Entry 3 - 2nd of Summer, Year 738

I tried to be a good queen, I really did. I immersed myself in politics totally foreign to me. I visited the poor and the unhoused, offering my aid to them. I started a foundation that helped to educate orphaned children. All of these things, I believed, would show the Titans that I was a good person. Then I made the mistake of going out in public without my security detail, and nearly got stoned. I wouldn't have died, of course. A blink and all of those rioters would have been obliterated in a second, but what would that have made of me? The very monster they claimed me to be. As I shielded my face, scuttling down the street and into an alleyway, I realised how small I had become. Rather, how small this place had made me. Hemlocke's face hung from banners all around the city, while mine was often vandalised: "Foreigner" and "Fey filth" and "Go back!". 

I should have listened.

I'm back now in my homeland this evening, and my family is dead. We just buried them, or rather what was left of them after the 'Final Siege' (as they are calling it in Hemlocke's war room). My cousins, the ones I left behind, spoke highly of my mother. She fought until the very last moment, and gave up her life first so that my siblings could get away. It didn't matter in the end; her sacrifice went to waste. I glanced at her casket, draped in a ruby tarp, wondering what she would think of me, and my unceremonious retrograde to this kingdom of ours. 

It makes you think, doesn't it. Was this the reason Hemlocke wanted me to begin with? Was our love all part of an elaborate ruse?

We were young when we first met. I remember peeping into the hallway as he walked beside my mother, trying to hear what he sounded like. He and his little brother, Bane, had been recently orphaned. Their father had collapsed on Adea's dais, foaming at the mouth. The Titan's goddess was known for her short temper, and had struck him down in a fit. In the absence of a ruling king, Hemlocke was coronated the next day, and immediately sought to end the senseless violence between our kingdoms once and for all. His idealism made me want him all the more. This vision that he had for our world, I'd been having it since I was little. I wanted to build a new reality, and I wanted to build it with him.

There were many aspects of his teenagehood that he lost when he became king, but courtship was not one of them. He did it well. He'd visit at random, bearing the most lavish gifts. We blushed and laughed with one another tirelessly, engaged in many small cliches. I'd always been somewhat sheltered by my mother, so all this attention felt riveting. I talked the ears off my siblings, musing about the change we were going to bring, and how we would never have to worry again. The fighting was going to end. He made it so easy to forget that our kind had been mortal enemies for centuries, and it did slip my mind.

So we married in the winter, surrounded by snow and wind. It was stupid of me to believe that three hundred years of bad blood could be washed away by a pair of rings, but we were terribly in love, and love blinds. Sure, I had known that this wouldn't come without riots and protests, but I convinced myself that I would be prepared for it all. Oh, well.

The subjects of my husband's kingdom, now supposedly mine as well, despised my heritage. They still do. When they look upon me, they see nothing but lost lives and relatives coming home in urns. How many advisors, councillors, businesspeople do you think gather in bars every week to bond over their hatred for my kind? It's practically tradition for them. Our wedding shot a hole in the kingdom's morale. Despite Feykind's promise to uphold their end of the ceasefire, the Titans were neither convinced nor satisfied. Their vitriol manifested into something ghostly, a bitter poltergeist that took shape in the arm of my husband's scythe. 

My mother's head rolled quite far after it was separated from her body. I was told to be glad that they found it at all. It would have been a coveted talisman: the head of the last Fey Queen. 

We prayed over their bodies, now covered in soil, and the ground was turned to stone. My cousins have left, but I'm still here, standing over them and weeping. There's nobody left. 

I've just been thinking over and over, wondering what I have left to give. Alba and Amaranth are still just infants. Alba will have no memory of his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and the radiant red throne that we have sat for generations. Amaranth will never get to see it at all. 

Fey refugees are pouring in faster than we can process them, and this is already causing unrest in the towns on the outskirts. I've been hearing talks of mobs rallying together. They want to completely erase us, and all I can do is sit by and watch. What allies do I have?

Hemlocke's generals are divvying up my mother's kingdom as I write this. I'm about to go and cause a scene. I have to make sure that Alba and Amaranth have a portion of it, a huge one. If I frame it in a way that makes it seem beneficial to the kingdom, it can work. Those two are the only surviving heirs to my family's throne. It's stupid to think they'd ever betray their father, but maybe someday it will all be worth it.