sometimes." Damon drew his final circle, three in a row, defeating Gertrude.

Thanks to his words, three heads lifted. Three pairs of eyes fixed on the Emperor, who was already scratching a fresh grid into the frost-hardened earth with the tip of his stick.

"Despite how she is," Damon continued, his voice even, unhurried, as though he were commenting on the weather rather than suggesting they voluntarily enter the same enclosed space as Angela, "she likes to see your faces around."

Ah.

This was what he chose to break the silence with?