Chapter 2: I’m Not a Princess, I’m Building a Kingdom

“Syairenne. Where are your shoes?”

The voice came from somewhere behind her—proper, sharp, tired.

“Probably where I left them,” she mumbled, not turning around.

“Lady Elira saw you sneaking out of the Winter Hall. Again. Do you know what people are saying?"

Well, Lady Elira is someone appointed by the court to oversee Syairenne’s refinement, stood poised like a portrait, never missing a single misstep.

Syairenne rolled her eyes. “Let me guess. ‘She’s odd.’ ‘She’s distant.’ ‘She’s not behaving like a proper daughter of Iridesa.’” She stood from the garden fountain and stretched like a wild cat, barefoot, crownless, and completely over it.

Her maid, well... technically her handler, sighed in that deeply disappointed, royalty-approved way. “You’re seventeen. The nobles are watching. You should be—”

“—smiling, silent, stitched into silk? Yeah. I’ve heard the speech.”

Syairenne wasn’t trying to be difficult. She just couldn’t keep pretending anymore. Not when her chest felt too tight all the time. Not when her mind was louder than the court musicians. Not when everything inside her kept saying, this isn’t it. This isn’t who you are. She wasn’t the perfect daughter of a highborn house. She didn’t want to marry a charming, half-boring lord from a neighboring kingdom. She didn’t want to smile through dinners filled with lies and agendas.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to make things. Break things. Touch the stars. Fall in love and actually mean it.

She wanted... freedom.

That night, she locked herself in her room with ink-stained fingers and a half-eaten pear, sketching things she wasn’t supposed to dream about.

A crest. A name. A realm that didn’t exist—yet.

Velmoré.

It came to her like lightning. Elegant, powerful, sharp around the edges. It sounded like royalty, but also like something forged by a girl who had survived her own silence. And she didn’t want to just wear a crown. She wanted to build it. From pieces of herself no one had ever bothered to look at. From the pain she never cried out loud. From all the nights she stayed up staring at the ceiling, whispering things to the moon no one would ever hear.

She started small.

A journal, hidden beneath the velvet cushion in her window seat. She wrote rules, laws, colors, sigils. She wrote speeches she'd never get to say in the real world. She designed dresses that weren't made to please nobles, but to tell stories.

And most importantly, she wrote her name.

Not as a daughter.

Not as a disappointment.

Not as a half-formed version of the girl people wished she was.

She wrote:

'Syairenne, First of Her Flame. Sovereign of Velmoré.'

It felt ridiculous.

It felt real.

Of course, no one knew.

To everyone else, she was still just "that girl." The one with the eyes too quiet. The one who danced like she had somewhere better to be. The one who never quite smiled the way princesses were trained to. And they kept talking. Whispering.

"She's been strange lately."

"Do you think she was cursed?"

"Maybe she’s just heartbroken, poor thing."

She heard every word. She didn’t flinch. But gods, if only they knew. She wasn’t heartbroken. She was rising. And if there was a curse at all—it was that she’d finally stopped pretending.

The boy?

Yeah. She thought about him sometimes.

His voice. The way he looked at her like he saw something she hadn’t shown anyone else. The way he made her believe that maybe just maybe she could be loved without shrinking. But love isn’t real when it runs. And he ran. No explanation. No closure. Just gone. He didn’t deserve a kingdom in her memory. So she buried him. Right under the first stone of Velmoré.

Weeks passed. Then months. She stopped attending banquets altogether. She claimed illness, and the court believed it—because what else could they say?

She wasn’t sick.

She was 'becoming'.

And one night, as she stood alone on the palace roof, wind in her hair, heart humming with something new, she whispered—

“I’m not a princess. I’m not someone’s daughter. I’m not here to decorate someone else’s story.”

She looked up at the stars, raised her hand slowly, and traced the air like it mattered.

“I’m building a kingdom. And they won’t even see it coming.”

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