Chapter 3 --3
The marble was cold under Elara’s bare feet.
Wrong detail. She should be wearing shoes. Princesses wore shoes. But the servants had only dressed her in layers of silk that felt too heavy, too constricting on this smaller frame, and somehow the shoes had been forgotten in her abrupt dismissal of them.
She walked anyway, each step sending a chill up her legs. New data: this body felt temperature more acutely than her previous one.
The corridor stretched ahead—tall windows letting in sharp morning light, portraits of stern-faced people lining the walls. She catalogued each detail mechanically. Twenty-seven portraits. Fourteen windows. Three servants who’d frozen mid-task when they saw her, then dropped into deep curtseys.
Expected behavior. She was royalty here.
The thought should have meant something. It didn’t.
Elara pushed through a set of heavy oak doors and stepped onto a colonnade.
She stopped.
The palace complex spread before her like a architectural blueprint come to life. Neoclassical design—symmetrical wings, tall columns with Corinthian capitals, elaborate cornices. Georgian or Victorian influence, her mind supplied automatically. Imposing stone blocks arranged in perfect geometric harmony.
But something was wrong with it.
Everything was white.
Not cream. Not ivory. Pure, stark, relentless white. The stone facades, the balustrades, the decorative moldings—all rendered in the same bleached limestone that hurt to look at in direct sunlight. Like someone had built a palace and drained it of color deliberately.