END

S E V E N

Callisto forced herself to look back at Cressida. She dragged her eyes to fall upon her golden-haired sister.

And instead found a beast wearing claws and teeth, both dripping in blood.

Her heart stopped beating. She stopped breathing. The people milling around her simply froze in place. The waves stopped crashing against the docks. The sound of sea-birds ceased.

All that existed was the terrible monster that was her sister.

Blood dripped off the fangs, the color so dark it was closer to black than red. Cressida stared at her with the same bronze eyes, but there were now staring at her from the body of a monster. Callisto tried to call upon her winds, but where power used to be was now a dry, barren well. She searched desperately for a scrap of power, scraping against the walls of her dark soul.

Cressida stared at her, smirking with her bloody maw. Smirked at Callisto's powerlessness, her incapability to do anything.

"Callisto?" asked a familiar, calm voice. "Are you alright?"

The image shattered. The monster disappeared, and was replaced with a beautiful, curly-haired girl.

There was no blood. There was no monster. There was just a girl.

Callisto shakily released a breath she did not known she had been holding. Mina placed a steady hand against Callisto's shoulder, and squeezed.

Acknowledging Mina's presence would be weakness. So, Callisto looked back at Cressida.

To her horror, Cressida was staring right back at her with a smirk on her full lips. She cocked her head slightly to the right, like a grinning wolf pondering whether or not to pounce, and met Callisto's gaze.

It might have been her imagination, but Callisto could see a smear of blood on her lips.

Then, Cressida looked away to address another one of her endless admirers, not sparing Callisto another glance.

Callisto burned the image of a five-year-old Cressida from her mind, destroying any love she might have possessed. The ghost of the girl hissed in her ear, even as Callisto walked through the crowd, stone-faced. The little girl screamed in agony as Callisto forced Cressida out of the darkness of her twisted mind.

Forced her out, and locked the door behind her.

She could have smiled. There was no room for love in this competition. Only blood, and betrayal, and death.

Callisto would spill blood. She would betray those foolish enough to trust her. She would bring death. No, she would be death.

She would bring her sisters to their knees.

|||||

"Do you want to talk about it?" Mina asked quietly from her seat by the fireplace. It had only been an hour since the docking was finished, but Callisto insisted on retiring to her chambers early. Mina had followed her without asking for an invitation, and to say that the young Queen was angry would be an understatement. "The Queentide officially begins tomorrow, and you will not have much time to talk then."

"No," Callisto hissed in response, defiantly staring out the window, "I do not want to talk about it."

Mina glanced over at her. "I'm worried about you, Cal. Your...episodes are happening more and more frequently."

"Worry about someone who cares," was Callisto's one response. Her blood was boiling in her veins as she glared at Mina with her black eyes. "Get out of my chambers, and do not even bother coming back."

Mina flinched at the venom in Callisto's voice, but she stood up and walked to the door. Callisto's eyes tracked her movements.

The girl stopped before crossing the threshold, and turned back to Callisto. "I may be the only person in the entire world who cares about you, Callisto," she said softly, not quite meeting Callisto's gaze. "But you insist on making it difficult to. Next time, when you believe that you are seeing a monster, or Death itself is choking you, I will not be there to convince you otherwise."

Every word was like a thorn in Callisto's heart. This was weakness; letting another person understand you so well that they know exactly what to say to make you ache, to make your heart bleed. This was the weakness she would have to cut off to become Queen.

Part of her wanted to kill Mina. As she said, Mina was the only person that gave a damn about Callisto. Killing her would give Callisto the fuel and energy that could only come from hatred and self-loathing that she needed to kill her sisters, and win the Queentide. The stain of Mina's blood lingering on her hands for eternity would haunt her enough to burn any regrets.

It could destroy whatever scrap of her dark soul Callisto still possessed.

It would be so easy, the cold voice in her mind crooned softly. Halt the air flow in her lungs. It would look like an accident.

Wind swirled from her outstreched fingers, a small tornado created on her fingertips. Mina eyed it, but kept her mouth shut.

"There will not be a next time," Callisto said. It was a promise. An oath. A threat.

Callisto meant to stop the air around Mina. She meant to have the other girl, her oldest and only friend, suffocate while Callisto watched. She meant to kill Mina to punish herself.

But no matter how hard she tried, she could not do it. Somewhere, in the depths of her dead, black heart, Callisto felt something.

So, instead of killing her, she merely said to Mina, "Leave."

And Mina did. She left, alive. A cold shame did not flood Callisto's veins. A numbing anger did not cloud her thoughts. A monster did not appear in front of her.

Callisto was left with weakness surging through her body with every damned heart beat.

AUTHOR'S NOTE
Taylor Swift's new single "Look What You Made Me Do" describes this book, and matches the aesthetic, perfectly. Especially the part about kingdom keys, and, well, all of it, actually. It will really come into play later on in the book when the characters make certain decisions because of something someone else pushed them to do.