A small, forgotten inn sat on the edge of an unranked trading kingdom, countless kilometers from the Solace Kingdom. Smoke curled lazily from its chimney, carrying the scent of cheap stew and sour ale, while the common room below buzzed with the low murmur of merchants and mercenaries. Upstairs, in the cheapest corner room that smelled of damp wood and old tallow, a woman sat alone at a scarred wooden table, a half-empty cup of watered wine untouched before her.
She was breathtaking in the way a winter storm is breathtaking: long white hair cascading like fresh snow down to the curve of her lower back, golden eyes now ringed with twin circles of abyssal black that seemed to swallow light instead of reflecting it. To any passer-by she appeared no older than twenty-five, but that was a lie carved in centuries.
Lyssandra Solace, Queen of Solace, mother to princes and princesses now scattered or enslaved, sat perfectly still while her face warped through expressions no one else could see: a frown, a deeper one, then sudden blank emptiness, as though something inside her kept seizing control and then letting go.
Because something inside her was.
"Bitch!" The word exploded in the silence of her mind, raw and ragged with seventeen years of stolen life. "You cost me nearly seventeen years with my children!"
Silence answered for several heartbeats, thick and suffocating, until a scoff drifted through the shared darkness of their skull, elegant, divine, utterly unmoved.
"How many times must I tell you, Sandra?" The voice was hers yet not hers, colder, older, laced with the weight of forgotten empires. "Mortal feelings are pointless. We have far greater concerns."
"Lysa!" Sandra snarled back, fury trembling through every syllable. "I don't know anything about your Lower Dimension nonsense, your 'family,' none of it! And you let that bastard seal me away!"
Another scoff, sharper this time.
"If you had kept playing house with that useless bloodline, we would never have had time to discover what this place truly is."
Sandra fell silent, because as much as she hated it, she knew Lysa wasn't lying. At four hundred and fifty years old, the two of them were practically interchangeable, two empresses sharing one palace of flesh, one body, one fate.
It had begun centuries ago, when a young princess bound for a political marriage had awakened something the world steles never registered. Not because the awakening was weak, but because it only recorded Sandra, who to the public on had an A rank bloodline of light. What no one, not even Sandra herself, had understood at the time was that she carried two complete, independent souls, unfused halves of the same cosmic whole.
The status screen only she could see had spelled it out in letters of cold starlight:
[Duality of Abyss Physique (SSS) – Two complete, independent souls inhabit one body, each with their own will, memories, talents, and core. The two are not yet fused… they are empresses seated on opposite thrones inside the same palace of flesh.]
But the physique had fractured instead of harmonized. Where there should have been balance, there was war. Lysa, the ancient monster who remembered and had everything except her true rank, had seized control the moment she realized this world was wrong.
"Even if that's true," Sandra said at last, voice quieter now, heavy with the knowledge of everything Lysa had seen while she was locked away, "you still don't know exactly what this world is."
"That is precisely why I need control," Lysa replied, the elegant tone cracking for the first time with something close to unease. "The laws here are broken. We must leave before—"
"Before what?" Sandra cut in. "Before your precious 'family' forgets you? Look, we can come to an agreement. You find us a way out of Elaris, and you give me time with my children first before we leave. If not, I swear I'll fight you every day for the rest of eternity!"
Silence again, deeper this time.
Deep inside their shared body, Lysa sat on a throne of darkness, long abyssal-black hair spilling over shoulders, eyes black with golden rings, a crown of living shadow resting on her brow, its central ruby pulsing like a dying heart. For once, the ancient empress looked uncertain.
'Will you even care about these mortals....,' she thought, terror flickering across features that had forgotten how to feel fear, 'once your soul heals... and you remember who you are truly?'
She exhaled a breath that belonged to galaxies long dead.
"Deal," she said aloud.
Outside, in the dim little room that smelled of tallow and regret, Lyssandra's face finally settled into a single expression, exhausted, determined, and just a little bit afraid of the day the two of them finally became one.