My chest rises and falls, slow and deliberate. The ache inside me nests deep, a relentless companion as I wear the mask expected of me.
I just can’t. My soul refuses to endure another second. So instead of staring at the vast ceiling painting any longer, I force my gaze toward the far end of the hall—where smaller paintings hang, delicate and almost as small as I feel.
A faint smile tugs at my lips when I see one: a girl with amber hair like mine, her back turned to the audience. She’s clothed, dressed in burgundy—a color reserved mostly for ceremonies, feasting on the enslavement of the godless. She faces the sea, her hair dancing softly with the salt breeze. Far in the distance, ships glow faintly at the horizon. The girl stands atop a cliff, gazing out at the turquoise sky, into the azure sun. Though her face remains hidden, I believe she wears a broad smile.
But my smile fades, swallowed by the harsh reality around me. I want to frown, to stand, to leave—but I don’t. I remain seated at the table, beside the family I no longer consider my own.
What is family? If I had to define it, I’d say it’s a man and a woman wielding control over children with superiority etched into their bones. These children are blamed, abused, and then, like broken mirrors, they seek out new victims within the family to imitate the twisted role models their parents have shown them.
I swallow hard, my eyes drifting down the hall again, stopping at the twelfth or thirteenth painting. This one is darker—a hanged man. Not by his neck, but by a single leg.
The noble-looking man hangs upside down, mocked by a proletarian beside him. The painter added a blindfold, loosely draped over the man’s face. Blue blood stains the left side of his eyeless socket, dripping down like tears of agony. His mouth twists into an upside-down smile, and his hands claw at something beyond the frame—perhaps the frame itself, which burns with a deep crimson flame. Blood of the godless.
It’s only then that I notice something behind the blindfold—maybe tears? Grief? Or just sweat. Maybe it’s nothing at all.
These paintings aren’t grand, not compared to the vast display of divine torment on the ceiling. But I know them. I’ve looked at them every year on my birthday, at this exact moment, this exact day. It’s a ritual, a feast meant to embolden us nobility—of royal blood—to feast on the “godless red-blooded”, as Father calls them.
But I see no meaning in this art. I stare only to waste time. To hasten my own withering.
My eyes linger too long on the hanged man, longer than on the sixty other paintings that stretch along this hall.
Suddenly, my father’s voice cuts through the haze. “Let us begin!”
Everyone rises as one—applause bursts out, glasses raised high, wine swallowed in hearty gulps. Most are corpulent, their bellies rounded from excess.
I scan the crowd, my brain staggering beneath the weight of their presence. Men with beards, some full, some sparse. Mustaches of all shapes and colors. Suits painted in hues of orange—darker tints bleeding into brown, lighter ones bordering on yellow. All wear shades of orange, the mark of our bloodline.
I study their hair—mostly blonde, some brown, a rare few with black strands. They stand, save for a handful who remain seated, perhaps lost in thought or simply unwilling to face this spectacle.
Families fill the room: Rosenmahl, Jäger, Löwenherz, Schild, Fell, and many more I barely recognize, all clustered together. Some men sit beside women, others beside families.
All the while, a void gnaws inside me, consuming every scrap of warmth. The painting on the ceiling weighs heavily, feeding this ominous feeling I try so desperately to banish.
My eyes wander through the crowd until they land on a man. He sits beside another man and a woman, flanked by others. Their features mark them as southern, perhaps from the Avelorian Kingdom. Their hair is brown or dark blonde, often with a nearly black hue.
But that’s not what unsettles me. It’s the man—how he forks his steak with an elegance befitting a high noble. He doesn’t resemble the man from the painting, yet there’s something eerily familiar about him, as if he were that hanged man incarnate.
His eyes hold a haunted weight that pierces through me, drawing my gaze like a magnet.
I stare, making him the last of my banquet’s attractions. The final image I carry before I take my own life.