To Your New Era

"For those who are just waking up now or haven't listened to the news, we have just received confirmation that both Her Majesty Queen Amestris…and all of her heirs were assassinated last night... God help us all... excuse me. Now, the Geverdian Council has called for a state of emergency as they try to scramble for legal precedent. The Council ordered a national day of mourning while the Geverdian authorities attempt to pick up the pieces. Now we'll pass over to Professor Tyrus, a professor of historical law from the Royal Excalan University. Professor, are there legal safeguards the Council can fall back on here?"

The radio waves wafted through the open doors and disseminated into the grand blue, cloudless sky. Too picturesque of a day considering the events. Iris turned the radio down as she walked over to the dining table, four meagre pieces of toast in hand.

"You need to eat, Mum," she said. Evalyn nodded, if only to satisfy Iris. The girl struggled to catch Evalyn's eyes; they were lost, drowning in a sea of possibilities.

"Do they know how it happened?" Iris asked.

"No. No, they haven't said."

The small hours of the morning had come and gone since the death—authorities definitely had their guesses, but concerning the passing of that one and only monarch, one had to be sure of their words before saying them.

"What are we going to do?"

Evalyn shook her head. "I don't know...I don't know, I mean..."

Possibilities. Swirling possibilities. One she'd latched onto like a guilty pleasure rose to the surface. "Run away? Run away now before they re-instate the laws—"

"What?"

Evalyn rose from her shock-induced stupor to see Iris bewildered, almost as though Evalyn had betrayed her. She didn't know what she was saying either, but they were words she wouldn't get another opportunity to say, a possibility that would only come about once in a millennium.

"Iris," she insisted, her words felt like hot syrup dribbling from her mouth. "This is the only chance that we will ever have at getting your freedom. We can run away now, go into hiding, live a normal life—"

"Then what?! Dad first, then you!"

The plate and the toast crashed to the floor, shattering across the floorboards, but even that couldn't distract Evalyn from the look of rage contorting Iris's face. "We won't be happy if we just leave now! You raised me like this! You raised me because everything else was worse!"

"But now there's another possibility—"

"No there isn't!"

"Yes there is!"

"She was your friend!"

"She was our queen!"

The shouting match ended abruptly with no clear victor. Evalyn, her conscience quickly catching up to her words, tried to salvage the situation.

"She told me that if I wanted your freedom, I would have to kill her for it. That I would have to destroy this country from the top down if I wanted to spare you from this life. Now that chance will never come."

Evalyn sank back into her chair, hanging her head as she reassessed her words that aged like milk by the second.

"I'm sorry, Iris," she said.

Evalyn pulled Iris closer and pressed the girl into her shoulder. The news report softly played in the background, the national tragedy to score their own turmoil.

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"She was a friend, yes. We'll mourn the Spirit who was our friend. But... she was just as much a monarch. She took as many freedoms away from us as she granted."

Iris didn't reciprocate the gesture, standing defiantly in Evalyn's arms.

"What would you do... if it were just you and Dad?"

"What?"

"If you had to choose for yourself, what would you do?"

Evalyn pursed her lips, her fingers balling into fists around locks of Iris's hair.

"I'd stay," she admitted, and felt Iris's head slowly nod in response.

"I know," Iris said. "So that's what I'm going to do."

The phone chimed from what felt like a world away. Iris eased herself out of Evalyn's grasp.

"I'll get it," she said, her bare footsteps rounding the corner. Evalyn listened to them fade, attention glued to her own hands resting on her lap. She sat there once more, paralysed by a world somewhere beyond her vision. There, six years ago, on the way home with Iris for the first time, she would've taken a detour—a single change in her choice of ferry and away to Sidos.

Before Iris's outburst, the choice seemed easy, the alternate world practically perfect, but now it was hard to contemplate even a fraction without seeing the obvious faults, the flaws that would fester into conflict. The arguments, the betrayals, the day of reconcile that came for every parent and child—only theirs would come after destruction, bloodshed even.

And with her ideal so resolutely struck down, Evalyn, perhaps more than ever before, questioned why 'ideal' was so incompatible with reality. She was once again eighteen, wishing innocent wishes she had long since shunned as naïve.

"It was from Dad," Iris said, voice reeling Evalyn back out of her own mind. "They're moving the Steel Whale into the city for a vigil, but I think they're really coming to get Al."

Evalyn nodded. "Al's alive. Good."

Iris paused. Evalyn could feel the girl's eyes on her nape. "I'm going to find Crestana and be there for him... what are you going to do?"

"I'll... wait here for now. Wait for Marie's call."

"Okay," Iris replied, leaving for her room. "I'll get changed and leave."

"Hey."

"Hm?"

She'd blurted it out without a plan—a running theme for that morning. In lieu of one, she stuck to her gut; asked what she wanted to know.

"What did you mean by 'Dad first, then me'?"

The radio inter-cut their sentences, still on the story of the century.

"He said the same thing: we should've run away years ago. That... if he had known how much he'd love me, he wouldn't have thought twice."

Evalyn could only wish he would back up his words with actions, but her stance on his orders that day was becoming hazier by the minute. Evalyn wasn't wrong, and she would never feel as though she had been. Still, perhaps he had a better grasp of the incompatibility between reality and the ideal.

"Then we can agree on that," she said.

"I know," Iris said. "Love you, Mum. Even though you show it in ways I don't like sometimes."

Evalyn winced at the comment, wishing she hadn't so swiftly connected it with her feelings about her own father.

Crestana pressed her whole body as close to Iris as she could, arms tight around her neck as their combined bodyweight leaned dangerously over the tram tracks. Immersed in her unkempt hair set free across her shoulders, Iris noted the lack of perfume. Crestana had kept up appearances for as long as they'd known each other, and it had always been lyreflower and blueberries—a scent she boasted was young, fresh, a far-cry from her aunt's favourite blend.

Now she smelt of nothing; nothing but a thin layer of dust, as though she'd cleaned a cabinet only moments before.

"How's the leg?"

"Fine…sorry."

"For what?" she asked.

"You had to see it."

Crestana's shutters creaked and sagged. They needed maintenance, but she had always insisted she was too busy.

"I got us into that mess…the least you could do is get angry," Crestana said

"I'm not angry."

"I know," she said. "You really ought to be."

"Okay," Iris said. "I forgive you."

Crestana didn't reply with her voice box, instead turning her arms into a vice grip around Iris's torso.

"Crestana?"

"I almost killed you."

"I said I forgive you."

"I haven't…I don't think I ever will, but…"

She pulled away in time for Iris's blood to restart circulation, the extent of her dishevelment now clearer to Iris than it had been moments before.

"I cried enough when you were unconscious."

"Okay," Iris said, leaving the unspoken words on the table, where it seemed Crestana wanted to leave them for the moment. Instead, she peered over Crestana's shoulder. "I don't think the tram is coming."

Morning, barely nine. The city should have been awash with the sound of footsteps, but now the solitary, puttering engine a distant block or two away sounded downright alien.

Silence engulfed the city—every clock face shattered at once.

"The city's shut down," Crestana muttered. "They're calling it a day of mourning."

"Calling it?"

Crestana nodded. "The crown is gone; no one knows what to do. There were no lanterns in the sky last night, the border wall is probably long gone and…"

Crestana looked up at the sky. Cloudless. The sun's heat beat down on the city's brick, like the inside of an oven.

"I don't remember the last day there weren't any clouds."