Blood poured down her face.

Levana stared at her reflection, seething in every inch of it. Her fingernails dug into her scarred temple. Her knuckles were white from clutching the edge of the vanity, and she felt like crying. Instead she laughed, giggled, turning around, staring at the floor. She played with her glamour for a moment, changing her hair, her eyes, the shape of her lips. She envisioned it all in her mind's eye, but she would never see it. Not once.

Sometimes she thought they saw her grotesque face in the corridor, a servant or a thaumaturge or a passing noble. She thought she heard gasps of horror, sometimes screams, all leering at the mutilated woman, the burned and malformed princess. But when she turned, they were just as fluttery and flattering as ever, in rosy-cheeked awe of her beauty and her might. Levana violently buried her face in one hand and clutched the smooth wood of the table in the other.

She couldn't bear to look at her own face. Not anymore. Every day she grew sicker and sicker of herself. She had to remind herself, lest she forgot, of her beauty. She was illustrious, radiant, awe-inspiring. Nobody could hope to compare to her.

Levana laughed again, louder this time, and traced the contours of her cheek. Yes, she could fool herself, her own bioelectricity. Her own fingertips were convinced that they felt soft, young flesh, high cheekbones, unmarred skin. If she could fool herself, why did she fear those gazes of horror so much that she saw them in anything?

Levana would soon have everything she wanted. She knew it. Selene would not last long, even if she survived her last-pitch journey to Earth. Luna was bowed beneath Levana's feet, her necessary pawns seduced by clever words and tales of power and glory and beauty. She took the loose threads of disloyalty to her treacherous niece and wound them into spools.

Levana walked over to the panoramic window and clutched at the velvet curtain, staring out over white, shining Artemisia through her requested reflectionless glass. And most importantly, Levana knew, she would be rid of Channary once and for all. She would finally live her life in peace! She would finally, finally, be free of those flames. Those haughty eyes, the scathing words that called out to her from the hollow woman she saw in her dreams. Lounging on a throne. Her throne. It was Levana's throne! All hers! It should never have belonged to anyone else. Nobody knew the sacrifices that Levana had to make for Luna. No one knew the pain, the torture she had endured. It was a part of life. A part of the Lunar life. Channary would never understand, in all her opulence and all her leering and laughing at her deformed little sister, the agony of living as she was. Selene would never understand, with her charmed, honeyed words and her line straight to Levana's throne, the years she'd had to battle herself.

Levana curled her fingers against the glass. She should have burned Selene long ago. She should have left her hideous and scarred, her hair falling out of her scalp, her face warped and uneven with scar and blood. Then she might have known the years of pain.

A knock sounded at Levana's chamber door, and she clicked back over to her vanity. "Come in."

The door was pushed open and Thaumaturge Bement stepped inside, holding Winter Hayle-Blackburn tightly by her elbow. She kept her lovely face carefully impassive.

Levana smiled and took hold of the vanity mirror, turning it towards the wall. "Hello, sweetheart. Might we have a little chat?"